Foreword

Alyson Shontell

Editor-in-Chief

Earlier this week I was on the road in D.C. and Memphis, where I attended our CEO membership dinner and met with FedEx (No. 50) CEO Raj Subramaniam at his company headquarters to record the next Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. A few things stood out from the events.

The U.S. broke a record last year that no one is talking about.
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Neil Bradley, who cohosted our CEO dinner, more applications were filed to start new businesses last year than ever before. That stat signifies two things:

The entrepreneurial spirit of America is alive and well, and
AI is making it easier and more essential for American workers to lean into self employment.

Another AI-related trend to watch: Tech billionaires are hedging AI by investing in physical experiences.
Endeavor Group Holdings (No. 495) founder Ari Emanuel has been preaching this for a while at his company TKO Holdings, which focuses on sports events like ultimate fighting and pro wrestling. But at the CEO dinner, I sat next to AOL cofounder and startup investor Steve Case, and he was describing the same thing. He has an increasing number of hospitality ventures and believes that becoming “asset heavy” may soon become an edge.

In recent years, companies like Marriott (No. 174) and Hyatt have boasted about being “asset light,” selling off a large number of their properties and earning money from managing them or licensing them instead. This puts the cost burden on another party to run and maintain, a nice short-term cash play. But over time, losing control of the physical experience can degrade the brand value.

Case is betting that in an era of digital fatigue, owning a great experience will be worth a lot. He pointed to Barry Diller’s recent $18 billion bid for MGM (No. 253) as proof of this trend: AI will never replicate the feeling of being in a Las Vegas casino.

You can read more here about the learnings from our CEO dinner, which my colleague Diane Brady hosted, or read our recent interview with Case at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference. (Want to join our Fortune CEO membership? Apply here.)

And for more on the news this week, check out my colleague Nick Lichtenberg’s analysis of red-hot stock Micron (No. 125). The Boise, Idaho-based chipmaker was a rare bright spot in the middle of a global tech selloff after banner earnings.

Fortune 500 Digest is taking next Saturday, July 4, off for the holiday. I’ll be back in your inboxes on July 11.

Follow Alyson on X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and the Titans and Disruptors vodcast.

Deals & Developments

Walmart (No. 1) is acquiring Paris-based Vibe.co in a roughly $1.4 billion deal. Read more: Walmart’s Vibe.co deal is a direct shot at Amazon’s booming ad business
Google, owned by Alphabet (No. 5), is investing about $75 million in indie studio A24 and partnering its DeepMind unit with the company to build AI-driven production tools and workflows for filmmakers.
Meta Platforms (No. 17) is developing an AI-powered prediction market app, codenamed Arena, that lets users wager virtual “play money” on real-world events using questions automatically generated by its Llama model.
AbbVie (No. 77) agreed to acquire Apogee Therapeutics for $10.9 billion in cash, its largest deal in more than five years, to bolster its immunology pipeline. The transaction is largely driven by Apogee’s lead drug candidate Zumilokibart, an experimental antibody being developed for atopic dermatitis and asthma.
Qualcomm (No. 108) has agreed to buy AI startup Modular in a deal worth $3.9 billion to strengthen the software that runs on its chips in phones, PCs, and data centers. The purchase gives Qualcomm tools that make it easier for businesses to run the same AI programs on many different kinds of chips, putting it in more direct competition with the CUDA software platform from Nvidia (No. 16). Read more: Qualcomm’s big AI gamble: Breaking Nvidia’s chips stronghold