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Wall Street CEO tells interns to ‘act immediately like this is 100% your full-time career’—it’s one of 20 top tips he has for Gen Z

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  • Jefferies CEO Rich Handler shared his top tips for Gen Z interns joining the $11 billion financial group this summer. He recommended young professionals treat the entry-level gig as their full-time career, connect with the entire firm, but still find time for fun in the punishing schedules of Wall Street. Every 20-something can learn from the executive’s advice, whether they’re in finance or not.

Summer is upon us, and that means a financial internship bloodbath on Wall Street. Securing a spot at one of the big banks is one hurdle, but making it through the work is another. So Jefferies CEO Rich Handler just laid out his best tips for young apprentices joining the firm this summer.

“If you act immediately in your internship like this is 100% your full-time career, you will optimize your experience,” Handler stressed in a recent letter outlining his tips. “It’s all about attitude.”

The Jefferies executive has some words of advice (and warnings) for the incoming cohort of summer interns joining the highly selective program. 

Last year, the $11 billion financial group only admitted 338 young professionals from a pool of over 25,000 applicants. The 1.35% acceptance rate makes landing the gig even harder than getting into Ivy League universities

Now these top-notch Gen Z apprentices will be cutting their teeth on Wall Street, and Handler wants to ensure they’re prepped for the big time. The Jefferies CEO detailed 20 tidbits of advice and insight into the internship, from handling ego to maintaining work-life balance. It’ll be critical as many young banking apprentices step into their first high-intensity roles with shaky legs. 

Key takeaways: connection is key, act accordingly, and be career-conscious 

Handlers’ need-to-knows span across a whole range of issues that young people entering adulthood could run into. It may be hard for newbies to fully understand the work, know what they want from their careers, balance ambition with humility, and find work-life harmony. The CEO’s tips guide the Gen Z students through the tumult.

Handler discussed the importance of connection several times; interns should bond with their teams, network across the firm, and appreciate their clients. And when Jefferies’ apprentices start their roles, they should pay it forward and help other students land an opportunity next year. 

But don’t be fooled into thinking Wall Street is one big fraternity. Employers have consistently struggled with Gen Z’s; six out of 10 bosses had already fired some of their Gen Z workers fresh out of college, according to a 2024 report, due to a lack of motivation, professionalism, and communication skills. Handler said interns need to act accordingly—these young professionals are stepping into the world of Wall Street. It’s essential that they bring maturity to the gig, be humble, ask questions, and act with integrity. 

“Welcome to the real world,” Handler wrote. “This is not college. We are not a fraternity or sorority. You are an adult and we will treat you like one.”

Large financial institutions like JPMorgan and Bank of America are known for historically overworking junior staffers. In spite of the 100-hours-per-week schedule some young bankers suffer through, Handler stressed the importance of having a life. He suggested interns that create boundaries, and plan ahead for fun after the program ends and school begins again. And refreshingly, the CEO said that if the banking sector isn’t for you, it’s good to ponder your career and make a change. 

Jefferies CEO’s top 20 tips for summer interns

Here is a brief run-down of Rich Handler’s top 20 tips for Jefferies’ incoming summer interns.

