Being in the C-suite is a high-pressure job with long hours, board responsibilities, 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 Ed Fuller, the 35-year-old founder and CEO of the marketing agency, Media Bodies.
Fuller fell into the world of marketing by accident. He started at Uproot, heading up brand partnerships and celebrity endorsements—mainly, he admits, to score free tickets to summer music festivals. “I did end up getting about 50 of them,” Fuller says. “But I also had my lightbulb moment for Media Bodies.”
It wasn’t just that everyday creators were suddenly becoming influencers and moving the needle for brands. He also noticed founders were doing something else too: travelling, networking, and pursuing creative experiences under the guise of ‘work’. He wanted in.
So he used his spare time to land his own clients, and soon started side-hustling for American Express, managing its U.K. Facebook page.
Clients have ranged from football legend Thierry Henry to MrBeast and Zoe Sugg, the company claims.
“In the initial stages, I completely made it up as I went, licensing music from Warner and Universal to get tracks from the likes of Michael Buble and Jessie J to drive engagement across AMEX’s Facebook page,” he adds.
But that one client gave him the confidence—and the cash flow—to launch Media Bodies in 2013.
Since then, the company has gone from a solo operation to a 30-person team, with over 100 brands on its roster and four straight years of 100% growth. Clients have ranged from football legend Thierry Henry to MrBeast and Zoe Sugg, the company claims. Last year, it bagged the U.K. Government’s Made in the U.K., Sold to the World award which celebrates the global success of small British businesses.
Now, Fuller splits his time between London and Barcelona, leads a fully remote team, and has—full circle—built a life that includes the travel and creative freedom that first drew him to the industry.
The finances
What’s been the best investment you’ve ever bought?
I’ve invested over $100k in getting training and internal onboarding and upskilling resources from some of the best industry experts, and that has skyrocketed the company’s growth.
And the worst?
I wouldn’t say this was a bad investment, just bad timing.
I was in the process of starting up another sport-tech app business, but it was just when Media Bodies was really taking off.
Ultimately, it was a case of stretching myself too thin and risking both, so I shelved that project for some time in the future to focus on Media Bodies.
How do you commute to work?
We have a hybrid working arrangement, so some days, I simply walk one room over into my home office.
The days we go into the office, if I’m heading to the local office, I’ll walk it, or if we’re heading down to a different branch, I’ll take the train.
What personal finance advice would you give your 20-year-old self?
Get an accountant. You’ll save a lot more time and money than you will trying to figure out everything yourself.
Don’t try to start a business with just interns. Invest in surrounding yourself with knowledgeable people so you can learn to lead better.
Invest in quality. Whether it’s a tool that improves your productivity, hardware, or even material things like shoes or clothes, you’ll save so much time and money in the long run even if the costs seem steep at first.
What’s the one subscription you can’t live without?
Spotify. I’m a big music fan, and listen to a lot of podcasts for work and general self-improvement! It’s the perfect balance of something that serves my needs for business and pleasure.
Where’s your go-to wristwatch from?
Raymond Weil.
The necessities
How do you get your daily coffee fix?
I don’t drink coffee!
What about eating on the go?
I always try to eat healthy. Since we work hybrid, eating on the go isn’t often, maybe once or twice a week. And in those cases, I’ll probably get something like a salad bowl. I tend to prefer Asian food (Japanese, Vietnamese, or Thai) because they tend to have more nutritious options and I generally really enjoy the cuisine!
“Invest in quality. Whether it’s a tool that improves your productivity, hardware, or even material things like shoes or clothes, you’ll save so much time and money in the long run even if the costs seem steep at first.”Ed Fuller
Where do you buy groceries?
When in the U.K., a Sainsbury’s, or if I’m in Barcelona, Mercadona.
Where do you shop for your work wardrobe?
My go-to brands for my work wardrobe are Reiss or Boggi Milano.
Are you the proud owner of any futuristic gadgets?
The closest might be an Oura ring. I got it to help track my sleep and anxiety.
It’s definitely been an interesting investment. It’s great to add perspective to how the body and mind are connected and identify personal patterns so I can make more mindful decisions and choices that are suitable specifically for my biology instead of following more generic wellness advice.
The treats
How do you unwind from the top job?
Physical movement is a must for me! Whether it’s the gym, a run, a swim, or a hike, I find staying active or just getting out in nature is a great way to unwind.
I also like to practise meditation, or watch sport and sport documentaries!
What’s the best bonus treat you’ve bought yourself?
Probably a really nice sound system for my home.
Take us on holiday with you, what’s next on your vacation list?
I travel for work quite often, so I get a little taste of different cultures and cities on and off.
But my next vacation spots are Morocco and New York later in the year.
I’m really keen to soak up the history, culture, and landscapes of both—they are guaranteed to be unique but rich experiences!
Fortune wants to hear from leaders on what their “Good Life” looks like. Get in touch: orianna.royle@fortune.com
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.”
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