Ternus, a 25-year-old Apple veteran and the company’s hardware chief, who will be taking over the top boss’ role, inherits a business with enormous financial strength, a global installed base of more than 2.5 billion active devices, and an annual revenue of more than USD 416 billion, but one that has struggled to match the AI innovation pace set by rivals such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

After completing his 15-year record-breaking tenure as CEO, during which he led Apple to unprecedented heights, Cook will assume the role of executive chairman, allowing him to remain engaged in policymaking.

The choice of Ternus is significant. Unlike Cook, who built his reputation on operations and supply-chain management, Ternus is an engineer and product executive. He joined Apple’s product design team in 2001, became vice-president of hardware engineering in 2013, and joined the executive team in 2021.

He has overseen hardware developments across the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods. His work on Apple silicon strengthened the Mac business by giving Apple greater control over processors and improving performance.

Apple’s effort to build “Apple Intelligence” has faced significant delays, especially regarding a more advanced version of Siri. As it strives to deliver AI capabilities across its devices, the company has sought outside technology, including partnerships with OpenAI and Google.

That strategy gives Apple access to powerful models but also raises questions about whether the company can develop enough proprietary AI technology to compete over the long term.

The post John Ternus takes the Apple helm, eyes AI revolution and foldable iPhones appeared first on International Finance.

Many expected Cook to be a caretaker, a steward of Jobs’ legacy. What happened instead was something more interesting: Cook didn’t try to be Jobs. He became himself – and in doing so, transformed Apple from a products company into an ecosystem empire.

The numbers are stark and revealing. Apple’s market capitalisation has surged from 280 billion pound to more than 3.2 trillion pound, a tenfold increase. Total annual revenue has quadrupled from 72 billion pound to 333 billion pound.

But those figures, impressive as they are, obscure a more consequential shift in how Apple creates value. Under Cook, the company didn’t just grow larger; it became fundamentally different.

The market cap milestone
Apple became the first publicly listed company to cross the 800 billion valuation pound in August 2018. It hit 1.6 trillion pound in 2020, crossed 2.4 trillion pound in January 2022, and briefly touched 4 trillion pound in July 2026 – a moment that seemed nearly impossible when Cook took office.

To put this in perspective, Apple’s current valuation roughly equals the size of the entire British economy, the fifth largest in the world.

The post Tim Cook’s Apple legacy: How an operator built a four trillion pound titan appeared first on International Finance.

Ahead of the automaker’s crucial board meeting next week, the venture’s management and labour leaders have taken a strong stance against layoffs and plant closures in Volkswagen’s largest restructuring effort to date.

Volkswagen’s radical measures include doubling the planned number of job cuts, closing factories and divesting parts of the business, moves that the management believes will revive profits and fend off growing China competition.

Blume is already conducting an outreach campaign, during which he visited Volkswagen’s electric vehicle plants in Emden and Zwickau, both considered vulnerable under the restructuring plan.

While praising employees’ efforts to cut costs, he still warned that more would ⁠be needed.

“This journey is not over. Because we not only measure ourselves against our own past performance. We measure ourselves against the best locations in Europe. Labour costs today are more than double those of comparable European locations. And when it comes to factory costs, other plants are still significantly cheaper. This is not a criticism—it is the reality against which we must measure ourselves,” Blume told staff at both sites, according to excerpts of speeches released by the company.

The supervisory board meeting is scheduled for September 4. Labour representatives and the state of Lower Saxony, which have traditionally been opposed to major job losses, hold a majority on the board.

Emden is in Volkswagen’s home state of Lower Saxony, which faces state elections in 2027. Zwickau, ‌which Blume ⁠said set a particularly strong example with lower costs, lies in the eastern state of Saxony, outside the company’s traditional power base.

Both factories, along with Volkswagen’s campervan plant in Hanover and subsidiary Audi’s plant in Neckarsulm, currently lack a business plan that would have ensured their continuity beyond 2030.

According to the reports, Volkswagen’s labour representatives and Lower Saxony have already drawn up alternative turnaround proposals for the automaker, which they will likely introduce during the board meeting.

In the last meeting in July, Blume’s proposed roadmap failed to get the necessary support from the board members.

