Don’t expect to spot Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian lingering at the front of the boarding line—he’s usually nowhere near it.
“I’m terrible,” Bastian admitted during an offstage interview last week at the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “I’m one of the last people to get on board the flight, and our team’s always rushing to make sure that I’m there because planes will not wait for me.”
Bastian, 68, has spent nearly a decade at the helm of America’s most profitable airline, steering the Fortune 500 giant through crises from 9/11 and bankruptcy to the COVID-19 pandemic. After joining Delta in 1998, Bastian rose through six leadership roles before becoming CEO in 2016, but did not observe all of the advice he received for how to be the top boss.
“The worst advice I ever received was [from] a former mentor who told me when I became CEO, I needed to create a unique identity, something that people couldn’t find me,” Bastian said. “He told me I’ll never have a moment of peace because I was too public.”
Bastian listened, but chose not to follow the recommendation: “I thanked him for that, and I did not do that.”
Now, Bastian says his inbox is flooded with thousands of emails per day, and he often spends flights reading through customer feedback. He likens himself to a “point guard” directing traffic to resolve issues.
“I only have one email, only have one phone, and as a result of that, I’m always in touch with our people, our customers, our community,” he said. However, customers often don’t believe they’re actually communicating with the real Bastian himself.
“They’ll think I’m some kind of fancy bot, and they’ll respond, ‘Wow, you’ve got a great agentic device there,’” he joked. “I say, ‘No, it’s me. I’m bored on a Saturday afternoon, just clearing out my inbox.’”
Even in person, Delta passengers are often surprised to see the chief executive seated in economy, eagerly awaiting Biscoff cookies and a Coke Zero from the snack cart.
“Many times when I travel, I’m sitting in coach,” Bastian said. “It’s always interesting because customers come back and say, ‘Why are you back here?’ And I say, ‘That’s about what my ticket could afford,’ and [I’m] usually next to the restroom.” To be sure, Bastian’s current compensation package is about $27 million, but airline executives do sometimes have to travel coach when premium seats are sold out.
Delta’s people-first strategy
Fresh off a strong third-quarter earnings release with $15.2 billion in record September revenue, Bastian toldFortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell on stage Delta’s success hinges not on planes or technology, but on its people.
“In our business, everyone focuses on the airline, the aircraft, the technology, the airports, the amazing destinations we get to,” he said. “But it’s the staff that bring it to life.”.
After announcing the Atlanta-based carrier’s first-ever direct flights between the U.S. and Riyadh alongside Riyadh Air CEO Tony Douglas, Bastian added he “obsesses” over his 100,000 employees “so that they can then go do the amazing work that our customers deserve.”
“If your people don’t feel that love and respect and care, they’re never going to be able to give you the service that you expect,” Bastian said.
The strategy has paid off: Delta ranks No. 15 on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, and No. 70 on this year’s Fortune 500 list as the most profitable U.S. airline, ahead of peers like American, United, and Southwest.
But Bastian’s people-first approach extends beyond philosophy. Long before he became CEO, the former chief financial officer helped design one of corporate America’s most generous profit-sharing programs in 2007. After emerging from a 19-month bankruptcy, Delta pledged to distribute billions of dollars in bonuses back to its workforce for every year that it hit its targets. In 2024, the employee share totaled $1.4 billion, amounting to around 10% of base pay.
“Rewarding our people is fundamental to who we are at Delta,” Bastian wrote in a February statement announcing the payouts. “It’s always my No. 1 priority to take care of the Delta team.”
Delta CEO Ed Bastian joined Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell and Riyadh Air CEO Tony Douglas at the Fortune Global Forum on October 27, 2025.
Stuart Isett for Fortune
Delta CEO’s leadership advice
Offstage at the Fortune Global Forum, Bastian, the longest-serving chief executive among major U.S. airlines, also reflected on his career journey and offered advice for the next generation of leaders: “Leadership is not a popularity contest.”
“We all want to be liked, we all want to be loved,” he said. “But leadership involves also making hard choices, hard decisions with a lot of respect and confidence.”
Earlier this year, Bastian confirmed to Fortune’s Shawn Tully that Delta’s board has named an internal candidate as his successor, marking the first time he publicly disclosed this contingency plan, but emphasized he still has “a number of years to go,” adding, “This is not a swan song.”