  1. Build relationships with the full-time team: “The most important part of internships (and business) is building relationships. While you are working hard to please everyone, never forget that it is the human connection that matters the most.”
  2. Build relationships with other interns—not zero sum: “The bonds you build with your fellow interns are an incredible part of your summer internship. Never view any of these people as your competitors because life is not ‘zero sum.’ Every one of you can be winners with full-time offers at the end of the summer or none of you can.”
  3. The environment is always different: “Every summer is different and that means every summer intern class has different opportunities and challenges…You never know what the environment will bring, but there are opportunities and things to learn regardless of the macro factors.”
  4. Learn the entire firm: “You can do this by reading, networking internally with others who work full-time in different areas and by making friends with interns outside your area of focus…There are many different aspects to an investment bank, and you might find a different one suits you better.”
  5. Act like this is your career choice: “If you act immediately in your internship like this is 100% your full-time career, you will optimize your experience. You will take the time to invest in real relationships, understand concepts and strategies because you will feel the need to rely on them for decades…It’s all about attitude.”
  6. Understand the assignment first: “You will save yourself an enormous amount of time/effort and dramatically increase the odds of a successful outcome if you spend extra time upfront learning exactly what you are being asked to accomplish.”
  7. Appreciate time with clients: “Clients are our lifeblood. They are why we have careers and without them, our company has no reason to exist. Our goal is to give each of you as many chances as possible to be exposed to our clients. This is also one of the best ways to learn.”
  8. Stay current: “Staying informed, concerned and involved with helping make the world a better place has many benefits.”
  9. Is this for you? “While striving to be the best you can be, also spend the summer assessing if you can see yourself truly enjoying a career in the industry, firm, division and role of your summer job. Get to know the people around you…try to listen and really understand their enjoyment, frustrations, challenges and opportunities.”
  10. Choose integrity: “Our industry is littered with once prominent professionals with extraordinarily promising careers who were brought to tears and ruin due to lapses in ethical principles. Consider this summer to be the final warning about how fragile everything in life truly is, especially reputations.”
  11. Think: “You can get completely caught up in ‘doing’ and end up being so narrowly focused that you neglect one of the most important priorities these programs afford: ‘thinking.’”
  12. Have a life: “A summer internship in finance can be one of the most intense work periods of your career…You need to do your best to draw the line in the sand this summer and decide now that you will maintain some reasonable degree of balance in your life.”
  13. Ask questions: “You will have a million questions. There are no stupid ones. Ask away but be mindful of what is going on when you ask.”
  14. The math is real: “Force yourself to come to grips with the reality that all of these zeros at the end of everything you are working on are real. These are big numbers with dollar signs in front of them…P.S. Don’t make yourself neurotic or nuts, but always check your work before submitting it. Maybe check it twice.”
  15. Have fun: “This summer will be a waste if you don’t have fun and enjoy yourself. Enjoy the people you meet and don’t be intimidated by anyone. Don’t take yourself or any of the people in our industry too seriously.”
  16. Pay it forward: “The day you start your internship is the day you can start helping others at your respective schools who are interested in finance get their jobs for the summer of 2026.”
  17. Lead with humility and confidence: “There is a very fine line between confidence and arrogance…Humble people let their accomplishments speak for themselves versus cleverly advertising them.”
  18. Be mature: “Welcome to the real world. This is not college. We are not a fraternity or sorority. You are an adult and we will treat you like one.”
  19. Plan for the end of summer: “Plan now for a short trip after the internship and before school starts. There are very few times in life when you can truly have zero guilt about rewarding yourself with some time away.”
  20. Have perspective: “If you decide you really don’t like this summer job or if you decide you love it, but circumstances result in not achieving a full-time offer, neither is the end of the world.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Trump smartphone will likely be made in China and subject to administration’s tariffs

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Analysts and supply chain experts are not sold on the Trump Organization touting its new smartphone as being “built in the United States,” saying it’s far more likely the $499 device will actually be produced in China.

The Trump Organization, the Trump family’s real estate, hospitality, and entertainment conglomerate, announced on Monday it would license its name to a wireless service called Trump Mobile and its gold-colored “T1” smartphone slated for an August release. The device will use a wireless provider dubbed Liberty Wireless and will operate on the Google Android operating system.

The Trump Organization’s announcement touted the phones as “proudly designed and built in the United States,” but analysts said it’s more likely the conglomerate is outsourcing manufacturing capabilities to an original device manufacturer (ODM) overseas, as least in the short term, as the U.S. does not have the manufacturing capabilities to build the phone.

“Despite being advertised as an American-made phone, it is likely that this device will be initially produced by a Chinese ODM,” Blake Przesmicki, an analyst at Counterpoint Research, said in a note published Monday.

Even if the U.S. did have smartphone production capabilities, he said, the company would have to rely on components imported from overseas.

The Trump Organization did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

Trump Organization executive vice president Eric Trump, for his part, admitted Trump Mobile would not initially be an entirely domestic endeavor.

“Eventually, all the phones can be built in the United States of America,” Trump said on The Benny Show podcast on Monday, suggesting the device is being produced or assembled overseas before its August launch.

