Good morning. There’s a growing trend among corporate treasuries to add bitcoin to their balance sheets as institutional acceptance and regulatory clarity increase.
Since 2020, fintech Block (No. 179 on the Fortune 500) has held bitcoin as part of its corporate assets. Beyond its merchant services and lending tools through Square, and investing features for Cash App users, the company recently announced Square Bitcoin—a fully integrated bitcoin payments and wallet solution launching Nov. 10 for businesses of all sizes.
“We can help turn our Square sellers into corporate bitcoin holding companies as well,” Amrita Ahuja, Block’s COO and CFO, told me.
I spoke with Ahuja, along with Neil Jorgensen, Block’s treasury corporate lead, and Nikhil Dixit, head of financial planning and analysis, about how the company approaches bitcoin.
From experiment to strategy
Block’s bitcoin journey began with customer demand. In 2018, Cash App launched the ability for users to buy, hold, and sell bitcoin. Since then, more than 20 million Cash App actives have traded over $58 billion worth of bitcoin, Ahuja said.
In 2020, Block made its first corporate bitcoin purchase—$50 million, less than 1% of total assets—mainly as a learning exercise, she said. The following year, Block expanded its holdings with an additional $170 million investment in bitcoin, and in 2024 adopted a dollar-cost averaging strategy, reinvesting 10% of monthly gross profit from bitcoin products, Ahuja explained.
Block has also open-sourced its bitcoin frameworks and white papers and launched a real-time bitcoin dashboard showing its holdings and price data. As of the second quarter of this year, Block held 8,692 bitcoin on its balance sheet.
Taking the long view
Many finance leaders remain cautious, viewing bitcoin as too volatile—especially recently—compared to traditional assets. Jorgensen acknowledges that perception.
Some see it as volatile and worry about shareholder reaction, he said. “But we don’t leverage bitcoin as our operating capital—we don’t ride an emotional roller coaster with it,” he added.
Block positions bitcoin as a long-term investment, guided by clear risk parameters, according to the leaders.
“Start small,” Ahuja advised. “Whether it’s a $1 cost-averaging program or a small one-time purchase, build understanding first.”
“Having a long-term view is very helpful,” Jorgensen said. “We’ve always held a very long-term view, so it gives us confidence. We sleep well at night.”
Ahuja noted that institutional infrastructure for bitcoin—custodians, liquidity providers, and banks—has matured significantly over the past several years, creating greater stability.
Back in 2020, when bitcoin traded around $10,000, investors saw it as purely speculative, Dixit said, who previously led investor relations at Block. The challenge at the time was explaining that Block’s bitcoin strategy was a principled, calculated risk representing a small slice of its portfolio, he explained. “Today, that sentiment has shifted dramatically,” he said.
Looking ahead
Block’s leaders emphasize the importance of tracking regulation and treating bitcoin like any other strategic asset.
“AI is changing almost every vector we can see,” Jorgensen said. “We want to be at the forefront—and we see bitcoin as part of that future.”
Ahuja’s advice to peers: Treat bitcoin as a strategic investment and be ready to explain your rationale in the context of your business, liquidity, and risk appetite.
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We’ll explore how leading CFOs are rethinking the future of work in the age of agentic AI—including when to deploy AI agents to accelerate automation, how to balance ROI tradeoffs between human and digital talent, and the upskilling strategies CFOs are applying to optimize their workforces for the future.
Benjamin E. Meisenzahl was promoted to CFO of The Sherwin-Williams Company (No. 191), effective Jan. 1, 2026. Meisenzahl has served as SVP of finance for the last two and a half years. He will assume the CFO duties currently held by Allen J. Mistysyn, who will take on a short-term transition role before retiring after 35 years with the company. Meisenzahl has held multiple roles of increasing responsibility over his 22-year career with Sherwin-Williams, including his current position, as well as global finance and operational roles in the company’s Paint Stores Group, Performance Coatings Group, and Global Supply Chain. He began his career at Sherwin-Williams as an internal auditor.
Every Friday morning, the weekly Fortune 500 Power Moves column tracks Fortune 500 company C-suite shifts—see the most recent edition.
More notable moves
Joe Kauffman was appointed president and CFO of Deel, a global payroll and HR platform. Kauffman joins Deel following more than a decade of leadership at Credit Karma, where he served as CFO, president, and CEO. Before that, he held CFO and corporate development roles at two NYSE-listed companies. Philippe Bouaziz, who has served as Deel’s CFO since the company’s founding, will move into the newly established role of executive chairman and chief strategy officer.
Suman Raju was appointed CFO of Darktrace, a global AI cybersecurity provider. Raju succeeds Cathy Graham, who joined Darktrace as CFO in 2020 and left the role in September. Raju joins Darktrace with a background in scaling public and private B2B enterprise SaaS companies and leading global finance organizations through periods of transformation. Most recently, he served as CFO at Ivalua. Raju previously held CFO roles at Crownpeak Technologies and SAP Ariba.