Poll-bound Lower Saxony’s State Premier Olaf Lies has also entered the discussion, stating, “Lower Saxony is an automotive county … and this industry must remain so,” while urging Volkswagen’s stakeholders to collaborate on solutions for the group’s future that will also protect the state’s industry.

Lies, who sits on Volkswagen’s supervisory board together with the owner families and labour representatives, spoke ahead of a series of workers’ assemblies, during which staff will have their first chance to question CEO Oliver Blume on his proposed restructuring.

Blume has warned that some 50,000 job cuts are needed to make the carmaker competitive, on top of 50,000 already agreed across the group.

Osnabrueck, about 150 km (93 miles) south of Emden, is also under threat, with vehicle production there due to end as early as 2027.

Daniela Cavallo, head of Volkswagen’s ⁠powerful works council, told reporters in Osnabrueck that layoffs and site closures would not solve problems caused by tariffs, Chinese competition and weak European demand.

“A vision for the future must consist of many different elements. It cannot … be solely about sites, labour costs and staff cuts,” she said.

Blume, ⁠who is touring Volkswagen sites to build support for the restructuring, has described plant closures as a last resort for the automaker.

As per the reports, Osnabrueck could yet be preserved through a partnership with the defence industry, although discussions have so far failed to produce a breakthrough.

In Emden and Zwickau, Blume said that Volkswagen would continue to support the sites, even if it could not secure future vehicle production.

“We will fight for industrial prospects and jobs at our locations, with partners, with investors, and with new industrial solutions,” he said.

However, the powerful labour unions have ensured that their voices are heard.

While Blume has been defending the radical cost-cutting measures as ways to offset the headwinds like growing Chinese competition, costly tariffs and a decline in demand for its cars, he has ruffled the labour leaders by reiterating that the additional 50,000 job cuts could be necessary to keep Volkswagen competitive, roughly double the redundancy programmes already agreed with unions.

The post Oliver Blume vs workers: Stormy board meeting awaits Volkswagen CEO appeared first on International Finance.

The weaknesses are just as clear, and shareholders had begun to say so out loud. A cash position running near 29% of the company’s total size is a drag on returns.

The risks are real too. A homebuilder is a cyclical, rate-sensitive asset bought at a point in the cycle when American housing affordability is stretched. Buybacks executed at higher prices are simply a transfer from continuing shareholders to exiting ones.

The post Greg Abel spends Berkshire’s cash. Buffett hoarded it. Who is right? appeared first on International Finance.

He told the nominee directors of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust on August 12 2026 that he would step away when his current term ends on February 20 2027.

In his letter, he noted that the proposal to extend his term had been pending for six months and was not carried through because one board member did not support it.

The timing was pointed. The announcement landed less than a week before the holding company’s annual general meeting on August 18. Group stocks fell as much as 4%, with TCS, the company Chandra himself once ran, the heaviest loser.

The Sir Dorabji Tata Trust said it respected his decision, then moved to constitute a selection committee under Article 118 of the Tata Sons articles of association.

The six-month stalemate
The dissenting board member has not been officially named, but the reporting points one way. Noel Tata, chairman of Tata Trusts, which controls roughly 66% of Tata Sons, wanted three things before signing off.

A credible turnaround plan for the loss-making new businesses. Clarity on how much more capital those businesses would swallow. And a written assurance that Tata Sons would not be taken public.

ALSO READ | Business Leader of the Week: Air India bets on Tewolde Gebremariam to engineer a turnaround

There was a second, quieter argument about the term itself. Chandra is 63 and the group’s retirement age for executive roles is 65, so the Trusts were reportedly comfortable with two more years rather than five.

What began as a scheduling question hardened into a referendum on nearly a decade of capital allocation.

The numbers behind the row
Tata Sons’ latest annual report gave Noel Tata his ammunition. For the year to March 2026, consolidated net profit fell 35% to about 266 billion rupees, roughly USD 2.78 billion, even as consolidated revenue rose 17% to 6.61 trillion rupees.

The standalone picture was healthier, with net profit up nearly 22%, but dividend income from TCS fell 12.7%, a reminder of how much of the empire still rests on one company.

Nearly all the damage came from unlisted arms. Air India and Air India Express together lost 22,238 crore rupees, more than double the 10,859 crore they lost a year earlier, on combined revenue that fell nearly 9%.