Manufacturing limitations

President Donald Trump has tried to jumpstart domestic manufacturing by imposing sweeping tariffs, but experts have long warned of the U.S.’s production limitations. Apple, for example, set up its supply chain in China in the 1990s, and moving it would require extensive sourcing substitutions and increased labor costs that would drive the cost of a U.S.-made iPhone to more than $3,000, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives previously said.

These barriers to expanding U.S. production are nearly universal in the industry, according to Przesmicki.

“Generally, no phones have been manufactured in the U.S. since the 2G era in over a decade,” Przesmicki told Fortune. “We have weaker supply chains, fewer capable employees in the smartphone sector, lower margins.”

Przesmicki suggested if any manufacturing of Trump-branded phones were to take place on American soil, it would be on a small scale, about 1,000 phones or fewer. Leo Gebbie, principal analyst at CCS Insight, told Fortune there’s “no serious chance” the Trump Organization has arranged for U.S. production of the T1 phones, especially before the August launch.

“The idea that this could be replicated in the U.S. in any sort of short- to medium-term timescale is fanciful,” Gebbie said. “It is an absolute pipe dream.” 

Instead, according to Gebbie, the T1 phones will likely have their final assembly stage in the U.S., which would allow the company to avoid steep investments in domestic manufacturing by simply importing all components. This strategy, he said, could be closer to what the Trump Organization intended when it hailed phones “built” in the U.S.

Trump not immune to his own tariffs

The importing of phone components, the majority of which are made in China, would provide another supply chain hiccup for the Trump Organization by making it susceptible to tariffs Trump imposed for the express purpose of discouraging trade with China.

“This absolutely does raise the specter of the Trump Organization mobile falling foul of the tariffs that have been instigated by the Trump administration,” Gebbie said.

“Ultimately, whether we’re talking about screens, whether we’re talking about camera technologies, whether we’re talking about chipsets and processors and smartphones, almost all of this comes from the same manufacturing hubs in Asia,” he added.

The president last month threatened a 25% tariff on smartphones not produced in the U.S. and lambasted Apple for producing its iPhone in India—where it makes about 20% of its total output. Trump warned he would impose a 25% levy on Apple products if the company does not move manufacturing to the U.S. 

Apple announced in February it would invest $500 billion in expanding U.S. plants over the next four years.

Gebbie suggested the Trump Organization’s emphasis on building its phone in the U.S—despite domestic manufacturing being unlikely—is to send a message to big companies that U.S. smartphone assembly is possible.

“Maybe it provides leverage for the Trump administration to go out to device-makers like Apple and Samsung and say, ‘Hey, we are marking smartphones in the U.S. Why aren’t you?’” Gebbie said.



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All 50 states agree to OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma’s plan for Sackler family to pay up to $7 billion

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A judge on Wednesday is being asked to clear the way for local governments and individual victims to vote on it.

Government entities, emergency room doctors, insurers, families of children born into withdrawal from the powerful prescription painkiller, individual victims and their families and others would have until Sept. 30 to vote on whether to accept the deal, which calls for members of the Sackler family who own the company to pay up to $7 billion over 15 years.

If approved, the settlement would be among the largest in a wave of lawsuits over the past decade as governments and others sought to hold drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies accountable for the opioid epidemic that started rising in the years after OxyContin hit the market in 1996. The other settlements together are worth about $50 billion, and most of the money is to be used to combat the crisis.

In the early 2000s, most opioid deaths were linked to prescription drugs, including OxyContin. Since then, heroin and then illicitly produced fentanyl became the biggest killers. In some years, the class of drugs was linked to more than 80,000 deaths, but that number dropped sharply last year.

The request of U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Sean Lane comes about a year after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a previous version of Purdue’s proposed settlement. The court found it was improper that the earlier iteration would have protected members of the Sackler family from lawsuits over opioids, even though they themselves were not filing for bankruptcy protection.

Under the reworked plan hammered out with lawyers for state and local governments and others, groups that don’t opt in to the settlement would still have the right to sue members of the wealthy family whose name once adorned museum galleries around the world and programs at several prestigious U.S. universities.

Under the plan, the Sackler family members would give up ownership of Purdue. They resigned from the company’s board and stopped receiving distributions from its funds before the company’s initial bankruptcy filing in 2019. The remaining entity would get a new name and its profits would be dedicated to battling the epidemic.

