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SpaceX filed for its long awaited IPO. And as corporate governance watchdogs page through the S-1 filing one thing’s for sure: They will find much to fret about. Indeed the governance apparatus stunningly favors the C-suite, the board, and especially founder Elon Musk, at the expense of shareholders.

In fact, Musk’s critics had already dialed up the outrage in the weeks before the S-1 was filed. In a letter to Musk and his two top lieutenants on May 13, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), and the Controllers of New York City and State, charged that the registration statement “would constitute the most management-favorable governance structure ever brought to the U.S. markets at this scale.”

Those interviewed by Fortune avow they’ve never witnessed anything this one-sided. “It’s crazy,” says Joseph Lucoski, founder and managing partner of securities law firm Lucoski, Brookman, LLP. “I practice every day with the exchanges and regulators, and they would never accept this onerous and one-sided a structure for an emerging growth company. Normally, you’d see a lot of pushback. But because it’s Musk, and the biggest IPO ever, and that everyone’s vying to get a part of it, the exchanges are going along with it. It would never happen in my world.”

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Elon Musk’s “Muskonomy” is growing, but it may spell trouble for Tesla.

SpaceX’s pending IPO reportedly scheduled for June will double Musk’s publicly traded companies, joining Tesla as a target for investors betting on the CEO’s moonshot goals around automation and space exploration. But rather than seeing twice the opportunity to cash in on a Musk-led enterprise, investors and analysts instead see red flags for Tesla stock.

“This cannot be a positive for Tesla,” Joe Gilbert, portfolio manager at Integrity Asset Management, told Bloomberg. “We believe that Musk’s focus will predominantly be lasered on SpaceX. Musk has proved to be able to balance multiple initiatives simultaneously in the past, but it feels like SpaceX is his new baby at the expense of Tesla.”

Tesla has had a difficult year: It saw the company’s first full-year revenue decline in its history last year, and despite improved sales in the first three months of this year, deliveries have fallen below analysts’ expectations, and production has continued to outpace sales.

Tesla did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

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President Donald Trump is so wealthy he doesn’t need to trade stocks himself, argued Vice President JD Vance, after the President’s ethics report last week revealed a flurry of stock trading in an account held in Trump’s name.

During an hour-long press conference Tuesday, Vance defended Trump, following criticism that emerged last week about stock trades made by the President’s account during the first quarter. The account made about 3,700 stock trades in the first three months of the year, according to a report by the Office of Government Ethics. In some cases the manager of the account purchased shares from companies that the President subsequently lauded at events or on social media.

Vance rejected the idea that Trump was the one behind these trades or that he has any influence over them. He said that as “a wealthy person” who “has had success in business,” the President can afford to delegate the management of his investments to other people.

“The president doesn’t sit at the Oval Office on his computer, on his like Robinhood account, buying and selling stocks. That’s absurd,” said Vance. “He has independent wealth advisers who manage his money.”

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For roughly 76 million American households, federal income taxes could eventually disappear—if a proposal by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ever becomes reality.

The now Blue Origin owner argued in a recent interview with CNBC that the bottom half of U.S. earners should pay no income tax, saying that working Americans shouldn’t be placed under increased financial pressure, considering they contribute a relatively small share of total tax revenue anyway.

“The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes,” Bezos said. “I think it should be zero.”

To make his case, Bezos questioned why a hypothetical healthcare worker as an example: “Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?”

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/05/21/amazon-founder-jeff-bezos-cut-taxes-bottom-earners-income-inequality-billionaire-philanthrophy/?utm_source=reddit/

Spring housing season is here, and after years of stagnation, it’s finally a hot one.

Contract signings rose 4.5% year-over-year in April—its strongest reading in three years—and new listings hit their highest level since 2022, according to Realtor.com’s Spring 2026 Housing Market Progress Report published Thursday.

For three straight springs, mortgage rates, a housing affordability crisis, tariffs, inflation, and more have rattled buyers. Meanwhile, sellers held onto pandemic-era price expectations, leaving them unwilling to let go of their home for less than they thought it was worth.

But now, both buyer and seller metrics are moving in the right direction since mortgage rates started surging from the sub-3% pandemic-era lows to the 6%-7% range today. And a lot of it is thanks to growing popularity in the Midwest housing market, which is proving more affordable for many Americans.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/05/21/midwest-housing-market-spring-2026-kansas-city-realtor-com-report/?utm_source=reddit/

Salary transparency was supposed to be the major fix for the pay gap. 