Tata Digital lost 4,974 crore rupees and battery venture Agratas 1,101 crore. Tata Projects, Tata Play and Tata Realty and Infrastructure added several hundred crore each.

The listed side offered no cover. Market capitalisation across the group’s quoted companies fell about 12% over the year, driven by a sharp derating of TCS.

What actually went wrong
None of the big losses were mysteries, and few were purely self-inflicted. Air India was rebuilding a state carrier from a standing start, then absorbed the crash of AI171 in June 2025, airspace closures, fuel price spikes from the West Asia conflict and adverse currency moves.

Chandrasekaran has told its shareholders the turnaround is a five to ten year job, not a quarterly one.

Jaguar Land Rover, historically the profit engine at Tata Motors, lost five weeks of production to a cyberattack that shut its plants from early September 2025, and finished the year with revenue down 20.9% to GBP 22.9 billion, compounded by US tariffs, weak Chinese demand and the phase-out of legacy Jaguar models ahead of an all-electric relaunch.

Tata Digital’s losses were the cost of buying market share against better funded rivals. Tata Electronics is a different sort of loss. Its revenue roughly doubled to 1.31 trillion rupees, making it the group’s fourth-largest company by turnover, and it broke even at the operating line. What sits below that line is the cost of building a semiconductor industry from scratch.

The Chandra record
He took charge on 21 February 2017, the first non-Parsi and the first career executive to lead Tata Sons, inheriting a group in open civil war. What followed was a decade of consolidation and expansion.

He reorganised around 30 group companies into ten verticals under a One Tata banner of simplification, synergy and scale, bought Bhushan Steel out of insolvency in 2018 and Neelachal Ispat in 2022, took Air India back from the government, acquired BigBasket and 1mg, listed Tata Technologies in 2023 and Tata Capital in October 2025 in the group’s largest ever IPO, and split Tata Motors in two.

The scoreboard is good and mixed at the same time. Group revenue nearly doubled and profit rose several times over.

Combined market value of listed companies climbed from about 8.2 lakh crore rupees to well over 23 lakh crore.

Yet compounded at roughly 12.4% a year, that trails the Nifty 50 over the same stretch. The best performer was Trent, a business Noel Tata built. The worst was TCS.

The chip and iPhone question
Chandra’s boldest wager was electronics. Tata bought Wistron’s iPhone plant in Karnataka in 2023, expanded at Hosur, and made itself central to Apple’s shift away from China at a moment when India assembles most of the iPhones sold in the United States.

On top of that he committed roughly USD 14 billion to semiconductors, a 91,000 crore rupee fabrication plant at Dholera with Taiwan’s PSMC, targeting 50,000 wafers a month at 28 to 110 nanometres, and a 27,000 crore rupee assembly and test facility in Assam.

Construction at Dholera passed the halfway mark in April 2026, with trial production targeted for the end of this year.

These projects are the reason his exit matters beyond Bombay House. A fab loses money for its first several years by design, and India’s semiconductor mission has no comparable private anchor.

A successor under pressure to restore profitability could slow the ramp, seek partners to share the burden, or push harder for state support.

Outright abandonment is unlikely given the sunk cost and the political weight behind the projects, but the pace and the appetite for the next tranche of capital are now uncertain.

TCS in the age of AI
The crown jewel has been the most disrupted asset in the portfolio. TCS closed March 2026 with 584,519 employees, down 23,460 in a year, after announcing cuts of about 2% of its workforce concentrated in middle and senior management.

Rupee revenue still grew 4.6% and operating margin reached a four-year high of 25 per cent, but in constant currency the top line shrank 2.4%.

Fewer people, flat dollars and fatter margins break the equation Indian IT was built on, that revenue equals people multiplied by hours multiplied by rate.

Chief executive K Krithivasan has been unusually candid, telling staff to pass AI productivity gains on to clients even where that cannibalises billing. Annualised AI revenue crossed USD 2.3 billion by the March quarter, real but small against a USD 30 billion base.

Whether a new chairman accelerates a shift to products, outcome-based pricing and genuine AI-first delivery, or simply defends margins, is the largest question hanging over the group’s valuation.

The succession shadow
Tata has done this badly before. Cyrus Mistry was removed in October 2016, reinstated by an appellate tribunal in 2019, and the matter was settled only when the Supreme Court found for Tata Sons in 2021, costing the group four years of distraction.

