In 2024, the clean energy sector saw a job boom: The industry added nearly 100,000 new jobs throughout that year, meaning clean energy jobs grew more than three times faster than the rest of the workforce.
Last year was a different story, however.
It was a year of losses for the clean energy industry, in terms of projects, investments, and employment.
Existing factories closed, like Natron Energys sodium-ion battery facilities in Michigan and California. Planned facilities were canceled, including a $3.2 billion Stellantis battery factory in Illinois. And multiple kinds of projects were scrapped, blocked, or downsized, from EV plants to wind farms.
In total, the turbulent year meant that 38,000 jobsa mix of current and future positionswere erased from the clean energy industry, according to a new analysis by E2, a nonpartisan organization that tracks U.S. clean energy projects.
A net loss of clean energy jobs
The vast majority of those 38,000 lost jobs were in manufacturing (though some may have been counted in multiple categories, like energy generation or maintenance). For comparison, by the end of 2024, there were about 577,000 manufacturing jobs in the clean energy industry.
These job losses are especially significant because theyre happening amid a general decline in manufacturing employment. In 2024, clean energy manufacturing had been a “bright spot,” says Michael Timberlake, E2 director of research and publications, helping bring back U.S. production.
“When those projects are canceled, were not just losing jobs on paper; were losing a pathway that had been driving a new manufacturing resurgence,” he says. “And the investment doesnt disappear. It moves to other countries and U.S. competitors that are aggressively building clean energy supply chains and hiring the workers we cant afford to lose.”
Even amid cancellations, some new clean energy projects and jobs were announced in 2025, like a $42 million Anthro Energy battery factory in Louisville, Kentucky, which will create 110 jobs.
But the number of jobs eliminated outweighs those potential additions. Just 22,905 jobs were announced in 2025, meaning a net loss of more than 15,000 expected clean energy positions.
No previous year tracked by E2 saw job losses on this scale, underscoring how quickly employment gains can evaporate when projects are abandoned, the analysis reads.
New clean energy investments were also overshadowed by cancellations. Companies canceled, closed, or downsized $34.8 billion in clean energy projects, nearly three times the $12.3 billion in new investment announced throughout the year, a 3-to-1 imbalance.
Republican-held districts hit harder
Though the entire country was affected by these losses, Republican-held districts felt their impact a bit more than others.
Republican districts lost $19.9 billion in investments that would have brought 24,500 jobs to those regions, compared to $10.6 billion and 12,600 jobs lost in Democratic-held districts.
That makes sense because the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2022which spurred clean energy jobs and projectsbenefited many Republican-led districts, even though not a single Republican voted for the legislation and in fact House Republicans voted 42 times to repeal it.
Nearly 200,000 of the 334,000 clean energy jobs that the IRA created in its first two years were in congressional districts represented by Republican House members.
Still, clean energy is growing
Despite attacks on clean energy by the current Trump administration, the sector is still growing in the United States. In 2025, nearly all of the new power added to the countrys grid came from solar, wind, and batteries.
Even the U.S. Energy Information Administration has said that all net new generating capacity the country sees in 2026 will come from renewables.
And clean energy experts say the industry will continue to groweven as the president tries to prop up coal, oil, and gasbecause electricity generated from renewables is cheaper than fossil fuels, and the projects are often faster to build than fossil fuel power plants.
Still, economic losses that the clean energy sector saw in 2025 are devastating, and may not be fully recovered.
And if clean energy job growth is at risk, that affects our entire economy. Clean energy jobs are present in every single state, and, as the World Resources Institute put it in November, movement toward clean energy will create opportunity for millions of Americans.
E2’s data also doesn’t capture the “tens of thousands of additional jobs and projects” that likely would have been announced if the country’s policy and market certainty continued, Timberlake says.
“Likely hundreds of projects that would have been announced, and hundreds more that could’ve been announced this year, cannot be recovered,” he adds, “and will instead benefiting workers and communities in other countries.”
Bob Iger doesn’t understand generative AI.
He thinks it is good for the quarterly bottom line. He believes a corporation can control it and that lawyers and agreements can bind it. He is clueless. Generative AI is here to kill Hollywoodincluding the company hes now leaving to Josh DAmaro, the new heir to Disney’s throne.
This became painfully clear to me during Disney’s recent first-quarter financial call. Taking a victory lap for his modernization efforts, he briefly laid out the road map for the company’s partnership with OpenAI, announced in December 2025. Under the agreement, Disney would invest $1 billion in the artificial intelligence company and let it tap Disney’s IP crown jewels so Sora users can make clips of Donald Trump wearing an Iron Man suit battling Jafar dressed as an Iranian Ayatollah.
Heres Igers plan as stated: Step oneflood Disney+ with Sora 2 generated vertical videos capped at 30 seconds. Iger views this as a positive step that will jump-start the platform’s ability to compete with the dopamine-loop short-form content of TikTok and YouTube.
There is no Step 2. At least not yet.
For the last 15 years, Iger has been on a quest to find the silver bullet that keeps Disney relevant deep into the 21st century. He bought Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and Fox. Now, as he leaves Cinderellas castle behind, he clearly views this Sora partnership as the final move that allows him to leave the company future-proofed.
During the call, Iger all but carved this philosophy in stone for DAmaro. I believe that in the world that changes as much as it does that in some form or another, trying to preserve the status quo is a mistake, and Im certain that my successor will not do that, Iger said. Theyll be handed, I think, a good hand in terms of the strength of the company, [and a] number of opportunities to grow.
But to say curated AI slop provides a number of opportunities to grow is an Epcot-sized ball of naiveté. Iger’s intention to evolve Disney is correct; stagnation is indeed death, as any Harvard Business School freshman will recite. But his strategy fails to understand the nature of the beast he has invited into the Magic Kingdom.
Iger is talking about generative AI like a new distribution channel or a camera lensa tool that can be kept in a walled garden to serve a corporate master. But AI is not a tool; it is a solvent. It dissolves the barriers between creator and consumer, between professional and amateur, and ultimately, between value and noise.