Most of the money would go to state and local governments to address the nation’s addiction and overdose crisis, but potentially more than $850 million would go directly to individual victims. That makes it different from the other major settlements.

The payouts would not begin until after a hearing scheduled for Nov. 10, during which Lane is to be asked to approve the entire plan if enough of the affected parties agree.



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CBO digs further into ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ and now says it will raise deficit by $2.8 trillion

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The report, produced by the nonpartisan CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, factors in expected debt service costs and finds that the bill would increase interest rates and boost interest payments on the baseline projection of federal debt by $441 billion.

The analysis comes at a crucial moment as Trump is pushing the GOP-led Congress to act on what he calls his “big, beautiful bill.” It passed the House last month on a party-line vote, and now faces revisions in the Senate. Vice President JD Vance urged Senate Republicans during a private lunch meeting Tuesday to send the final package to the president’s desk.

“We’re excited to get this bill out,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune afterward.

Tuesday’s report uses dynamic analysis by estimating the budgetary impact of the tax bill by considering how changes in the economy might affect revenues and spending. This is in contrast to static scoring, which presumes all other economic factors stay constant.

The CBO released its static scoring analysis earlier this month, estimating that Trump’s bill would unleash trillions in tax cuts and slash spending, but also increase deficits by $2.4 trillion over the decade and leave some 10.9 million more people without health insurance.

Republicans have repeatedly argued that a more dynamic scoring model would more accurately show how cutting taxes would spur economic growth — essentially overcoming any lost revenue to the federal government.

But the larger deficit numbers in the new analysis gave Democrats, who are unified against the big bill, fresh arguments for challenging the GOP position that the tax cuts would essentially pay for themselves.

“The Republican claim that this bill does not add to the debt or deficit is laughable, and the proof is in the numbers,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.

“The cost of these tax giveaways for billionaires, even when considering economic growth, will add even more to the debt than we previously expected,” he said.

Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said Tuesday on social media that considering the new dynamic analysis, “It’s not only not paying for all of itself, it’s not paying for any of itself.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Republicans have sought to discredit the CBO, saying the organization isn’t giving enough credit to the economic growth the bill will create.

At the Capitol, Mehmet Oz, who heads up the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services and joined Vance at the GOP Senate lunch, challenged CBO’s findings when asked about its estimate that the bill would leave 10.9 million more people without health care, largely from new work requirements.

“What will an American do if they’re given the option of trying to get a job or an education or volunteering their community — having some engagement — or losing their Medicaid insurance coverage?” Oz asked. “I have more confidence in the American people than has been given to them by some of these analyzing organizations.”

Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee unveiled their proposal Monday for deeper Medicaid cuts, including new work requirements for parents of teens, as a way to offset the costs of making Trump’s tax breaks more permanent in their draft for the big bill.

The Senate’s version of the package also enhances Trump’s proposed new tax break for seniors, with a bigger $6,000 deduction for low- to moderate-income senior households earning no more than $75,000 a year for singles, $150,000 for couples.

The proposals from Senate Republicans keep in place the current $10,000 deduction of state and local taxes, called SALT, drawing quick blowback from GOP lawmakers from New York and other high-tax states, who fought for a $40,000 cap in the House-passed bill. Senators insisted negotiations continue.

Bessent said Tuesday that the Senate Republican proposal for the tax cuts bill “will deliver the permanence and certainty both individual taxpayers and businesses alike are looking for, driving growth and unleashing the American economy.”

“We look forward to continuing to work with the Senate and the House to further refine this bill and get it to President Trump’s desk,” he said in a news release.

While the House-passed bill exempted parents with dependents from the new Medicaid work requirements, the Senate’s version broadened the requirement to include parents of children older than 14, as part of their effort to combat waste in the program and push personal responsibility.

The work requirements “demonstrate that you are trying your hardest to help this country be greater,” Oz said. “By doing that, you earn the right to be on Medicaid.”

The CBO separately released another analysis on the tax bill last week, including a look at how the measure would affect households based on income distribution. It estimates the bill would cost the poorest Americans roughly $1,600 a year while increasing the income of the wealthiest households by an average of $12,000 annually.



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