This time the process is orderly, the runway is seven months, and names such as T V Narendran, Saurabh Agrawal and Shailesh Chandra are already circulating.

What has not changed is the tension between a philanthropic majority owner and a management team that wants to spend.

The listing question
That tension has a name, and it is the IPO. The Reserve Bank classified Tata Sons as an upper layer non-banking financial company in 2022, which ordinarily forces a listing.

Tata Sons repaid more than 21,000 crore rupees of debt and applied to be deregistered as a core investment company. In August 2026 the RBI kept it on the list, saying the application remains under examination.

The case for listing is transparency and access to capital for exactly the sort of long-gestation bets that just cost Chandra his job.

The case against is control, since the Trusts fear dilution of a structure that funnels dividends into philanthropy, and market pressure on projects that need a decade.

Shapoorji Pallonji, holding about 18% and under debt strain, wants the exit that only a listing provides.

Chandra leaves in February with the group larger, more diversified and more exposed than he found it. The argument he lost was never really about whether the bets were right. It was about who gets to keep paying for them.

Image Courtesy: Tata Consumer Products

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Average pay for chief executives at S&P 500 companies, excluding Tesla’s Elon Musk, jumped 21% to USD 22.8 million in 2025, the highest figure since records began in the 1990s, according to the AFL-CIO’s annual Paywatch study released on Thursday (August 13).

Fred Redmond, the labour federation’s secretary-treasurer, said Musk’s Tesla package, potentially worth up to USD 1 trillion, was reshaping pay negotiations across corporate America.

“It changes the dynamic when other CEO compensation plans come up. Boards use it as a reference,” he said.

Including Musk’s award, valued by Tesla at USD 158.3 billion, the average S&P 500 chief executive took home USD 340.1 million in 2025.

The gap between executive and worker pay widened accordingly. Excluding Musk, the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay rose to 312:1 from 285:1 in 2024; including him, it reached 5,387:1. The report calculated that Musk earned the median Tesla employee’s annual salary roughly every four seconds.

Redmond said, “Our members are angry about their situation and feel they should speak out about inequality.”

Special one-off awards proved contentious elsewhere. Goldman Sachs paid chief executive David Solomon USD 118.9 million, including a retention bonus, winning support from 71% of shareholders in an advisory vote, below the market average.

The post Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar pay deal drags corporate America’s CEO salaries to record highs appeared first on International Finance.

On August 5, the Tata Group carrier named Tewolde Gebremariam as chief executive and managing director. He replaces Campbell Wilson, the former Singapore Airlines executive who resigned in April and leaves on 30 September.

Then came the cOVID pandemic. Ethiopian took no government bailout, converted passenger aircraft into freighters and let cargo carry the group through the collapse in travel.

The financial picture is worse. Air India and Air India Express posted a combined net loss of Rs 22,238 crore in FY26, more than double the previous year’s Rs 10,859 crore, on combined revenue of Rs 71,870 crore that fell almost 9%.

The third is revenue that does not depend on seats. Cargo, the greenfield maintenance base in Bengaluru and the training academy in Gurugram are already built or building. Ethiopian showed what happens when those units stop being cost centres.

The fourth is network honesty. Routes that cannot pay while the airspace is shut should stay parked, and the retrofitted aircraft should go where premium yields actually are.

The caution is that Ethiopian had a protected home market, state ownership and a low cost base. Air India has none of those, and faces a rival carrying two of every three domestic passengers. Gebremariam cannot reopen Pakistani airspace or speed up Airbus and Boeing. What he can do is decide what this airline is for, and stop it losing money while it works that out.

The post Business Leader of the Week: Air India bets on Tewolde Gebremariam to engineer a turnaround appeared first on International Finance.

That works out to exactly 5.00% of the 390,256,808 shares outstanding, and it was worth somewhere between USD 127 million and USD 154 million depending on which day’s closing price you use, because the market moved so sharply once the news broke.

Lucid’s shares closed roughly 22% higher on the day of the disclosure, their strongest level since April 2026. A representative for the Prince confirmed the obvious, which is that the shares were bought during a slump in the price.

The filing was made on a passive basis, with the prince holding sole voting and sole dispositive power over the entire holding and no intention of steering the company’s management.