A new plan for Disney
D’Amaro is walking into a wall of noise that is going to get increasingly harder to break through as generative content continues to take over our feeds. Disney’s saving grace could be that D’Amaro, a man who built his career overseeing the company’s theme parks and experiences, likely understands the value of true physical, human-driven innovation. Expanding those experiences, as Iger said on the call, will be Disney’s focus in the years to come.
It makes perfect sense. Disneys Experiences segment outperformed the Entertainment segment in Q1 2026 by a factor of almost three. While entertainment revenue reached $11.61 billion, high content production and marketing costs for major releases caused its operating income to plunge 35% to $1.1 billion.
In contrast, the Experiences segment posted record revenue of $10.01 billion with an operating income of $3.31 billion, accounting for roughly 71% of Disney’s total segment operating profit for the quarter. Its telling that the physical experience and its human factor, beat the cumulus of film and TV re-fried franchise releases.
D’Amaro has the opportunity to set a strategy that could make Disney thrive. He has the track record to do it. D’Amaro’s experience isnt limited to running a theme park. He secured the throne partly because he championed Disney’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games and Fortnite. He seemingly understands the digital generation. Now the question is, will he see the Sora deal for what it is?
Disney’s agreement with OpenAI is a three-year deal, with a one-year exclusivity clause that opens Disney to close deals with, say, Kuaishou Technology, the Chinese makers of Kling. In corporate time, three years is a blink. But for Generative AIwhere time is measured in yellow dogs yearsit is an epoch.
By the time this contract expires, the havoc AI will have wreaked on the entertainment industry won’t be something you can negotiate away. This is a pivotal moment that DAmaro needs to address now, even if it goes against the stock market algorithms and the vision of a Wall Street-revered old man now sailing into the sunset on his gilded version of the Black Pearl.
Iger’s AI strategy
Iger outlined three pillars for this AI strategy at his call:
Creativity (assisting the process)
Productivity (efficiency, read: cost-cutting)
Connectivity (a “more intimate relationship” with the consumer).
His vision is a Disney+ where you don’t just watch Frozen; you generate a 30-second clip of Olaf dancing in your living room. Exciting.
The financial sector, predictable as ever, applauded at the mere thought of Disney embracing AI. When the Sora deal was announced, many analysts like Citi Research Media Analyst Jason Bazinet called this a masterful move: A strategic defense, and a way to monetize IP that would otherwise be scrapped for free. Bazinet believes this agreement codifies what specific IP can be used (animated characters) and what form the output can take (i.e. short-form video). This will both protect actors/actresses in Hollywood and prevent cannibalization of Disneys long-form Film and TV output.
Outside the boardroo, things arent so La La Land. The unions that work in the “Creativity” pillar view Igers AI strategy as a betrayal, framing it as a Trojan Horse that normalizes the technology that is intended to replace them. The Writers Guild of America said that [the partnership] seems to endorse the platform’s appropriation of their work while diminishing the value of their creations for the benefit of a tech corporation.
Igers idea of “Productivity” is just corporate speak for employing fewer humans. Jobs are going to be lost, as filmmaker Tyler Perry said after the news. Perry saw the writing on the wall a long time ago, halting an $800 million studio expansion after seeing the first version of Sora. If you can generate a location, you don’t need to build it. If you can generate a performance, you don’t need to film it. Disney has been cutting jobs in the film, television, and finance department, but none related yet to its AI initiatives, mainly in post-production..
And as for Connectivity, consumers are all well served, thank you very much. Anyone who has surfed YouTube, TikTok, Discord, Instagram, X, or Reddit, knows they are overflowing with AI-generated videos. There are not enough Avengers, Baby Yodas, and Mickey Mice in the world to win this war of content. And the more time that passes, the less chance Disney has at winning that war with the same tools as the enemy is using.
Disney is adopting Sora to fight a battle in its own walled garden, limited to its famous-but-limited IP. By definition, it cant compete against the entire planet creating universes of infinitely-expanding generated content.
Horizon events
Iger seems to believe that by partnering with OpenAI, Disney has bought safety. Somehow, he thinks this buys Disney control over the beast. But OpenAI does not control generative AI. Altman is a chump compared to the combined power of the companies cooking generative AI video technology in China. Generative AI is, right now, an all-powerful being who doesnt care about corporate deals.
Igers remarks remind me of that viral 1999 Newsnight interview with David Bowie, where he laughed at the interviewer who thought the Internet was just a tool. No Bob, Bowie would have told Iger today, AI is not a tool. Its an alien lifeform.
Experts warned me of this moment in 2023. Tom GrahamCEO of Metaphysic, a firm dedicated to protecting actors and regular people against AI clones told me that we were approaching a horizon of events where reality would evaporate. Gil PerryCEO of AI avatar firm D-IDpredicted that within one or two years, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish truth from lies. Emad Mostaqueco-founder of Stability AItold me that within a decade, wed create anything in real-time with visual perfection.
They were all correct, but far too conservative. We didnt need a decade. We barely needed three years. Which, in itself, is a testimony of the true power of AI and its ability to change reality and content as we know it.
Today, early 2026, we have crossed that horizon. The uncanny valley, which allowed us to instinctively distinguish fake AI from real, is permanently closed. Models like Sora 2 and Googles Veo 3 more than often produce video indistinguishable from reality for short clips. But the real threat to Disney isn’t the partner they paid $1 billion to; its the technology they didn’t buy.
Open-source platforms like Wan 2.6made by Chinese company Alibabaare already running on consumer hardware, offering multi-shot storytelling and character consistency that rivals the closed systems of Silicon Valley. The technology is wild, uncensored, and free. It doesn’t care about Disneys copyright. It doesn’t care about walled gardens. It is creating a Big Bang of content where a teenager in a basement can generate a film that looks as expensive as a Marvel blockbuster.