Big Deal
E*TRADE from Morgan Stanley’s monthly analysis found that the firms clients were net buyers in 10 of 11 S&P 500 sectors. The three most-bought sectors in October 2025 were communication services (+11.80%), utilities (+11.78%), and financials (+10.87%). For the second month in a row, activity in utilities appeared to be driven more by risk-on buying in nuclear and alt-energy stocks than by traditionally defensive utility companies, according to Chris Larkin, managing director of trading and investing.
“Tech led the market again in October, and clients continued to target some of the megacap tech names that dominate the communication services sector,” Larkin said in a statement. “On the other side of the fence, the shift away from health care may have had an element of profit-taking, with clients appearing to sell some stocks that had rallied strongly in previous months.”
Courtesy of E*TRADE
Going deeper
“Walmart CEO said paying its star managers upwards of $620,000 yearly empowered them to ‘feel like owners,'” is a Fortune report by Emma Burleigh.
From the report: “For many employees, it can be hard to feel connected to their company, especially at huge corporations like Walmart. But in 2024, Walmart U.S. CEO John Furner pulled out the big guns to ensure star managers feel the love—by paying them upwards of $620,000 per year.”
“And that bet has been working so far. In 2024, Walmart claimed the top spot on the Fortune 500—and landed on the Fortune Best Companies to Work For list not just last year, but again in 2025. Walmart said it has also improved its hourly worker retention rate by 10% over the past decade.” You can read more here.
Overheard
“These aren’t extraordinary results. These are arguably the best results that any software company has ever delivered.”
—Palantir CEO Alex Karp said on Monday during the company’s quarterly earnings call. The defense tech and AI software company posted third-quarter revenue of roughly $1.2 billion, up 63% from the year-ago period and above the average analyst expectation, Fortune reported. Palantir’s government contracts business remains strong; however, business from U.S. commercial customers drove the company’s growth in the third quarter, expanding by 121% year-over-year to $397 million.
Nearly all leading artificial intelligence developers are focused on building AI models that mimic the way humans reason, but new research shows these cutting-edge systems can be far more energy intensive, adding to concerns about AI’s strain on power grids.
AI reasoning models used 30 times more power on average to respond to 1,000 written prompts than alternatives without this reasoning capability or which had it disabled, according to a study released Thursday. The work was carried out by the AI Energy Score project, led by Hugging Face research scientist Sasha Luccioni and Salesforce Inc. head of AI sustainability Boris Gamazaychikov.
The researchers evaluated 40 open, freely available AI models, including software from OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp. Some models were found to have a much wider disparity in energy consumption, including one from Chinese upstart DeepSeek. A slimmed-down version of DeepSeek’s R1 model used just 50 watt hours to respond to the prompts when reasoning was turned off, or about as much power as is needed to run a 50 watt lightbulb for an hour. With the reasoning feature enabled, the same model required 7,626 watt hours to complete the tasks.
The soaring energy needs of AI have increasingly come under scrutiny. As tech companies race to build more and bigger data centers to support AI, industry watchers have raised concerns about straining power grids and raising energy costs for consumers. A Bloomberg investigation in September found that wholesale electricity prices rose as much as 267% over the past five years in areas near data centers. There are also environmental drawbacks, as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com Inc. have previously acknowledged the data center buildout could complicate their long-term climate objectives.
More than a year ago, OpenAI released its first reasoning model, called o1. Where its prior software replied almost instantly to queries, o1 spent more time computing an answer before responding. Many other AI companies have since released similar systems, with the goal of solving more complex multistep problems for fields like science, math and coding.
Though reasoning systems have quickly become the industry norm for carrying out more complicated tasks, there has been little research into their energy demands. Much of the increase in power consumption is due to reasoning models generating much more text when responding, the researchers said.
The new report aims to better understand how AI energy needs are evolving, Luccioni said. She also hopes it helps people better understand that there are different types of AI models suited to different actions. Not every query requires tapping the most computationally intensive AI reasoning systems.
“We should be smarter about the way that we use AI,” Luccioni said. “Choosing the right model for the right task is important.”
To test the difference in power use, the researchers ran all the models on the same computer hardware. They used the same prompts for each, ranging from simple questions — such as asking which team won the Super Bowl in a particular year — to more complex math problems. They also used a software tool called CodeCarbon to track how much energy was being consumed in real time.
The results varied considerably. The researchers found one of Microsoft’s Phi 4 reasoning models used 9,462 watt hours with reasoning turned on, compared with about 18 watt hours with it off. OpenAI’s largest gpt-oss model, meanwhile, had a less stark difference. It used 8,504 watt hours with reasoning on the most computationally intensive “high” setting and 5,313 watt hours with the setting turned down to “low.”
OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Google released internal research in August that estimated the median text prompt for its Gemini AI service used 0.24 watt-hours of energy, roughly equal to watching TV for less than nine seconds. Google said that figure was “substantially lower than many public estimates.”
Much of the discussion about AI power consumption has focused on large-scale facilities set up to train artificial intelligence systems. Increasingly, however, tech firms are shifting more resources to inference, or the process of running AI systems after they’ve been trained. The push toward reasoning models is a big piece of that as these systems are more reliant on inference.
Recently, some tech leaders have acknowledged that AI’s power draw needs to be reckoned with. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the industry must earn the “social permission to consume energy” for AI data centers in a November interview. To do that, he argued tech must use AI to do good and foster broad economic growth.
SpaceX is preparing to sell insider shares in a transaction that would value Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite maker at a valuation higher than OpenAI’s record-setting $500 billion, people familiar with the matter said.
One of the people briefed on the deal said that the share price under discussion is higher than $400 apiece, which would value SpaceX at between $750 billion and $800 billion, though the details could change.
The company’s latest tender offer was discussed by its board of directors on Thursday at SpaceX’s Starbase hub in Texas. If confirmed, it would make SpaceX once again the world’s most valuable closely held company, vaulting past the previous record of $500 billion that ChatGPT owner OpenAI set in October. Play Video
Preliminary scenarios included per-share prices that would have pushed SpaceX’s value at roughly $560 billion or higher, the people said. The details of the deal could change before it closes, a third person said.
A representative for SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The latest figure would be a substantial increase from the $212 a share set in July, when the company raised money and sold shares at a valuation of $400 billion.
The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, earlier reported that a deal would value SpaceX at $800 billion.
News of SpaceX’s valuation sent shares of EchoStar Corp., a satellite TV and wireless company, up as much as 18%. Last month, Echostar had agreed to sell spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $2.6 billion, adding to an earlier agreement to sell about $17 billion in wireless spectrum to Musk’s company.
The world’s most prolific rocket launcher, SpaceX dominates the space industry with its Falcon 9 rocket that launches satellites and people to orbit.
SpaceX is also the industry leader in providing internet services from low-Earth orbit through Starlink, a system of more than 9,000 satellites that is far ahead of competitors including Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Leo.
SpaceX executives have repeatedly floated the idea of spinning off SpaceX’s Starlink business into a separate, publicly traded company — a concept President Gwynne Shotwell first suggested in 2020.
However, Musk cast doubt on the prospect publicly over the years and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said in 2024 that a Starlink IPO would be something that would take place more likely “in the years to come.”
The Information, citing people familiar with the discussions, separately reported on Friday that SpaceX has told investors and financial institution representatives that it is aiming for an initial public offering for the entire company in the second half of next year.
A so-called tender or secondary offering, through which employees and some early shareholders can sell shares, provides investors in closely held companies such as SpaceX a way to generate liquidity.
SpaceX is working to develop its new Starship vehicle, advertised as the most powerful rocket ever developed to loft huge numbers of Starlink satellites as well as carry cargo and people to moon and, eventually, Mars.
Financially strained and cautious customers leaned heavily on buy now, pay later (BNPL) services over the holiday weekend.
Cyber Monday alone generated $1.03 billion (a 4.2% increase YoY) in online BNPL sales with most transactions happening on mobile devices, per Adobe Analytics. Overall, consumers spent $14.25 billion online on Cyber Monday. To put that into perspective, BNPL made up for more than 7.2% of total online sales on that day.
As for Black Friday, eMarketer reported $747.5 million in online sales using BNPL services with platforms like PayPal finding a 23% uptick in BNPL transactions.
Likewise, digital financial services company Zip reported 1.6 million transactions throughout 280,000 of its locations over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. Millennials (51%) accounted for a chunk of the sizable BNPL purchases, followed by Gen Z, Gen X, and baby boomers, per Zip.
The Adobe data showed that people using BNPL were most likely to spend on categories such as electronics, apparel, toys, and furniture, which is consistent with previous years. This trend also tracks with Zip’s findings that shoppers were primarily investing in tech, electronics, and fashion when using its services.
And while some may be surprised that shoppers are taking on more debt via BNPL (in this economy?!), analysts had already projected a strong shopping weekend. A Deloitte survey forecast that consumers would spend about $650 million over the Black Friday–Cyber Monday stretch—a 15% jump from 2023.
“US retailers leaned heavily on discounts this holiday season to drive online demand,” Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, said in a statement. “Competitive and persistent deals throughout Cyber Week pushed consumers to shop earlier, creating an environment where Black Friday now challenges the dominance of Cyber Monday.”
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