For anyone who has followed his career for four decades, the pattern is instantly familiar. Prince Alwaleed does not buy stories at their peak. He buys assets when the narrative around them has soured, then waits.

The template that made a reputation
The template was set in 1991, when a young Saudi investor few people in New York had heard of put close to USD 800 million into Citicorp while the American banking system was in the middle of a property loan crisis. That single position went on to define his standing in global finance and earned him a nickname he has never entirely shaken off, the Arabian Warren Buffett.

The same instinct runs through the portfolio he assembled afterwards. Kingdom Holding Company, which he founded in 1980 and listed on Tadawul in 2007, has taken positions across banking, hospitality, media, technology, aviation and real estate.

Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Fairmont Raffles Swissotel and full ownership of the Hotel George V in Paris gave him one of the most valuable luxury hospitality footprints in private hands.

Rotana Group and the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation gave him reach across Arabic-language media. Positions in Apple, News Corporation, JD.com, Uber, Snap and Twitter, the last of which converted into a holding in X, put him early into the digital economy at a time when very few regional investors were looking that way.

More recently the focus has swung towards artificial intelligence (AI), with Kingdom Holding committing significant capital to Elon Musk’s xAI.

Prince Alwaleed retains 78.1% of Kingdom Holding, with the Public Investment Fund holding the 16.9% stake it acquired in 2022, an arrangement that ties his personal balance sheet directly to the state’s own investment programme without merging the two.

Why Lucid, and why now
The Lucid purchase should be read on two levels.

Commercially, it is a classic Alwaleed entry. The company has had a difficult year, and the prince stepped in while sentiment was at its weakest, which is precisely the point in the cycle at which he has historically been most active.

He has done this before with Citicorp, with Fairmont and with hotel assets bought in the aftermath of downturns, and the discipline has rarely varied.

Strategically, the position carries a weight that goes well beyond its dollar value. The Public Investment Fund, through Ayar Third Investment Company, already holds a majority of Lucid, and Saudi Arabia is preparing to move to full-scale vehicle manufacturing in the kingdom.

Lucid is not simply a portfolio line for Riyadh. It is the centrepiece of an attempt to build an advanced automotive industry inside Saudi Arabia, complete with local assembly, engineering jobs and a supply chain that did not exist a decade ago.

When a senior member of the royal family puts his own name, rather than a sovereign vehicle, on a 5% holding, the message to global markets is unambiguous. The Kingdom’s commitment to this project is not a line item that can be quietly withdrawn.

Building upwards in Jeddah
The Lucid filing was triggered by an acquisition dated 23 July. On exactly the same day, Prince Alwaleed was standing on a construction site on the north side of Jeddah, announcing that Jeddah Tower had reached 430 metres.

That coincidence is worth pausing on. The tower, developed by Jeddah Economic Company with Kingdom Holding as its principal backer, is designed to pass one kilometre and become the tallest building in the world.

Construction restarted in 2025 under a contract worth around SAR 7.2 billion, and the project has since moved past the ninetieth floor with facade cladding and mechanical works under way.

Kingdom Holding has pointed to a workforce of roughly 5,200, an average five-day floor cycle and more than eight million hours worked without a lost-time incident. Completion is currently guided towards 2028.

Jeddah Tower anchors Jeddah Economic City, a development of some 57 million square feet intended to position the Kingdom as a destination for international business and premium tourism.

It will house residences, offices, a Four Seasons hotel and one of the highest observation decks anywhere. For Gulf executives watching capital allocation across the region, the tower is the clearest statement of intent that Kingdom Holding has made in years.

The domestic portfolio and the giving
Closer to home, Kingdom Holding holds a stake of about 27.4% in flynas, the low-cost carrier that completed its Tadawul listing in 2025, and 16.2% of Banque Saudi Fransi. The Kingdom Centre tower in Riyadh remains one of the capital’s landmarks and one of his best-known assets.

Then there is the giving, which the prince has repeatedly described as the part of his work he values most. Alwaleed Philanthropies reports more than USD 5 billion deployed over 45 years, reaching upwards of 1.5 billion beneficiaries across 190 countries.

In January this year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the organisation announced a fresh USD 15 million commitment to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative alongside the Gates Foundation, funding vaccination campaigns, surveillance and outbreak response over three years.