But at Fortune‘s Workplace Innovation Summit in Atlanta on Tuesday, a pay transparency CEO and a viral content creator who have spent years working on the issue both said that the problem isn’t companies not sharing pay, it’s that they can’t explain it.

“If companies were merely consistent with the things they say they care about in their pay philosophy, and what they actually pay in the execution of offers, merit, promotions, transfers, the pay gap would basically be eradicated,” Maria Colacurcio, CEO of pay equity software company Syndio, told the audience.

The disconnect, she said, isn’t intentional, but it still has consequences. HR and compensation teams spend months building thoughtful strategies. But then “that strategy hits the wild wild west,” when recruiters are trying to land candidates and managers are making last-minute retention plays. Merit increases also often go to whoever is loudest, not necessarily whoever performed best.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors] https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/pay-transparency-companies-cant-explain-salaries-syndio-salary-transparent-street/?utm_source=reddit/

Daniel Wendler knows what it feels like to be a polar bear in the wrong climate.

A “proudly autistic” clinical psychologist, author, and workplace advocate, Wendler has spent his career arguing that most companies aren’t failing their neurodivergent employees out of malice — they’re doing it by default.

“Because most people are neurotypical, organizations are designed according to neurotypical needs, which means that people with neurodivergent needs get left out,” Wendler said May 20 at Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit.

His go-to illustration: imagine taking a polar bear — an apex predator, unrivaled on Arctic ice — and dropping it in Austin, Texas. The animal doesn’t suddenly become less capable. It’s just been placed in an environment that wasn’t built for it. Neurodivergent workers, he argues, are that polar bear every time they walk into a standard open-plan office.

“This is the exact same principle that explains how we can unlock the talent of the neurodivergent team members within our organization,” he said.

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Last year increasingly looks like a turning point for American electricity bills. Retail electricity prices rose 7% in 2025 alone, part of a nearly 40% climb since 2021 that has made this decade the fastest period of electricity price growth on record.

Wholesale costs are now 6.1% higher than a year prior — almost double the overall inflation rate — and Americans have grown louder in blaming the most visible new culprit: power-hungry data centers.

The real picture of Americans’ surging electricity costs is more nuanced, and yet the worst may still lie ahead. In the first three months of 2026 alone, utility companies requested state commissions to approve rate increases worth $9.4 billion, according to a report published Tuesday by PowerLines, a nonprofit focusing on utility regulation.

That followed a record-breaking 2025, when utilities requested $31 billion in rate hikes for the full year — more than double the $15 billion sought in 2024. Critically, nearly half of those 2025 requests had not yet been approved as of early 2026, meaning a significant wave of increases is still working its way to consumers’ bills.

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This week marked a discouraging milestone for American motorists. The average gas price is now on the wrong side of the $4 mark in every state in the country, an increase that coincides with the start of the busy summer driving season, which kicks off on Memorial Day weekend.

GasBuddy, which tracks fuel pricing, said prices this summer could average $4.80 per gallon from Memorial Day through Labor Day, with the possibility of all-time highs if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for a significant portion of the summer. The national average could easily exceed $5 later this summer if the war is still going.

Prices have spiked since early March because of the war in Iran and the effective closure of the strait, through which 20% of global crude oil volumes typically flow. Prices are the highest since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, but that year costs also fell sharply by the end of the summer—a development that appears unlikely to be repeated in 2026.

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A biotech company that aims to resurrect lost creatures said Tuesday it has hatched live chicks in an artificial environment — a development that was met with mixed reviews from scientists and critics of its de-extinction mission.

Twenty-six baby chickens — ranging from a few days to several months old — were born from a 3D printed lattice structure that mimics an eggshell, according to Colossal Biosciences.

Colossal previously announced it had genetically engineered living animals to resemble extinct species, including mice with long hair like the woolly mammoth and wolf pups that take after dire wolves.

Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm said the artificial egg technology could one day be scaled up to genetically tweak living birds to resemble New Zealand’s extinct South Island giant moa, whose eggs are 80 times the size of a chicken’s and would be difficult for any modern bird to lay.

“We wanted to build something that nature has done a pretty good job of developing and make it better and scalable and even more efficient,” Lamm said.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/jurassic-park-isnt-just-a-movie-anymore-as-de-extinction-startup-hatches-live-chicks//?utm_source=reddit/

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations pledged $300 million Wednesday toward initiatives it says will defend democratic rights and advance economic security in the U.S. over the next five years.

