• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on how CEOs deal with increasing geopolitical uncertainty.
• The big story: Putin signals he will not oppose the U.S. taking over Greenland.
• The markets: More pain to come.
• Analyst notes from WARC on global ad spend, Wedbush on Gamestop’s Bitcoin plan and auto tariffs, Goldman Sachs on gold.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Many of us built our careers in an environment where the U.S. was a dominant and stable player in the global economy. It has been a magnet for talent and a home to brands that are popular and produced worldwide. That’s giving way to a more volatile and multipolar world, in which leaders need new political skills.
We convened a group of CEOs yesterday, in partnership with Boston Consulting Group, to share perspectives on how they’re managing differently. Nikolaus Lang, who heads the BCG Henderson Institute and chairs its Center for Geopolitics, notes that “companies need to build up a geopolitical muscle around talent, functions, and processes.”
That’s become even more of an imperative in recent weeks as U.S. policy takes a new direction, with Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference providing “the clearest wakeup call,” says Lang, that old rules and alliances are no longer a given.
Here are edited highlights of what some of the CEOs had to say:
Marc Casper, Thermo Fisher Scientific: Government relations, in normal times, is a relatively modest use of time. Building relationships for the longer term is the way I’ve always thought about it. This has been a super active time. In the U.S., it’s largely been about educating the administration on the implications of some policies and, with Congress, it’s about what’s important fundamentally to U.S. competitiveness. You can’t make changes until you know what’s likely to stick, so you reduce costs as appropriate. In a regulated industry, you cannot do things particularly quickly.
Christiana Riley, Santander U.S. We are the eurozone’s largest bank by market cap and amongst the largest consumer banks globally, representing 173 million customers across the 12 markets. We’re going through a major investment cycle in building new digital banking capabilities. We continue to see opportunity, both in a hard-currency market such as the U.S. and in the higher-growth developing markets where we have leading franchises in Mexico and Brazil. But it’s been a real roller coaster operating in a global organization.
Arjun Sethi, Kraken: It’s not about what the rules are going to be. It’s just that there are rules of the road that you can sort of adhere to, so that there’s market stability. But some regulatory clarity creates instability. For example, in our venture capital, public and private markets, we’ve just retreated 100% from Europe. And the U.K. is on the cusp as to whether we’re going to deploy capital there or not. In Argentina, we retreated, but we’re still in Brazil. We’re still in India. We’re still in Israel. China, we’re still in but it’s sort of 50:50.
Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: With barriers to trade, the work that comes back is different from the work that left. Employers are rational. They need to compete on price and will automate to the highest degree possible. This accelerates the cooling of labor markets and it always flips the fastest in the U.S., which has fewer structural barriers to maintaining employment. Europe was struggling economically prior to this and this is just going to make it worse. From the Asia and Latin perspective, we’re seeing good growth. Work can move to talent today, and will be able to move much, much, easier in the future. We’re just at the beginning of this flow.
Matt Gline, Roivant Sciences: There was a meme a while ago about a cat that crawled on to the wing of an airplane. The cat was okay but there’s a video of the cat clinging to the wing until they managed to land the plane. We’re definitely the cat in that scenario. We’re just hanging on for dear life, waiting to see where it all goes.
More news below.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
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Putin unbothered by Trump’s push for Greenland. In a speech in Murmansk, the Russian leader did not criticize the idea that the U.S. should take over Greenland. “The United States has serious plans regarding Greenland. These plans have long historical roots, as I have just mentioned, and it is obvious that the United States will continue to consistently advance its geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Arctic,” he said. The move would be “an issue that concerns two specific nations and has nothing to do with us.”
Trump wants control of all major investments in Ukraine. From Bloomberg: “The US is pushing to control all major future infrastructure and mineral investments in Ukraine, potentially gaining a veto over any role for Kyiv’s other allies and undermining its bid for European Union membership. President Donald Trump’s administration is demanding the ‘right of first offer’ on investments in all infrastructure and natural resources projects under a revised partnership deal with Ukraine, according to a draft of the document obtained by Bloomberg News.”
Musk responds to car tariffs. Elon Musk posted a message to X on Thursday stating that President Trump’s new 25% tariff on imported cars and car parts will have a “not trivial” effect on the price of Tesla parts. The EV maker imports as much as one fourth of the value of its vehicles. Context: Tesla’s competitors often import even more.
Iran has responded to Trump’s demand for talks to end their nuclear weapons program. The president gave Iran a two-month deadline to sign a new deal or face military action.
A look at Amazon’s robots. Amazon is building an army of robots to work alongside warehouse employees and help reduce injuries in the workplace. Fortune’s Leo Schwartz went inside an Amazon facility in Massachusetts to see how they work.
Gamestop shares slide on new strategy. Shares of GameStop were down 23% on Thursday, erasing gains from an earlier bump this week following news that the company would close more retail stores and raise $1.3 billion to invest in Bitcoin.
Trump targets WilmerHale. The president ordered government agencies to terminate all contracts with the law firm and ban it from government offices. The firm once employed Robert Mueller, who investigated the president’s links to Russia.
Mars exec allegedly stole $28 million from the company. Paul Steed was a respected sugar market expert.
The markets
• The S&P 500 fell 0.33% yesterday to 5,693.31 and is now down 3.20% YTD. Tech stocks were down even more. Reddit lost 8% on the day. Markets in China, Japan and Europe were all down this morning. S&P futures hinted at more pain to come: they were trading down 0.2% this morning premarket.
From the analysts
• WARC on global ad spend: “Growth forecasts for advertising spend have been downgraded this year (-0.9pp to +6.7%) and next (-0.7pp to +6.3%), equivalent to a $19.8bn cut,” per James McDonald.
• Wedbush on Gamestop’s Bitcoin plan: “GameStop is following the MicroStrategy playbook, but MicroStrategy currently trades at less than 2x the value of its Bitcoin holdings. With GameStop already trading at more than 2x its cash holdings it is unlikely that its conversion of cash into Bitcoin will drive an even greater premium,” per Michael Pachter et al.
• Goldman Sachs on gold: “We raise our end-2025 forecast to $3,300/toz (vs. $3,100) and our forecast range to $3,250-3,520, reflecting upside surprises in ETF inflows and in continued strong central bank gold demand,” per Lina Thomas and Daan Struyven.
• Wedbush on auto tariffs: “These initial tariffs (if they hold in their current form) would be a hurricane-like headwind to foreign (and many US) automakers and ultimately push the average price of cars up $5k to $10k depending on the make/model/price point. We continue to believe this is some form of negotiation, and these tariffs could change by the week, although this initial 25% tariff on autos from outside the US is almost an untenable head-scratching number for the US consumer,” per Daniel Ives et al.
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