Bill Gates, Chair of the Gates Foundation, said: “Polio eradication is within sight, but the last mile is the hardest. Alwaleed Philanthropies’ latest commitment is exactly the kind of leadership the world needs to build a future where no family has to live in fear of polio paralyzing their child.”

HRH Princess Lamia Bint Majed Al Saud, Secretary General, Alwaleed Philanthropies, added: “This commitment builds on Alwaleed Philanthropies’ long-standing support for global health and its partnership with the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, reinforcing the critical role of philanthropy in addressing some of the world’s most complex public health challenges.”

In July, its Crafting Change project with UNESCO in Tanzania marked its own milestone in cultural skills training.

The lesson for the region
At 71, Prince Alwaleed remains one of the few Gulf investors whose personal conviction still moves a listed share price on two continents in a single session. The Lucid stake will be judged in time by returns.

What it demonstrates today is the discipline that has defined him since 1980, which is a willingness to commit capital at the point of maximum doubt and to stay committed for far longer than the market’s attention span allows.

For the region’s boardrooms, that is the more useful takeaway. Gulf capital has spent the past decade proving it can write very large cheques. The harder skill, and the one on display this week, is knowing when to write them.

The post Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Lucid stake buildup: The art of buying when others are selling appeared first on International Finance.

Few chief executives anywhere have become so bound up with the company they run that markets have coined a phrase for the value they personally add to the stock price.

That phrase is the “Jamie Premium.” And this summer, it is being put to its biggest test yet, as JPMorgan edges towards becoming the first bank in history to touch a USD 1 trillion market valuation.

The bank’s roots go back to 1799. Understanding how it got here means understanding the man who has run it for the last twenty years.

Who Is Jamie Dimon
James “Jamie” Dimon was born in New York City in 1956, the son of a stockbroker at American Express. He has said he picked up the language of markets at the family dinner table long before he ever set foot on a trading floor.

After Tufts University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, he joined Sandy Weill, the dealmaker who spent the 1980s and 90s stitching together what would eventually become Citigroup. Dimon was Weill’s right hand through most of it.

Then it fell apart. Weill fired Dimon in 1998, ending a 15-year working relationship that had, until that point, looked unshakeable. Dimon later said the episode hit his net worth harder than his self-worth, which is a tidy line for a man who spent the next 18 months weighing his options, including a serious conversation with Jeff Bezos about joining Amazon.

He chose banking instead. In March 2000, he took over as CEO of Bank One, a troubled Chicago lender that one analyst at the time said even Hercules couldn’t fix. Dimon put USD 60 million of his own money into the stock on his first day, cut costs, tightened up risk controls, and turned a bank that had posted a USD 511 million loss into one earning USD 3.5 billion within three years.

That turnaround caught JPMorgan’s attention. The two banks merged in 2004, and by the end of 2005, Dimon was CEO of the combined JPMorgan Chase. He took the chairman’s title a year later and has not left either post since, making him the longest-serving chief executive among America’s biggest banks by a considerable distance.

The Moves That Built an Empire
Dimon’s reputation was not built in the good years. It was built in 2008. While most of Wall Street was either drowning or being bailed out, JPMorgan went shopping.

In March that year, as Bear Stearns teetered on collapse, JPMorgan agreed to buy the storied investment bank for close to USD 1.4 billion, a fire-sale price backed by emergency Federal Reserve financing.

Six months later, Washington Mutual failed, still the largest bank collapse in US history, and JPMorgan bought its banking operations for roughly USD 1.9 billion.

Neither deal was clean. Both came loaded with legal exposure and legacy mortgage problems that JPMorgan spent years, and billions of dollars, untangling with regulators afterwards.

Dimon himself later grumbled that the two acquisitions became a convenient scapegoat for legal headaches the bank had inherited rather than caused. Still, the strategic logic held up. Lehman Brothers was gone.

Merrill Lynch had been sold in a rushed weekend deal. Wachovia had failed. JPMorgan, in the space of a single terrible year, had added a top-tier investment bank and a huge consumer deposit base while nearly everyone else on the street was shrinking.

The bank’s next real stress test came in 2012, when a botched derivatives trade out of its London office, the so-called “London Whale,” cost more than USD 6 billion and briefly dented Dimon’s reputation for having risk under control. He didn’t dress it up.