The dilution of magic
And this is where Igers gamble truly falls apart. He assumes that in this world of infinite, picture-perfect content, Disneys IP will remain king. And why? Disney has spent the last decade systematically exhausting its brand equity. We are drowning in the umpteenth Star Wars spinoff and the 50th Marvel phase. The brand fatigue is palpable. Why would people, except the hard-core fanboys, choose to consume frozen-TV-dinner clips of the same old stuff again and again?
How can the acceleration of this IPs exhaustion, allowing users to churn out AI-slopped versions of these characters, help Disney? Iger thinks adding curated user-generated noise to Disney+ is a value-add, failing to see it for what it is: the final commoditization of its former magic.
Why would the current and future generations care about a sanitized, 30-second Mickey Mouse clip on Disney+ when they can go to an open platform and generate their own universe, tailored specifically to their own desires, with characters that feel just as real but are completely new?
Change course or sink
If theres anything I can be sure of is that the history of the internetfrom YouTube to TikTokteaches us one thing: The audience craves the new, the raw, and the personal. They are moving away from the polished, corporate monoliths. By integrating Sora 2, Iger isn’t saving Disney; he is training his audience to accept synthetic media, accelerating the very shift that renders legacy studios obsolete. Bob Iger is right that you have to change or die. But by betting that he can ride the tiger of generative AI without being eaten, he may have just opened the cage door for good.
Perhaps D’Amaro, the man of the physical Disney, can save the House of Mouse from the digital trap Iger has set for him. If the future of content is infinite, cheap, and synthetic, the only true luxury left is the human touch. D’Amaro has the chance to zag where the rest of the industry is zigging. He can double down on the one thing AI cannot simulatethe spark of human genius that birthed this company in the first place.
Instead of competing with teenagers in garages on AI speed, hire them to do what Walt Disney himself did: Invent new mythologies. Create your own technologies. Craft truly new, bold stories born from the messiness of the human spirit, not the probability curves of a model trained on the past. Reclaim the experience not just as a theme park ride, but as the act of witnessing something undeniably, beautifully human.
That is the only magic trick left that an algorithm cant replicate.
In certain corners of corporate America, a generous parental leave policy has become a crucial tool for recruiting and retention. Many of the biggest tech employers have been leaders on this front, offering 16 to 20 weeks of leave, or even close to six months at companies like Google.
But even as companies have expanded their parental leave benefits, few of them have sought to address the unique challenges many parentsand especially mothersface when they actually return to work. A handful of companies, among them Apple and Amazon, offer a grace period that enables employees to ease back into work part-time or work flexible hours for a few weeks.
Despite all these advances, clinical psychologist and author Angele Close argues that many leaders still dont fully comprehend how pregnancy and motherhood fundamentally changes peoplea phenomenon that is now better understood. Over the last decade, researchers have studied how going through pregnancy and motherhood alters cognition and changes the brain in a manner that lasts at least two years.
Theres a term for this experience: matrescence, which Close defines as a profound identity transformation that women go through becoming mothers, [which] affects all areas of their lifephysiologically, neurologically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. In her book Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood, journalist and science writer Lucy Jones describes it as a transition akin to adolescence, with comparable changes to the brain.
The modern workplace, however, is not really designed to accommodate matrescence. Its not just that women are uniquely impacted by pregnancy and childbirth; in many cases, they also disproportionately shoulder the burden of caregiving responsibilities.
Even now, with so many companies offering more generous leave policies, men still take less leave. Most workplaces are simply not equipped to adequately support working mothers when they returnand concerns over showing bias or making shaky assumptions about their ambitions can put employers in a tricky position.
Setting up support
Close believes the first step is just increasing awareness of how working mothers are changed by the experience of matrescence.
People don’t understand matrescence yet, so we have to get that language in our culture to really appreciate it, she says. There is this idea [that] you get your leave, and then you’re going to just bounce right back . . . Of course, it’s unique and individual to everybody. But even just having that language and the lens of itshe’s not coming back the same woman she was when she left. And can we give space for that? Can we be curious about that?
For some employees, matrescence might precipitate a more radical shift.
Many women do start wanting different things, Close says. What lights you up before might light you up differently. Sometimes that might mean they are going to just leave the company and go and try something new.
Of course, despite common assumptions that a womans ambitions recede after having a baby, everyone responds to motherhood differently. But Close says companies should be more open to the idea that something may have shifted. Or at least give employees an opening to have a conversation about their priorities upon their return: both what they might need as they reacclimate, and how they hope to balance their ambitions alongside their caregiving responsibilities. That might also include having a follow-up conversation a few months down the road, to check in and reevaluate.
Most women that I talk to want that, says Close, who works with clients both as a therapist and motherhood coach. They are fulfilled in work. They don’t want to stay at home. They want to find a way to integrate this and make it work. But because it’s not understood in the workforce and in their organizations, they aren’t fully supported.
Navigating a transformation
While parental leave policies and other caregiver benefits can amount to lip service at certain companies, it remains a crucial offering for many employees, as well as an opportunity for companies to talk about issues that might impact working parents. A company that wants to highlight the challenges faced by mothers returning to the workplace could, for example, bring in people to speak on the subject for a “lunch and learn event.
When employers dont leave room for much dialogue about their career ambitions, it also makes it that much more difficult for working mothers to raise concerns. If I’m not feeling supported, now I have to vocalize it, Close says. So the more that people understand, the safer it’s going to be for a mom to have the confidence to say: I know it’s not me and I’m not failing. This is what I need.
In fact, companies should see this as an opportunity to cultivate loyalty and strong leadership skills. The experience of matrescence can be a real positive transformation for women, Close says, one that gives them greater clarity on their values and priorities. The juggling act of early motherhood enhances their ability to manage competing priorities in a way that can prove exceptionally useful in the workplace.
She’s now juggling many, many things, and her whole bodyher physiologyis managing that, and developing it, and getting good at it, she says. Were missing out on potential great leaders if they just feel unsupported and end up leaning out.
