Author: Megan Burrows

When you stroll through any mid-sized German suburb today, you’ll see something that wasn’t there eighteen months ago: charging cables draped across driveways with the carefree permanence of garden hoses, extending from garage doors to the curb. Not everywhere, not yet, but enough to indicate that a change is occurring that would not have been possible with just a government incentive program. What years of emissions targets and electric vehicle subsidies only partially managed appears to be being done by the Iran conflict, which is now well past its third month. Even before the Strait of Hormuz closed, petrol prices…

The fact that one of the most significant events in the history of electric vehicles did not take place in a boardroom in Silicon Valley or a policy chamber in Brussels is especially ironic. About 20% of the world’s daily oil supply travels through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow stretch of water that is only 33 kilometers wide at its narrowest point. The effective closure of that corridor by Iran in early 2026 caused a shift in the perceptions of regular automobile buyers that had only been partially achieved by years of environmental messaging and government subsidies. Suddenly, the…

Greg Bishop placed it on a cardboard sheet. Not literally, but one imagines the feeling was genuine enough to endure. He wrote on X, “When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was write cover stories for Sports Illustrated,” after learning that he was included in the most recent round of cuts. “Today’s layoffs include me. I’m holding a cardboard sign as I stand by the side of the road. It reads like a joke: WILL WRITE FOR FOOD. Really, it wasn’t. The conglomerate that had taken over as Sports Illustrated’s publisher just over two years prior, Minute…

A certain type of advantage is only apparent when something goes horribly wrong. An oil shock causes supply chain disruptions, shaken consumers, and cautious language in earnings calls for the majority of automakers. It appears more and more like a sales event for BYD. In late February, when crude prices surged toward $100 per barrel due to American and Israeli airstrikes against Iran, an unusual event occurred in automobile dealerships from Australia to the Philippines. According to reports, BYD started moving two weeks’ worth of inventory in one day. At a closed-door briefing, the company’s founding chairman, Wang Chuanfu, told…

For many years, the case for electric cars was based on a somewhat ethereal premise: reduced emissions, cleaner air, and a hazy sense of morality. Billions were spent by automakers to craft that message. Subsidies were poured into it by governments. Even so, a sizable percentage of drivers shrugged and grabbed the pump. Then the oil markets shook, the Middle East erupted, and in a matter of months, geopolitics achieved what years of advertising campaigns failed to. It’s difficult to ignore the numbers. Crude markets experienced a sort of slow-motion panic after the conflict surrounding Iran intensified and oil flows…

There’s a certain type of corporate announcement that can be simultaneously reassuring and frightening, sometimes in the same sentence. In late May 2026, Fidelity Investments accomplished just that, confirming that it had let go of a number of employees at its campus in Covington, Kentucky, while maintaining that the site was on the verge of expansion. Whether you still work there will likely determine whether you find that reassuring or suspicious. The Covington layoffs are a part of a larger reorganization that has eliminated about 800 jobs overall, or 1% of Fidelity’s 80,000 employees worldwide. The fact that the precise…

In late May 2026, Perella Weinberg Partners announced the cuts on a Wednesday. This is the type of midweek news drop that investment banks prefer when they don’t want the story to dominate a Friday news cycle. By the end of the day, about sixty to seventy people had left, twelve of them partners who had worked at one of Wall Street’s more reputable independent advisory firms for years or even careers, developing a book. According to a person familiar with the situation, the cuts are concentrated in industry subsectors that have lagged behind the overall market. The official wording…

Citing numerous breaches of the ceasefire, including Israel’s growing military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s negotiators declared on Monday that they would stop communicating with the United States through middlemen and that Tehran would take steps to completely close the Strait of Hormuz. Trading floors are put on hold by this kind of announcement. And it did. Within minutes of the report from Iran’s state-affiliated news agency Tasnim, oil prices shot up more than 7%. Watching this develop has a certain somber rhythm. A few days prior, there was a brief, tentative indication that a deal might actually be…

When a company announces layoffs the same week it reports record earnings, it can be startling. The majority of people believe that job cuts are the result of CEOs buying time before a difficult quarter goes public, struggling balance sheets, or desperate pivots. None of that was done by Cloudflare. The San Francisco-based internet infrastructure behemoth reported Q1 revenue of $639.8 million on May 7, 2026, exceeding analyst expectations. Almost simultaneously, it announced that it was laying off over 1,100 workers. about one in five employees. Co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn published the letter they sent to staff members…

Seeing a business the size of RNDC start to dismantle itself covertly, market by market, warehouse by warehouse, is almost anticlimactic. Once one of the biggest alcohol distributors in the US, Republic National Distributing Company has filed WARN notices affecting 267 employees at four locations in Washington and another 146 in Oregon, putting over 460 jobs at risk in the region. It is anticipated that the terminations will start on or soon after July 17. The math is easy for workers in Seattle, Everett, Auburn, and Spokane. Before summer ends, the trucks might stop moving. In a way, the layoffs…