Fortune 500

There may be no single person more integral to shaping the future of work than Jensen Huang. As cofounder and CEO of Nvidia, Huang has transformed the company into a chipmaking powerhouse. Nvidia is now the most valuable company in the world, with a market cap exceeding $5.1 trillion. And as a leader of the AI era, Huang has a prediction for what jobs will be the most valuable in the years ahead. “Engineers ultimately are the ones that take an invention and advance it in such a way that it’s safe, beneficial, ultimately transformative to society,” Huang said. “The engineers in the AI industry must advance AI in service of a better future for all of us, and I’m confident we will.” Read more: https://bit.ly/4233jfm

There’s a $500 million windfall General Motors is expecting to help boost its first quarter earnings. The catch? It’s a refund for tariff payments it made to the Trump administration—and it doesn’t come anywhere close to the billions it still has to pay. The Supreme Court struck down tariffs the Trump administration imposed in February. Because of that ruling, GM said Tuesday it expected to pay import duties between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion for the coming year, down from the $3 billion to $4 billion it previously expected to pay. GM’s chief financial officer Paul Jacobson said that the company didn’t know when it would receive the funds, but that hasn’t stopped the automaker from adjusting its first quarter results to reflect the $500 million payment. Read more: https://bit.ly/4mZ7mmw

On Friday, Intel’s shares hit a record high after announcing revenue forecasts described as “blockbuster”. The stock is now up 120% this year. Greg Ernst is Intel’s chief revenue officer. Speaking to Fortune at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month, he said that the strategy put in place then was now working, despite initial skepticism. “We decided we’re going to enter some deep partnerships, and then we would get the option to issue stock,” Ernst said. “That could go either way for a company, because you’re diluting existing shareholders by issuing new stock. But our thesis was, if there’s true technical partnership, investors would be inspired by it, and they would instantly see the value." Read more: https://bit.ly/4t0gb0A

John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, takes over as CEO on Sept. 1, ending Tim Cook’s 15-year tenure at the top of the world’s most valuable consumer technology company. Apple’s presence with China is perhaps the defining relationship of the Tim Cook era. Chinese factories, managed by Global 500 companies like Foxconn and Luxshare, made the iPhones that turned the company into a global juggernaut. Chinese consumers also snapped up Apple products, making the country one of Apple’s most important markets. Today, Ternus inherits a China business that’s turned a corner from a tricky few years, yet still brings significant headaches, from a protectionist Washington and a prickly Beijing to a Chinese consumer who has grown less reflexively loyal to Western brands. Read more: https://bit.ly/4cOejlJ

Ford CEO Jim Farley, the leader of the 122-year-old company that democratized the car for everyday Americans, said carmakers are facing three “perfect-storm moments” that could prove existential. Farley took over as CEO in 2020, but has worked at the automaker since 2007. Before that, he spent nearly 20 years at Toyota. Now, he thinks the three-fold transformation barreling at carmakers represents a “come to Jesus” moment for the industry, and they will have to either meet each of the challenges or face the consequences, he told Rolling Stone. Read more: https://bit.ly/3P0SBmA

Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple’s chief executive after 15 years leading the iconic company, with longtime Apple hardware executive John Ternus taking the reins as the new CEO in September, the company announced on Monday. At a 2019 Stanford commencement speech, Cook encouraged graduates to stay true to themselves, telling them to direct their energy towards "creating and building". Cook has the numbers to back up his words of advice. In the 15 years he served as CEO, Apple catapulted to a $4 trillion company, and Cook is the company's longest-serving chief executive. Read more: https://bit.ly/4tyjZr9

Intel has spent the last few years trying to reinvent itself and prove it’s still relevant in an AI-centric world dominated by Nvidia’s chips. On Thursday, as Intel crushed Wall Street financial targets, the company had a new message: There’s nothing wrong with being a 58-year-old maker of PC and server microprocessors. “We are embracing our roots as data driven, paranoid, and engineering driven,” CEO Lip Bu Tan said at the start of the company’s Q1 earnings conference call, referencing the famous “only the paranoid survive” philosophy of Andy Grove, the late cofounder of Intel. Read more: https://bit.ly/4sMbeZf

Tim Cook and Steve Jobs couldn’t have been more different, according to the Apple cofounder’s biographer Walter Isaacson. “He had the same vision I did, and we could interact at a high strategic level, and I could just forget about a lot of things unless he came and pinged me,” Jobs said of Cook, the latter of whom announced he was retiring as Apple CEO this week. Jobs had only one criticism of Cook: He was “not a product person, per se.” Despite this, Cook has cemented his legacy as one of Apple’s most successful CEOs as he steps down in September. Read more: https://bit.ly/48De5gb