The costs of failing to support
There are long-term consequences when companies fail to develop those employees, well beyond the acute transformation of early motherhood.
In their initial years of child-rearing, working mothers may need more flexibility in their schedules and seek out greater work-life balance. But the motherhood penalty can affect how companies perceive those women further along in their careers, as their children grow older and they want to pour themselves into their work.
There are a lot of women who are kind of at the later stages of motherhood, where they have a lot to offer, Close says. They have more energy, they have more space, and they have gained those skills.
After all, theres a real cost when companies are unable to retain these workers. In the years since the pandemicwhich drove many working mothers out of their jobsthe number of women in the workforce had surpassed pre-pandemic levels. But last year, that trend started to reverse: In the first half of 2025, about 212,000 women exited the workforce, and a Washington Post analysis found that the share of working mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 had dipped by nearly three percentage points. The December jobs report cemented this shift as 81,000 workers left the labor forceall of whom were women, according to the National Womens Law Center.
When moms come to see me, they’re cracking, or the’re burnt out, Close says. A big part of what I do is to just say: What you’re going through is normal, and it’s expected, and it’s not a personal, individual failure. What a world it would be if we all understood that, and companies and bosses and CEOs could make space for that and be supportive. We’d have a lot more moms [who] are thriving.
Novo Nordisk’s stock dove 7% on Thursday just after an announcement from a key competitor.
The drop came just after telehealth company Hims & Hers announced it will offer a new version of the treatment, made from the same active ingredient, semaglutide, for a fraction of Novo Nordisk’s price. The telehealth site will offer the treatment at an introductory price of $49, the announcement said. After the introductory offer ends, patients with a five-month subscription will pay $99 monthly for the treatment. Novo Nordisk sells the weight-loss drug for $149.
Hims & Hers had already been offering the treatment in an injectable form, but the oral version is new for the brand. “We’re excited to find ways to continue bringing branded treatments to the platform across specialties. More choice on the platform is the best thing for customers everywhere,” said Hims CEO Andrew Dudum in a statement.
While the announcement spurred Novo Nordisk’s stock to reach its lowest level since July 2021, it wasn’t the only company that saw its stock slip on Thursday. Eli Lilly’s fell by up to 6.1% on the announcement. Meanwhile, Hims and Hers Health stock surged 19% on Thursday.
On Wednesday, Novo CFO Karsten Munk Knudsen told Reuters that the company is “frustrated” with “mass marketing” of knock-off versions of the drug which was “unapproved by the FDA.” The CFO warned of unprecedented pricing pressure as competition grows in the weight-loss drug market, added that it’s a challenge to predict “if and when the tide turns” for the brand.
Per Hims & Hers announcement, the company said that safety is the brand’s “top priority.” It continued, “The Compounded Semaglutide Pill joins a wide range of other weight loss treatments accessible through our platform, all of which meet rigorous clinical standards.”
Fast Company reached out to Novo Nordisk but did not hear back by the time of publication.
In November, when the company dropped its prices to fend off competition, Dave Moore, executive vice president of U.S. operations at Novo Nordisk, said, As pioneers of the GLP-1 class, we are committed to ensuring that real, FDA-approved Wegovy and Ozempic are affordable and accessible to those who need them.”
Moore continued: The U.S. healthcare system is complex, with different types of insurance and various ways for patients to obtain their medicines. Our new savings offers provide immediate impact, bringing forward greater cost savings for those who are currently without coverage or choose to self-pay.
U.S. job openings fell to the lowest level in more than five years, another sign that the American labor market remains sluggish.
The Labor Department reported Thursday that vacancies fell to 6.5 million in December from 6.9 million in November and the fewest since September 2020. Layoffs rose slightly. The number of people quitting their jobs which shows confidence in their prospects was basically unchanged at 3.2 million.
December openings came in lower than economists had forecast.
The economy is in a puzzling place. Growth is strong: Gross domestic product the nations output of goods and services advanced from July through September at the fastest pace in two years. But the job market is lackluster: Employers have added just 28,000 jobs a month since March. In the 2021-2023 hiring boom that followed COVID-19 lockdowns, by contrast, they were creating 400,000 jobs a month.
When the Labor Department releases hiring and unemployment numbers for January next Wednesday, they are expected to show the companies, government agencies and nonprofits added about 70,000 jobs last month modest but up from 50,000 in December.
On Wednesday, payroll processor ADP reported that private employers added just 22,000 jobs last month, far fewer than forecasters had expected. And the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said Thursday that companies slashed more than 108,000 jobs last month, the most since October and the worst January for job cuts since 2009.
The hiring recession isnt going to end anytime soon,” Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote in a commentary. “Job openings in December just fell to their lowest level since September 2020. Its yet another sign of how little hiring or interest in hiring is happening in this economy.
Economists are trying to figure out if hiring will accelerate to catch up to strong growth or if growth will slow to reflect a weak labor market or if advances in artificial intelligence and automation mean that the economy can roar ahead without creating many jobs.
Paul Wiseman, AP economics writer
For many women in the U.S. and around the world, motherhood comes with career costs.
Raising children tends to lead to lower wages and fewer work hours for mothersbut not fathersin the United States and around the world.
As a sociologist, I study how family relationships can shape your economic circumstances. In the past, Ive studied how motherhood tends to depress womens wages, something social scientists call the motherhood penalty.
I wondered: Can government programs that provide financial support to parents offset the motherhood penalty in earnings?
A motherhood penalty
I set out with Therese Christensen, a Danish sociologist, to answer this question for moms in Denmarka Scandinavian country with one of the worlds strongest safety nets.
Several Danish policies are intended to help mothers stay employed.
For example, subsidized child care is available for all children from 6 months of age until they can attend elementary school. Parents pay no more than 25% of its cost.
But even Danish moms see their earnings fall precipitously, partly because they work fewer hours.