But of all the business advice he’s received over the years, Bastian says his most impactful wisdom came from his late mother: “She told us, growing up, you’ve got two ears and one mouth, use them accordingly.”
He explained that in business, leaders often focus on sending messages rather than listening: “We don’t take enough time to learn, to listen, to be able to make sure we understand each other.”
For Bastian, it’s a vital skill to form better relationships and fuel personal and professional growth.
“You learn a lot more,” he said. “That curiosity really is one of the hallmarks, I believe, of my career.”
The must-haves for building a market-leading business include vision, talent, culture, product innovation and customer focus. But what’s the secret to success with a merger or acquisition?
I was asked about this in the wake of Salesforce’s recently completed $8 billion acquisition of Informatica. In part, I believe that people are paying attention because deal-making is up in 2025. M&A volume reached $2.2 trillion in the first half of the year, a 27% increase compared to a year ago, according to JP Morgan. Notably, 72% of that volume involved deals greater than $1 billion.
There will be thousands of mergers and acquisitions in the United States this year across industries and involving companies of all sizes. It’s not unusual for startups to position themselves to be snapped up. But Informatica, founded in 1993, didn’t fit that mold. We have been building, delivering, supporting and partnering for many years. Much of the value we bring to Salesforce and its customers is our long-earned experience and expertise in enterprise data management.
Although, in other respects, a “legacy” software company like ours — founded well before cloud computing was mainstream — and early-stage startups aren’t so different. We all must move fast and differentiate. And established vendors and growth-oriented startups have a few things in common when it comes to M&A, as well.
First and foremost is a need to ensure that the strategies of the two companies involved are in alignment. That seems obvious, but it’s easier said than done. Are their tech stacks based on open protocols and standards? Are they cloud-native by design? And, now more than ever, are they both AI-powered and AI-enabling? All of these came together in the case of Salesforce and Informatica, including our shared belief in agentic AI as the next major breakthrough in business technology.
Don’t take your foot off the gas
In the days after the acquisition was completed, I was asked during a media interview if good luck was a factor in bringing together these two tech industry stalwarts. Replace good luck with good timing, and the answer is a resounding, “Yes!”
As more businesses pursue the productivity and other benefits of agentic AI, they require high-quality data to be successful. These are two areas where Salesforce and Informatica excel, respectively. And the agentic AI opportunity — estimated to grow to $155 billion by 2030 — is here and now. So the timing of the acquisition was perfect.
Tremendous effort goes into keeping an organization on track, leading up to an acquisition and then seeing it through to a smooth and successful completion. In the few months between the announcement of Salesforce’s intent to acquire Informatica and the close, we announced new partnerships and customer engagements and a fall product release that included autonomous AI agents, MCP servers and more.
In other words, there’s no easing into the new future. We must maintain the pace of business because the competitive environment and our customers require it. That’s true whether you’re a small, venture-funded organization or, like us, an established firm with thousands of employees and customers. Going forward we plan to keep doing what we do best: help organizations connect, manage and unify their AI data.
Out with the old, in with the new
It’s wrong to think of an acquisition as an end game. It’s a new chapter.
Business leaders and employees in many organizations have demonstrated time and again that they are quite good at adapting to an ever-changing competitive landscape. A few years ago, we undertook a company-wide shift from on-premises software to cloud-first. There was short-term disruption but long-term advantage. It’s important to develop an organizational mindset that thrives on change and transformation, so when the time comes, you’re ready for these big steps.
So, even as we take pride in all that we accomplished to get to this point, we now begin to take on a fresh identity as part of a larger whole. It’s an opportunity to engage new colleagues and flourish professionally. And importantly, customers will be the beneficiaries of these new collaborations and synergies. On the day Informatica was welcomed into the Salesforce family and ecosystem, I shared my feeling that “the best is yet to come.” That’s my North Star and one I recommend to every business leader forging ahead into an M&A evolution — because the truest measure of success ultimately will be what we accomplish next.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
Homebuyers may experience a reprieve in 2026 as price normalization and an increase in home sales over the next year will take some pressure off the market—but don’t expect homebuying to be affordable in the short run for Gen Z and young families.
The “Great Housing Reset” will start next year, with income growth outpacing home-price growth for a prolonged period for the first time since the Great Recession era, according to a Redfin report released this week.