The new strategy comes even as President Donald Trump’s administration has singled out the Soros family, accusing them of supporting violence and fostering division. Those attacks are part of a broad effort rolled out in 2025 by Trump and his allies to influence nonprofits and charitable funders through executive orders, by withholding funding or by threatening investigations.

“We are continuing our work unabated. We will not be intimidated into silence,” said Laleh Ispahani, managing director for the U.S. at Open Society Foundations, when asked about the administration’s attacks on the Soros family.

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Single Gen Z women are outpacing their male counterparts when it comes to buying a home.

They accounted for 35% of all homebuyers in their generation, while single Gen Z men represented 18%, according to survey data from the National Association of Realtors.

NAR surveyed people who bought a home between July 2024 and June 2025. The survey included homebuyers from several generations, from Gen Z, ages 18-26, to the Silent Generation, ages 80 to 100. No other generation had a bigger share of single women homebuyers than Gen Z.

The survey data are the latest sign that single women overall are becoming homeowners at greater rates than single men. Single women across the generations made up a quarter of all homebuyers in the July 2024-June 2025 period, according to NAR. Single men, meanwhile, accounted for 11% of all home purchases.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/single-gen-z-women-are-destroying-their-male-counterparts-when-it-comes-to-buying-their-first-house/?utm_source=reddit/

Growing up, Mikala Sposito dreamed of being a trailblazer.

“I always wanted to be the first female to do something,” she said.

That dream is about to be realized.

The 21-year-old from Dexter, Michigan, will be the first woman to represent the United States in welding at the WorldSkills Competition in China.

Sposito, a student at Washtenaw Community College, earned the coveted spot by winning the USA Weld Trials in Huntsville, Alabama, earlier this year.

“It was very, very close the whole time, but I was the one who made it to Shanghai,” Sposito said.

Described as the Olympics of the skilled trades, WorldSkills determines the globe’s best in technical disciplines that include construction, information technology, manufacturing and robotics.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/05/17/skilled-trades-welding-worldskills-competition-olympics-first-american-female/?utm_source=reddit/

It wasn’t even a year ago that fiscal hawks were wringing their hands over a new national debt milestone: The debt had hit $38 trillion, and interest payments on an annual basis would be 13 figures.

A little over 200 days later, the U.S. national debt stands at more than $39 trillion. According to Treasury data, updated retrospectively for May 18, the debt landed at $39,008,999,901,378.68.

More than $1 trillion has been added since October 23, 2025—about $5 billion per day. The debt surpassed $39 trillion in mid-March and actually fell below it for several weeks before cresting to this point again.

Concern about the level of national debt is growing, particularly in relation to GDP, known as the debt-to-GDP ratio. This represents a nation’s borrowing versus the growth of its economy, and therefore the risk levels attached to servicing and repaying the debt. The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio sits at approximately 123%, meaning its borrowing is bigger than the size of its entire economy.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/us-national-debt-officially-hits-39-trillion-milestone/?utm_source=reddit/

Child advocacy organizations Fairplay and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) are filing a complaint against Roblox at the Federal Trade Commission, asking the agency to investigate the gaming giant for practices they say exploit children through manipulative monetization, addictive design features and chat systems that have enabled predators to reach minors.

The Request for Investigation, shared exclusively with Fortune ahead of its public filing on Wednesday, alleges that Roblox is violating Section 5 of the FTC Act through unfair and deceptive practices. It also calls on the commission to scrutinize the platform’s compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, an act Fortune has covered in the past after the FTC released an updated version of it that has left social media platforms asking for more guidance. A broad coalition is backing the effort, including Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation Movement, ParentsSOS, the Consumer Federation of America, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Roblox has estimated that roughly 40% of its more than 130 million daily active users are under 13 and allows children as young as 5 to create accounts. Revenue climbed to $3.6 billion in 2024, up from $2.8 billion the year before, while user engagement surged nearly 50% over three years to 73.5 billion hours. In Q1, over half of daily active users were age verified. Of those, about a third each are under 13; between 13 and 17; and over 18.

“Our platform is designed to provide a positive, healthy and enjoyable experience—we build for fun and connection, not short-term engagement,” a Roblox spokesperson told Fortune, adding that the company has safeguards and clear policies requiring fair treatment of players by game creators.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/exclusive-advocacy-groups-file-complaint-roblox-manipulative-design/?utm_source=reddit/