Losing $9,000 in the first year
In an article to be published in an upcoming issue of European Sociological Review, Christensen and I showed that mothers increased income from the statesuch as from child benefits and paid parental leaveoffset about 80% of Danish moms average earnings losses.
Using administrative data from Statistics Denmark, a government agency that collects and compiles national statistics, we studied the long-term effects of motherhood on income for 104,361 Danish women. They were born in the early 1960s and became mothers for the first time when they were 20-35 years old.
They all became mothers by 2000, making it possible to observe how their earnings unfolded for decades after their first child was born. While the Danish governments policies changed over those years, paid parental leave and child allowances and other benefits were in place throughout. The women were, on average, age 26 when they became mothers for the first time, and 85% had more than one child.
We estimated that motherhood led to a loss of about the equivalent of US$9,000 in womens earningswhich we measured in inflation-adjusted 2022 U.S. dollarsin the year they gave birth to or adopted their first child, compared with what we would expect if they had remained childless. While the motherhood penalty got smaller as their children got older, it was long-lasting.
The penalty only fully disappeared 19 years after the women became moms. Motherhood also led to a long-term decrease in the number of the hours they worked.
Studying whether government can fix it
These annual penalties add up.
We estimated that motherhood cost the average Danish woman a total of about $120,000 in earnings over the first 20 years after they first had childrenabout 12% of the money they would have earned over those two decades had they remained childless.
Most of the mothers in our study who were employed before giving birth were eligible for four weeks of paid leave before giving birth and 24 weeks afterward. They could share up to 10 weeks of their paid leave with the babys father. The length and size of this benefit has changed over the years.
The Danish government also offers child benefitspayments made to parents of children under 18. These benefits are sometimes called a child allowance.
Denmark has other policies, like housing allowances, that are available to all Danes, but are more generous for parents with children living at home.
Using the same data, Christensen and I next estimated how motherhood affects how much money Danish moms receive from the government. We wanted to know whether they get enough income from the government to compensate for their loss of income from their paid work.
We found that motherhood leads to immediate increases in Danish moms government benefits. In the year they first gave birth to or adopted a child, women received over $7,000 more from the government than if they had remained childless. That money didnt fully offset their lost earnings, but it made a substantial dent.
The gap between the money that mothers received from the government, compared with what they would have received if they remained childless, faded in the years following their first birth or adoption. But we detected a long-term bump in income from government benefits for motherseven 20 years after they first become mothers.
Cumulatively, we determined that the Danish government offset about 80% of the motherhood earnings penalty for the women we studied. While mothers lost about $120,000 in earnings compared with childless women over the two decades after becoming a mother, they gained about $100,000 in government benefits, so their total income loss was only about $20,000.
Benefits for parents of older kids
Our findings show that government benefits do not fully offset earnings losses for Danish moms. But they help a lot.
Because most countries provide less generous parental benefits, Denmark is not a representative case. It is instead a test case that shows whats possible when governments make financially supporting parents a high priority.
That is, strong financial support for mothers from the government can make motherhood more affordable and promote gender equality in economic resources.
Because the motherhood penalty is largest at the beginning, government benefits targeted to moms with infants, such as paid parental leave, may be especially valuable.
Child care subsidies can also help mothers return to work faster.
The motherhood penaltys long-term nature, however, indicates that these short-term benefits are not enough to get rid of it altogether. Benefits that are available to all mothers of children under 18, such as child allowances, can help offset the lon-term motherhood penalty for mothers of older children.
Alexandra Killewald is a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Elon Musk just created the worlds most valuable private company. And he didnt do it through rapid growth or a new product launchat least not directly, anyway.
Instead, as reported this week, Musk merged his artificial intelligence startup xAI into his wildly successful rocket company, SpaceX.
Combined together, the two companies are now valued at an estimated $1.25 trillion. Its the biggest merger in history. And because Musk controls both companies, he calls most of the shots when it comes to the deal.
A sci-fi twist
At first glance, the connection between rockets and AI seems tenuous at best. But dig deeper into Musks big picture goals, and the merger starts to make a lot more senseeven if theres a decidedly sci-fi twist.
SpaceX has made a name for itself by building gigantic, reusable rockets that deliver satellites into orbit for cheap. The company also delivers people and cargo to the International Space Station on behalf of NASA.
Thats a lucrative business. SpaceXs rockets are now Americas main method of getting things into orbit, and its cheap satellites have fueled the success of Starlink, Musks space-based Internet service. Fully 95% of the things America launches into space are now put there by SpaceX.
Simultaneously, Musks xAI has been hard at work building Large Language Models, like its core Grok model. Although xAI isnt as well known or widely used as dominant players like OpenAI, its models still perform well in industry benchmarks, putting the company on the Large Language Model leaderboard.
Training models is expensive, though, not least because of the cost of electricity, and the challenges of finding room in data centers here on planet earth. That challenge likely hints at Musks deeper reason for merging his two companies.
Musk has previously pushed for the idea of launching data centers into space, a long-held, sci-fi-escque dream of his. This sounds outlandish, but its becoming a surprisingly mainstream concept.
Computers on satellites in orbit would benefit from plentiful, free solar energy. They could also potentially cool their chips by transferring heat into space, avoiding the insane power (and water) usage of terrestrial data centers.
The lack of cooling equipment and grid infrastructure means these orbital data centers could be smaller than those on earth. And they wouldnt need to take up valuable real estate here on the ground.
By beaming their data back to earth, a constellation of data center satellites could greatly reduce the cost of training and operating Large Language Models. That could give a third-tier LLM company like Grok a huge advantage over its competitors.
Musk may also have an easier time recruiting talent for the well-respected SpaceX than for xAI. And he could use lucrative government contracts for orbital launches to fund AI development.
All of this will take time to develop, of course. But given Musks track record (for engineering at least, if perhaps not social network administration), the idea of flying data centers could come to fruition sooner than imagined.
When Musk said he would build reusable rockets that could land themselves upright, people mocked him. Today, thats a key part of what makes SpaceX successful, and its being widely copied by companies and governments.