“The London Whale was the stupidest and most embarrassing situation I have ever been a part of,” he wrote in his 2013 shareholder letter, a rare moment of a Wall Street chief executive owning a failure in plain language rather than corporate hedging.

He testified before Congress, rebuilt the risk function, and moved on. It remains the closest JPMorgan has come to a genuine credibility crisis on his watch, which says something, given how long that watch has now run.

What followed was less dramatic but arguably more important. Dimon built what the bank now calls its “fortress balance sheet,” a deliberately conservative capital cushion meant to absorb shocks that would sink less careful rivals. He had been saying as much for years.

“It’s hard to predict when a storm will happen, but one thing is inevitable, it will happen,” he wrote in a shareholder letter back in 2002, long before most of Wall Street took the warning seriously.

That philosophy was tested again in March 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank both collapsed within weeks of each other. Dimon personally led efforts to organise a rescue for First Republic.

When that rescue failed, JPMorgan bought the bank’s assets and deposits outright, adding yet another chunk of the US consumer banking market to its own.

He also pushed the bank hard into technology, spending billions annually on digital banking, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence, and built out its investment banking and trading arms so JPMorgan could compete seriously on both Wall Street dealmaking and Main Street lending at once, a combination few of its rivals can match at the same scale.

Record Numbers, Record Milestone
All of that is what has JPMorgan sitting at the edge of a historic number right now. In the second quarter of 2026, the bank posted net income of USD 21.2 billion, the highest quarterly profit any American bank has ever reported.

Total managed revenue climbed 27% year-on-year to USD 58 billion, helped by a surge in trading revenue, a rebound in investment banking fees, and a large one-time gain on the bank’s Visa stake. Strip that gain out and adjusted profit was still USD 16.9 billion, with a return on tangible common equity of 23%.

Loans grew 9% to USD 1.54 trillion. Deposits rose to USD 2.71 trillion. Credit quality, meanwhile, actually improved slightly, with card loss rates ticking down year-on-year, which suggests the growth isn’t coming from looser lending standards.

Put it together and JPMorgan’s market capitalisation sat at roughly USD 920 to 935 billion in mid-July 2026, within touching distance of USD 1 trillion. No bank has ever crossed that line. Getting there would put JPMorgan in a club currently occupied almost entirely by technology giants like Tesla, Meta, and Broadcom.

For context, JPMorgan’s current valuation is roughly equal to the combined market value of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup, three of its biggest domestic rivals, added together.

Explaining the “Jamie Premium”
Which brings us back to the Jamie Premium. It isn’t an official financial metric. You won’t find it in a filing. It’s a term analysts and investors use to describe the extra value the market attaches to JPMorgan simply because Dimon is the one running it, over and above what the bank’s underlying numbers alone would justify.

Investors and analysts have pegged that premium at somewhere between 10% and 15% of the stock’s value, a real sum given the size of the company.

The idea makes sense once you break it down. Buying JPMorgan stock isn’t just a bet on the bank’s assets and earnings. It’s also a bet on the judgement of the person deciding where that capital goes and how much risk to take with it, particularly through the next crisis nobody can yet see coming.

Dimon has now steered the bank through the 2008 crash, the European debt scare, a pandemic, the 2023 regional banking wobble, and a string of geopolitical shocks, without a single full-year loss along the way.

That record shows up in how the market prices the stock. When Dimon told an investor conference the shares were “very valuable,” traders piled in within hours, sending JPMorgan’s stock sharply higher.

There’s a catch, though. A premium built around one man is also a risk concentrated in one man. Dimon has spoken openly about succession, and the board has already said it plans to eventually split the chairman and CEO roles once he steps back.

Most analysts expect at least part of the Jamie Premium to fade whenever that handover happens, no matter how capable the next person turns out to be. Two decades of proven judgement isn’t something a successor can simply inherit on day one.

That day hasn’t come yet. For now, JPMorgan is standing at the edge of a milestone no bank has ever reached, carrying both the payoff of twenty years of disciplined, occasionally opportunistic leadership and the pressure of having almost no margin left for a mistake.

The post Business Leader of the Week: Inside Jamie Dimon’s rewiring of JPMorgan into Wall Street giant appeared first on International Finance.

