Trump published a text message on Tuesday that he received from French President Emmanuel Macron, confirmed as genuine by Macron’s office.

Starting with “My friend,” Macron’s tone was more deferential than the criticism that France and some of its European partner nations are openly voicing against Trump’s push to wrest Greenland from NATO ally Denmark.

Before broaching the Greenland dispute, Macron opted in his message to first talk about other issues where he and Trump seem roughly on the same page.

“We are totally in line on Syria. We can do great things on Iran,” the French leader wrote in English.

Then, he added: “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland,” immediately followed by: “Let us try to build great things.”

That was the only mention that Macron made of the semi-autonomous Danish territory in the two sections of message that Trump published. It wasn’t immediately clear from Trump’s post when he received the message.

Trump breaks with tradition

World leaders’ private messages to each other rarely make it verbatim into the public domain — enabling them to project one face publicly and another to each other.

But Trump — as is his wont across multiple domains — is casting traditions and diplomatic niceties to the wind and, in the process, lifting back the curtain on goings-on that usually aren’t seen.

This week, a text message that Trump sent to Norway’s prime minister also became public, released by the Norwegian government and confirmed by the White House.

In it, Trump linked his aggressive stance on Greenland to last year’s decision not to award him the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” the message read.

It concluded, “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

On Tuesday, Trump also published a flattering message from Mark Rutte, secretary general of NATO, which the alliance also confirmed as authentic.

“I am committed to finding a way forward on Greenland,” Rutte wrote. “Can’t wait to see you. Yours, Mark.”

Rutte has declined to speak publicly about Greenland despite growing concern about Trump’s threats to “acquire” the island and what that would mean for the territorial integrity of NATO ally Denmark. Pressed last week about Trump’s designs on Greenland and warnings from Denmark that any U.S. military action might mean the end of NATO, Rutte said: “I can never comment on that. That’s impossible in public.”

Macron’s relationship with Trump

Macron likes to say that he can get Trump on the phone any time he wants. He proved it last September by making a show of calling up the president from a street in New York, to tell Trump that police officers were blocking him to let a VIP motorcade pass.

“Guess what? I’m waiting in the street because everything is frozen for you!” Macron said as cameras filmed the scene.

It’s a safe bet that Macron must know by now — a year into Trump’s second spell in office — that there’s always a risk that a private message to Trump could be made public.

Macron said Tuesday that he had “no particular reaction” to the message’s publication when a journalist asked him about it.

“I take responsibility for everything that I do. It’s my habit to be coherent between what I say on the outside and what I do in a private manner. That’s all.”

Still, the difference between Macron’s public and private personas was striking.

Hosting Russia and Ukraine together

Most remarkably, the French leader told Trump in his message that he would be willing to invite representatives from both Ukraine and Russia to a meeting later this week in Paris — an idea that Macron has not voiced publicly.

The Russians could be hosted “in the margins,” Macron suggested, hinting at the potential awkwardness of inviting Moscow representatives while France is also backing Ukraine with military and other support against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

Macron wrote that the meeting could also include “the danish, the syrians” and the G7 nations — which include the United States.

The French president added: “let us have a dinner together in Paris together on thursday before you go back to the us.”

He then signed off simply with “Emmanuel.”

Making nice only goes so far

Despite Macron’s persistent efforts, in both of Trump’s terms, not to ruffle his feathers, any payback has been mixed, at best.

Trump bristled on Monday, threatening punitive tariffs, when told that Macron has no plans to join Trump’s new Board of Peace that will supervise the next phase of the Gaza peace plan, despite receiving an invitation.

“Well, nobody wants him because he’s going to be out of office very soon,” Trump told reporters, even through the French leader has more than a year left in office before the end of his second and last term in 2027.

“I’ll put a 200% tariff on his wines and champagnes and he’ll join,” Trump said.

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Lorne Cook in Brussels, Sylvie Corbet in Paris and Kostya Manenkov in Davos contributed.

“I’ve always been like this, I’m reading basically every spare minute that I have,” Andreessen told the How I Write podcast in 2023.