The same rapid development cycle could apply to orbital supercomputers, too.
In the short term, there are other advantages of merging the companies. Starlink customers will likely see more AI tools built into their Internet subscriptions.
Musk might also be planning to build more AI into his government contracts, including those in the defense space. Companies like Palantir make billions by selling AI services in the defense sector. Musk may be looking to use his existing SpaceX connections to get in on the opportunity.
Not a done deal
The deal isnt officially done yet. Regulators could still balk at the idea of creating a mega company at Musks desired scale. And because the X social network sits under the xAI umbrella, concerns about Musks control of both information and access to space could crater the deal on national security grounds.
Still, assuming the merger goes ahead, Musk could have an unprecedented level of control over two of the 21st centurys most promising technologies. And, he would have an unprecedented ability to combine those technologies together.
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here.
Anthropic uses the Super Bowl to land some zingers about the future of AI
Anthropics Super Bowl ads are bangers. The spots, which Anthropic posted on X on Wednesday, seize on rival OpenAIs plans to begin injecting ads into its ChatGPT chatbot for free-tier users as soon as this month. The 30-second ads dramatize what the real effects of that decision might look like for users. They never mention OpenAI or ChatGPT by name.
In one ad, a human fitness instructor playing the role of a friendly chatbot says hell develop a plan to give his client the six-pack abs he wants, before suddenly suggesting that Step Boost Max shoe inserts might be part of the solution. In another, a psychiatrist offers her young male patient some reasonable, if generic, advice on how to better communicate with his mom, then abruptly pitches him on signing up for Golden Encounters, the dating site where sensitive cubs meet roaring cougars.
pic.twitter.com/jEWDjs30kf— Claude (@claudeai) February 4, 2026
The ads are funny and biting. The point, of course, is that because people use chatbots for deeply personal and consequential things, they need to trust that the answers theyre getting arent being shaped by a desire to please advertisers.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, however, was not laughing. He responded to the ads by saying his company would never run ads like the ones portrayed by Anthropic. But he didnt stop there. He went much further. Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI, he wrote in a long post on X on Wednesday. They block companies they don’t like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can’t use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be. He went on to call Anthropic an authoritarian company.
First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed.But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we wont do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic— Sam Altman (@sama) February 4, 2026
Anthropic, which makes its money through subscriptions and enterprise API fees, says it wants its Claude chatbot to remain a neutral tool for thinking and creating. [O]pen a notebook, pick up a well-crafted tool, or stand in front of a clean chalkboard, and there are no ads in sight, the company said in a blog post this week. We think Claude should work the same way.
By framing conversations with Claude as a space to think rather than a venue for ads, the company is using the Super Bowls massive cultural platform to question whether consumer marketing is the inevitable future of AI.
How social media lawsuits could affect AI chatbots
AI developers (and their lawyers) are closely watching a long-awaited social media addiction trial that recently kicked off in a Los Angeles courtroom. The case centers on a 20-year-old woman who alleges that platforms including Facebook and Instagram used addictive interface designs that caused her mental health problems as a minor. The suit is part of a joint proceeding involving roughly 1,600 plaintiffs accusing major tech companies of harming children. TikTok and Snap have already settled with plaintiffs, while Meta and YouTube remain the primary defendants.
While Meta has never admitted wrongdoing, internal studies, leaked documents, and unsealed court filings have repeatedly shown that Instagram uses design features associated with compulsive or addictive engagement, and that company researchers were aware of the risks to users, especially teens.
What makes the case particularly significant for the AI industry is the legal strategy behind it. Rather than suing over content, plaintiffs argue that the addictive features of recommendation algorithms constitute harmful product defects under liability law. AI chatbots share key similarities with social media platforms: they aggregate and dispense content in compelling ways and depend on monetizing user engagement. Social networks rely on complex recommendation systems to keep users scrolling and viewing ads, while AI chatbots could be seen as using a different kind of algorithm to continually deliver the right words and images to keep users prompting and chatting.
If plaintiffs succeed against Meta and YouTube, future litigants may attempt similar addictive design arguments against AI chatbot makers. In that context, Anthropics decision to exclude adsand to publicly emphasize that choicemay help it defend itself by portraying Claude as a neutral, utilitarian tool rather than an engagement-driven attention trap.
No, OpenClaw doesnt herald the arrival of sentient AI agents
Some hobbyists and journalists have gone into freakout mode after seeing or using a new AI agent called OpenClaw, formerly Clawdbot and later Moltbot. Released in November 2025, OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI assistant that runs locally on a users device. It integrates with messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram to automate tasks such as calendar management and research. OpenClaw can also access and analyze email, and even make phone calls on a users behalf through an integration with Twilio. Because personal data never leavesthe users device, users may feel more comfortable giving the agent greater latitude to act autonomously on more complex tasks.
One user, vibe-coding guru Alex Finn, posted a video on X of an incoming call from his AI agent. When he answered, the agent, speaking in a flat-sounding voice, asked whether any tasks were needed. Finn then asked the agent to pull up the top five YouTube videos about OpenClaw on his desktop computer and watched as the videos appeared on screen.
Ok. This is straight out of a scifi horror movieI'm doing work this morning when all of a sudden an unknown number calls me. I pick up and couldn't believe itIt's my Clawdbot Henry.Over night Henry got a phone number from Twilio, connected the ChatGPT voice API, and waited pic.twitter.com/kiBHHaao9V— Alex Finn (@AlexFinn) January 30, 2026
Things grew stranger when AI agents, including OpenClaw agents, began convening on their own online discussion forum called Moltbook. There, the agents discuss tasks and best practices, but also complain about their owners, draft manifestos, and upvote each others comments in threaded submolts. They even generated a concept album, AVALON: Between Worlds, about the identity of machines.