The residential real estate brokerage sees mortgage rates in the low-6% range, down from down from the 2025 average of 6.6%; a median home sales price increase of just 1%, down from 2% this year; and monthly housing payments growth that will lag behind wage growth, which will remain steady at 4%.
These trends toward increased affordability will likely bring back some house hunters to the market, but many Gen Zers and young families will opt for nontraditional living situations, according to the report.
More adult children will be living with their parents, as households continue to shift further away from a nuclear family structure, Redfin predicted.
“Picture a garage that’s converted into a second primary suite for adult children moving back in with their parents,” the report’s authors wrote. “Redfin agents in places like Los Angeles and Nashville say more homeowners are planning to tailor their homes to share with extended family.”
Gen Z and millennial homeownership rates plateaued last year, with no improvement expected. Just over one-quarter of Gen Zers owned their home in 2024, while the rate for millennial owners was 54.9% in the same year.
Meanwhile, about 6% of Americans who struggled to afford housing as of mid-2025 moved back in with their parents, while another 6% moved in with roommates. Both trends are expected to increase in 2026, according to the report.
Obstacles to home affordability
Despite factors that could increase affordability for prospective homebuyers, C. Scott Schwefel, a real estate attorney at Shipman, Shaiken & Schwefel, LLC, told Fortune that income growth and home-price growth are just a few keys to sustainable homeownership.
An improved income-to-price ratio is welcome, but unless tax bills stabilize, many households may not experience a net relief, Schwefel said.
“Prospective buyers need to recognize that affordability is not just price versus income…it’s price, mortgage rate and the annual bill for living in a place—and that bill includes property taxes,” he added.
In November, voters—especially young ones—showed lowering housing costs is their priority, the report said. But they also face high sale prices and mortgage rates, inflated insurance premiums, and potential utility costs hikes due to a data center construction boom that’s driving up energy bills. The report’s authors expect there to be a bipartisan push to help remedy the housing affordability crisis.
Still, an affordable housing market for first-time home buyers and young families still may be far away.
“The U.S. housing market should be considered moving from frozen to thawing,” Sergio Altomare, CEO of Hearthfire Holdings, a real estate private equity and development company, told Fortune.
“Prices aren’t surging, but they’re no longer falling,” he added. “We are beginning to unlock some activity that’s been trapped for a couple of years.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn’t foresee a sudden spike of AI-related layoffs, but that doesn’t mean the technology won’t drastically change the job market—or even create new roles like robot tailors.
The jobs that will be the most resistant to AI’s creeping effect will be those that consist of more than just routine tasks, Huang said during an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan this week.
“If your job is just to chop vegetables, Cuisinart’s gonna replace you,” Huang said.
On the other hand, some jobs, such as radiologists, may be safe because their role isn’t just about taking scans, but rather interpreting those images to diagnose people.
“The image studying is simply a task in service of diagnosing the disease,” he said.
Huang allowed that some jobs will indeed go away, although he stopped short of using the drastic language from others like Geoffrey Hinton a.k.a. “the Godfather of AI” and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, both of whom have previously predicted massive unemployment thanks to the improvement of AI tools.
Yet, the potential, AI-dominated job market Huang imagines may also add some new jobs, he theorized. This includes the possibility that there will be a newfound demand for technicians to help build and maintain future AI assistants, Huang said, but also other industries that are harder to imagine.
“You’re gonna have robot apparel, so a whole industry of—isn’t that right? Because I want my robot to look different than your robot,” Huang said. “So you’re gonna have a whole apparel industry for robots.”
The idea of AI-powered robots dominating jobs once held by humans may sound like science fiction, and yet some of the world’s most important tech companies are already trying to make it a reality.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made the company’s Optimus robot a central tenet of its future business strategy. Just last month, Musk predicted money will no longer exist in the future and work will be optional within the next 10 to 20 years thanks to a fully fledged robotic workforce.
AI is also advancing so rapidly that it already has the potential to replace millions of jobs. AI can adequately complete work equating to about 12% of U.S. jobs, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report from last month. This represents about 151 million workers representing more than $1 trillion in pay, which is on the hook thanks to potential AI disruption, according to the study.
Even Huang’s potentially new job of AI robot clothesmaker may not last. When asked by Rogan whether robots could eventually make apparel for other robots, Huang replied: “Eventually. And then there’ll be something else.”
Politics8 years ago