About 1,600 roles ended immediately, with the remaining 1,600 to be phased out over Microsoft’s 2027 financial year. The move is part of a wider reduction of 4,800 jobs across Microsoft as a whole, though Xbox has taken a disproportionate hit, accounting for close to a third of the total.

Sharma did not soften the reasons behind the decision. “Our business today is not healthy,” she told employees, explaining that Xbox’s profit margins are running three to ten times lower than comparable gaming and publishing businesses.

She was equally candid about where money has gone to waste. Since 2018, Xbox has expanded aggressively into new studios, but not every purchase has paid off. Sharma revealed that on average, the company lost 64 cents for every dollar it ploughed into some of its acquired studios each year and conceded that Xbox is “not the best home for every type of studio”.

As a result, four studios are leaving Xbox for good. Compulsion Games, known for South of Midnight and We Happy Few, and Double Fine Productions, the San Francisco studio behind the Psychonauts series, will become independent and keep hold of their games and intellectual property. Two further studios are affected, including Arkane’s French arm, where formal talks with staff representatives are under way.

Despite the scale of the cuts, Sharma insisted that no previously announced first-party game is being cancelled. Instead, Xbox wants a flatter, leaner structure with a tighter slate of flagship franchises and heavier investment behind the titles that matter most.

The backdrop to all this is a punishing stretch for the console business. Despite spending tens of billions of dollars to expand Xbox, including its blockbuster acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft has struggled to narrow the gap with Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo. The venture’s hardware revenue recently fell by a third year on year, and rising component costs have made the hardware side of the business harder to sustain. Sharma has pointed to a broader hardware crisis sweeping the games industry, arguing that a stronger Xbox would be far better placed to absorb the shock.

The company has increasingly shifted its strategy towards distributing its games across more platforms, instead of relying on console-exclusive titles to drive Xbox hardware sales.

“South of Midnight producer Compulsion Games and Psychonauts maker Double Fine Productions will become independent studios, while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs will be spun off to grow Senua and State of Decay 3,” Sharma said.

‘The management of Arkane Studios, which developed ‘Dishonoured’ and is currently working on a game based on Marvel Comics character Blade, has started consultations with its workers’ union in France to review options. A healthy Xbox could weather the shock of the hardware crisis,” she added further.

Sharma took over as Xbox chief executive in February 2026, succeeding the long-serving Phil Spencer. She has moved quickly since arriving, cutting the price of Game Pass Ultimate, scrapping the Copilot AI assistant on Xbox consoles, and reviving long-shelved franchises, with a new Gears of War prequel now in development.

Looking further ahead, she wants Xbox to eventually reach more than a billion players a day and has called for a return to what she calls the brand’s “renegade spirit”. Whether the reset works will take years to judge, but Sharma left little doubt about her intent. “We will not be one of them,” she said, referring to companies that assume past success guarantees future survival.

AI to blame?
Xbox’s organisational revamp also comes amid big tech’s historic AI outlays, which are set to top USD 700 billion in 2026. These spendings are also putting pressure on companies to show returns from the technology and offset the rising cost of rolling the technology out across their business verticals. Amazon and Meta Platforms have also laid off thousands of employees this year.

Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, however, told employees in a memo that “the roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI. At the same time, what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done.”

“That (targeted cuts) makes the announcement read more like portfolio reallocation and operating discipline than a fresh ‌catalyst for ⁠the stock. In the near term, the market is likely to reward Microsoft less for headcount reductions and more for evidence that AI monetisation is scaling faster than AI-related costs,” said Parth Talsania, CEO of Equisights Research, while interacting with Reuters.

Xbox’s parent, Microsoft, itself has gone through a nearly 23% slump in its shares in the first six months of 2026, making it their worst first-half performance since 2022.

The software giant, earlier in 2026, offered voluntary buyouts to about 7% of its US workforce, or about 9,000 employees. While the tech giant is known for trimming jobs near the end of ⁠its fiscal year in June, before setting spending plans for the new financial year, this year’s cuts also coincide with booming AI demand that has powered growth at ⁠Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing business. While the venture has been the exclusive seller of OpenAI’s models, the mounting cost of building data centres to run those services is also squeezing the group’s cash flows.

While the company, in April, had forecast quarterly Azure sales above Wall Street estimates, it also issued a USD 190 billion ⁠spending projection for 2026 that massively surpassed expectations.

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