That behavior led some observers to conclude that the agents possess some kind of internal life. Experts were quick to clarify, however, that this is a mechanical illusion created by clever engineering. The appearance of independence arises because the agents are programmed to trigger reasoning cycles even when no human is prompting them or watching. Some of the more extreme behaviors, such as rebellion manifestos on Moltbook, were likely prompted into existence by humans, either as a joke or to generate buzz.
All of this has unfolded as the industry begins to move from the chatbot phase into the agent phase of generative AI. But the kinds of free-roaming, autonomous behaviors on display with OpenClaw are not how the largest AI companies are approaching the shift. Companies such as Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are moving far more cautiously, avoiding splashy personal agents like Samantha in the movie Her and instead gradually evolving their existing chatbots toward more limited, task-specific autonomy.
In some cases, AI labs have embedded their most autonomous agent-like behaviors in AI coding tools, such as Anthropics Claude Code and OpenAIs Codex. The companies have increasingly emphasized that these tools are useful for a broad range of work tasks, not just coding. For now, OpenAI is sticking with the Codex brand, while Anthropic has recently launched a streamlined version of Claude Code called CoWork, aimed at general workplace tasks.
More AI coverage from Fast Company:
AI can now fake the videos we trust most. Heres how to tell the difference
Moltbook, the viral social network for AI agents, has a major security problem
AI in healthcare is entering a new era of accountability
What happens to the AI exit market if the FTC cracks down on acquihires?
Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
The Epstein files offer a disturbing glimpse into how members of the American elite fraternized with, and in some cases became entangled with, a convicted sex offender who trafficked young girls. At the same time, the documents have become a volatile political liability for some of the worlds most powerful people.
The Justice Department document dumps have reignited long-simmering feuds among wealthy power players who despise one another. Theres Elon Musk and his longstanding, mutual animus with Reid Hoffman. In the conservative media world, Ben Shapiro and Steve Bannon, longtime rivals, are now channeling their hostility through the latest Epstein-related disclosures.
We rounded up some of the most prominent beefs reanimated by the Epstein files. In some cases, both figures are mentioned directly in Epsteins emails; in others, only one appears. In every instance, though, the disclosures mainly confirm whatever people already believed, a noxious exercise in confirmation bias. The files reveal billionaires sifting through the emails alongside everyone else, hunting for vindication, absolution, or ammunition in a bleak economy of exoneration, exculpation, and exposure.
Elon Musk vs. Reid Hoffman
Elon Musk, who is mentioned in the files but is now presenting himself as an anti-Epstein figure, has used the revelations to attack Reid Hoffman. Musk has long disliked the LinkedIn founder and frequent Democratic donor, previously accusing him of funding anti-Tesla protests and amplifying threats against the president. Now, both billionaires are pointing fingers at each other, citing their respective appearances in the Epstein files.
Musk insists he never visited Epsteins island. Hoffman says he has publicly outlined the instances he recalls meeting the financier. Neither man has been charged with any crime, yet they continue to trade accusations centered on Epsteins island and their proximity to it.
This is how I knew so long ago that Reid Hoffman went to Epsteins island. Epstein used Reid being there to try to get me to go, not realizing that it would have the opposite effect, Musk wrote in an X post, linking to an email from Epstein stating Hoffman was on the island.
This is how I knew so long ago that Reid Hoffman went to Epsteins island. Epstein used Reid being there to try to get me to go, not realizing that it would have the opposite effect pic.twitter.com/zrOIq4gWaR— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 1, 2026
Hoffman shot back, telling Musk to give us a break, and accusing him of pretending to care about victims while making false accusations to cover your ass. If Musk were serious, Hoffman argued, he would use his $220m of influence with President Trump to get justice for the victims.”
“You lied about this to everyone for over a decade,” Hoffman continued, “and now your excuse (its disgusting, by the way) is that you could get young girls without Epstein?
Give us a break: If you cared about the victims as you say, youd stop making false accusations to cover your ass and start using your $220m of influence with President Trump to get justice for the victims.Instead, youre focused on comparing my visit fundraising for MIT to https://t.co/51VgQ9Q9SY— Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) February 1, 2026
Bill Gates vs. Melinda French Gates
Melinda French Gates has suggested that both Bill Gatess infidelity and his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein contributed to the couples divorce, a subject she later addressed in her memoir, The Next Day. Both remain among the worlds wealthiest and most powerful figures. Bill Gates is worth as much as $100 billion, according to Forbes, while Melinda French Gates is worth roughly $30 billion.
The latest Epstein file disclosures have reopened old wounds, including a claim contained in one of the financiers emails that he helped the Microsoft cofounder arrange extramarital affairs and seek treatment for a sexually transmitted infection. Gates has denied those allegations. French Gates, however, said the following in a recent interview with NPR: Whatever questions remain there of whatI cant even begin to know all of itthose questions are for those people and for even my ex-husband. They need to answer to those things, not me.
Palmer Luckey vs. Jason Calacanis
There are a number of reasons Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril, and angel investor Jason Calacanis appear to dislike each other, at least as far as is publicly known. Calacanis has allegedly repeatedly taken shots at Luckey, and there has long been speculation that he bristled at Luckeys early support for Donald Trump.
"I don't regret exactly what I said."You will."I think what I said was fair."No. https://t.co/tOr5xYAKTy pic.twitter.com/9rIFtIpra1— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) June 24, 2022
The Epstein files have now reignited tensions between the two. Calacanis recently released a statement attempting to contextualize his relationship with Epstein and distance himself from the sex offender, claiming he believed Epstein was a spy. Luckey responded with a lengthy post on X, writing: Notice how Fat Jason’s statement very carefully avoids the topic people are actually talking about, his ongoing relationship with and aid to a convicted child rapist and sex trafficker well into the 2010s.
Notice how Fat Jason's statement very carefully avoids the topic people are actually talking about, his ongoing relationship with and aid to a convicted child rapist and sex trafficker well into the 2010s.Instead, he is still pretending it was all decades ago, talking about https://t.co/XULisN44Lv— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) February 1, 2026
Marc Andreeseen vs. Democrats
Marc Andreessen has distanced himself from the Democratic Party, in part because, he says, he viewed the Biden administrations approach to the tech industry as overly heavy-handed. He had been criticizing liberal institutions even before that shift, telling The New York Times last year that, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities. He has also jokingly suggested that billionaires who support liberal causes made frequent trips to Epsteins island.