The billionaire previously carved out two hours of reading time on most weekdays, according to a detailed version of his weekly schedule he published in 2020. However, with the business world only becoming more pressurized, he’s ramped up his knowledge intake—something made possible from “the single biggest technological leap” in his life: AirPods. 

Andreessen now spends two to three hours a day glued to audiobooks—typically alternating between histories, biographies, and material in new subject areas like artificial intelligence. Collectively, his practice amounts to nearly an entire 24-hour day dedicated to learning, each week.

Research suggests that listeners retain roughly the same amount of information from audiobooks as they do from reading text, making Andreessen’s shift in format less a compromise than an optimization.

“If nothing else is going on,” Andreessen added. “I’m always listening to something.”

Andreessen didn’t respond to Fortune’s request for further comment.

Mark Cuban and Bill Gates agree: reading will drive you to success

Andreessen’s approach is far from unusual among the ultra-wealthy. Reading ranks as the most commonly cited behavior tied to long-term success, according to a JPMorgan report that surveyed more than 100 billionaires with a combined net worth exceeding $500 billion.

Bill Gates, for example, has long championed reading—often finishing 50 books a year and releasing annual lists to encourage others to do the same.

“Reading fuels a sense of curiosity about the world, which I think helped drive me forward in my career and in the work that I do now with my foundation,” he told TIME in 2017.

Former Shark Tank star Mark Cuban has similarly cited reading as a critical habit that helped set him apart—and put him on the billionaire path.

 “I read more than three hours almost every day,” Cuban wrote on his blog in 2011.

“Everything I read was public,” the now 67-year-old added. “Anyone could buy the same books and magazines. The same information was available to anyone who wanted it. Turns out most people didn’t want it.”

Reading, as a whole, remains a cornerstone of nuanced thinking and communication—skills that are increasingly critical for business leaders, according to Brooke Vuckovic, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.

“Reading long-form fiction, biography, and history demands focused attention, tolerance with ambiguity and unanswered questions or unrevealed nuance in characters and situations, and a willingness to have our preconceptions upended,” Vuckovic previously told Fortune. “All of these qualities are requirements of strong leadership [and] they are in increasingly short supply.”

The severity of this fraud has reached the attention of the U.S. government. On Wednesday, Jacqueline Burns Koven, the head of cyber threat intelligence at Chainalysis, spoke in front of the Senate about the increase of this criminal activity, and how the U.S. can combat it. Her testimony was titled, ‘Made in China, Paid by Seniors: Stopping the Surge of International Scams.’

“Scams that leverage cryptocurrency are having a record year in terms of proceeds,” Burns Koven said, in an interview with Fortune. “The Chinese scam conglomerates are the market leaders in criminal fintech. They’ve been doing this for a long time.” 

The estimated $17 billion received in crypto scams is up from about 30% from last year, according to the report. These operations have become increasingly sophisticated and include the use of AI-generated deepfakes. Crypto is an essential part of the operation because the criminals frequently use digital currencies to finance their scamming operations, such as purchasing tools like SMS phishing kits. 

Nefarious actors have leaned heavily on impersonation techniques, where they pose as legitimate organizations to coerce victims into paying digitally. The most well-known example of this is the EZ-Pass phishing campaign, which targeted millions of Americans. The operation was traced back to a Chinese-speaking criminal group called “Darcula”, which also has a history of impersonating the USPS. 

While 2025 also saw a record number of crypto seizures by law enforcement, Burns Koven says that government and industry responses are still fragmented and reactive. Just as criminals are using advanced technology for scams, both the public and private sector could use AI to block these messages from appearing on people’s phones. Also, with criminals using crypto to facilitate these scams and because these transactions are public on the blockchain, this makes it easier to identify criminal networks and disrupt activity.  

“Scammers are taking advantage of the disjointed and reactive responses from both the public and private sector,” she said. “We need to use advanced technologies like AI enabled fraud prevention, to prevent a human being from ever being in contact with that scam in the first place.”

Fraud usually never sleeps, but these Chinese criminal networks actually do take breaks. Chainalysis and other researchers found a dip in criminal activity during the Chinese New Year and other of the country’s public holidays.