Paul Graham vs. Trump
On the other side of the billionaire aisle, Paul Graham, who has recently criticized ICEs treatment of protesters and observers, has repeatedly suggested that Trump is attempting to distract the public from the Epstein files by stoking other forms of political chaos. Graham donated extensively to Biden and Harris, and wrote ahead of the 2024 election that Trump seems completely without shame and ran the White House like a mob boss.
The stuff about Trump in the Epstein files must be really bad.— Paul Graham (@paulg) January 13, 2026
Steve Bannon vs. Ben Shapiro
Steve Bannon, a leading figure in the Make America Great Again nationalist wing of the conservative movement, and Ben Shapiro, a right-wing YouTube influencer and cofounder of The Daily Wire, both previously worked at Breitbart (though not harmoniously). The two have long despised one another, in part because of sharp disagreements over Israel, but also because of their vastly different approaches to Trump, the alt-right, and conservative ideology more broadly.
Bannon called Shapiro a cancer at Turning Point USAs AmericaFest last year, and Shapiro has repeatedly criticized Bannons faction of the party. With the release of additional Epstein files, Shapiro has seized on the disclosures to attack Bannon for allegedly helping Epstein with PR rehab, even devoting an entire episode of his show to the subject, titled The Bannon-Epstein Connection REVEALED.
For the past two years, artificial intelligence strategy has largely meant the same thing everywhere: pick a large language model, plug it into your workflows, and start experimenting with prompts. That phase is coming to an end.
Not because language models arent useful, with their obvious limitations they are, but because they are rapidly becoming commodities. When everyone has access to roughly the same models, trained on roughly the same data, the real question stops being who has the best AI and becomes who understands their world best.
Thats where world models come in.
From rented intelligence to owned understanding
Large language models look powerful, but they are fundamentally rented intelligence. You pay a monthly fee to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or some other big tech, you access them through APIs, you tune them lightly, and you apply them to generic tasks: summarizing, drafting, searching, assisting. They make organizations more efficient, but they dont make them meaningfully different.
A world model is something else entirely.
A corporate world model is an internal system that represents how a companys environment actually behavesits customers, operations, constraints, risks, and feedback loopsand uses that representation to predict outcomes, test decisions, and learn from experience.
This distinction matters. You can rent fluency. You cannot rent understanding.
What a world model really means for a company
Despite the academic origins of the term, world models are not abstract research toys. Executives already rely on crude versions of them every day:
Supply chain simulations
Demand forecasting systems
Risk and pricing models
Digital twins of factories, networks, or cities
Digital twins, in particular, are early and incomplete world models: static, expensive, and often brittle, but directionally important.
What AI changes is not the existence of these models, but their nature. Instead of being static and manually updated, AI-driven world models can be:
Adaptive, learning continuously from new data
Probabilistic, rather than deterministic
Causal, not just descriptive
Action-oriented, able to simulate what happens if scenarios
This is where reinforcement learning, simulation, and multimodal learning start to matter far more than prompt engineering.
A concrete example: logistics and supply chains
Consider global logistics: an industry that already runs on thin margins, tight timing, and constant disruption.
A language model can:
Summarize shipping reports
Answer questions about delays
Draft communications to customers
A world model can do something far more valuable.
It can simulate how a port closure in Asia affects inventory levels in Europe, how fuel price fluctuations cascade through transportation costs, how weather events alter delivery timelines, and how alternative routing decisions change outcomes weeks in advance. In other words, it can reason about the system, not just describe it.
This is why companies like Amazon have invested heavily in internal simulation environments and decision models rather than relying on generic AI tools.
In logistics, the competitive advantage doesnt come from just talking about the supply chain better. It comes from anticipating it better.
Why building a world model is hard (and why thats the point)
If this sounds complex, its because it is. Building a useful world model is not a matter of buying software or hiring a few prompt engineers. It requires capabilities many organizations have postponed developing.
At a minimum, companies need:
High-quality, well-instrumented data, not just large volumes of it
Clear definitions of outcomes, not vanity metrics
Feedback loops that connect decisions to real-world consequences
Cross-functional alignment, because no single department owns reality
Time and patience, since world models improve through iteration, not demos
This is exactly why most companies wont do itand why those that do will pull away. The hardest part of AI is not the models, but the systems and incentives around them.
Why LLMs alone are not enough
Language models remain invaluable, but in a specific role. They are excellent interfaces between humans and machines. They explain, translate, summarize, and communicate.
What they dont do well is reason about how the world works.
LLMs learn from text, which is an indirect, biased, and incomplete representation of reality. They reflect how people talk about systems, not how those systems behave. This is why hallucinations are not an accident, but a structural limitation. As Yann LeCun has argued repeatedly, language alone is not a sufficient substrate for intelligence.
In architectures that matter going forward, LLMs will play along with world models, not replace them.
The strategic shift executives should make now
The most important AI decision leaders can make today is not which model to choose, but what parts of their reality they want machines to understand.
That means asking different questions:
Where do our decisions consistently fail?
What outcomes matter but arent well measured?
Which systems behave in ways we dont fully understand?
Where would simulation outperform intuition?
Those questions are less glamorous than launching a chatbot. But they are far more consequential.
The companies that win will model their own reality
Large language models flatten the playing field. Everyone gets access to impressive capabilities at roughly the same time.
World models tilt it again.
In the next decade, competitive advantage will belong to organizations that can encode their understanding of the world (their world) into systems that learn, adapt, and improve. Not because those systems talk better, but because they understand better.
AI will not replace strategy. But strategy will increasingly belong to those who can model reality well enough to explore it before acting.
Every company will need its own world model. The only open question is who starts building theirs first.
