Category: 3. Business

By Mike Murphy

Residents look upon the remains of a residential and commercial building on Saturday in the Shahrak-e Gharb neighborhood of Tehran, Iran. The building was hit last week by U.S. and Israeli missile attacks .

U.S. stock-index futures fell on Sunday, as new threats of escalation from both President Donald Trump and Iran threatened to intensify the conflict roiling the Persian Gulf region.

Over the weekend, Trump threatened to “obliterate” key Iranian power plants if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened to shipping traffic by late Monday. That led Iran’s foreign minister to threaten attacks against critical infrastructure used by Israel, the U.S. and Gulf states, including power plants, telecommunications systems and water desalination facilities.

After shaking off sharp initial losses, Dow Jones Industrial Average futures (YM00) were last down around 160 points, or 0.3%, while S&P 500 futures (ES00) fell 0.4% and Nasdaq-100 futures (NQ00) dropped 0.5%.

West Texas Intermediate crude futures (CL.1) (CLK26) briefly topped $100 a barrel on Sunday, and were last around $98.60, amid fears that oil prices could rise as high a $175 a barrel, which would likely push the U.S. into a recession. Brent crude (BRN00) (BRNK26), the global benchmark, remained well above $100 a barrel. The vital Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to shipping, bottling hundreds of tankers and other ships in the Persian Gulf. More than 20 ships have been hit so far, according to the U.K. Maritime Trade Operations Center.

Read more: Here’s the exact oil price that would tip the U.S. into a recession – and we’re getting closer as the Iran conflict drags on

Bitcoin (BTCUSD) sank over the weekend, and was last trading below $68,000. Gold prices (GC00), coming off their worst weekly percentage drop in more than 14 years, fell 2% on Sunday, while silver prices (SI00) tumbled as well.

Last week, the three major U.S. stock indexes suffered their fourth straight week of losses. The Dow DJIA fell 2.1% for the week, while the Nasdaq COMP slid 2.1% and the S&P 500 SPX dropped 1.9%, according to FactSet data. That put the indexes on the brink of a correction, defined as a decline of at least 10% from a recent high. The S&P 500 is down 6.8% from its January peak, while the Dow is off 9.2% and the Nasdaq has slumped 9.6%. On Friday, the small-cap Russell 2000 closed in correction territory.

“Every tick higher in energy is being translated directly into inflation expectations, policy assumptions, and risk appetite, and that transmission mechanism is not subtle. It is blunt force,” Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management, wrote in a weekend note.

Investors are becoming more worried that the war with Iran will cause lasting economic damage as it continues. While the “TACO trade” – betting that “Trump Always Chickens Out” – has paid off for buy-the-dip investors over the past year, this time seems different, as the attacks on Iran have set off a complicated global chain of events that looks increasingly difficult to stop.

See more: Stocks are teetering on the edge of correction territory. Why the ‘TACO trade’ could flop.

“The markets may be in for a rude awakening when they realize that Trump doesn’t control the outcome of this conflict,” Nic Puckrin, co-founder and CEO of digital-asset analysis platform Coin Bureau, said in a weekend note. “With no easy resolution to the Iran war in sight, risks are to the upside that it will drag on. And the longer oil stays above $100, the longer it will take to undo the damage.”

Meanwhile, gas prices in the U.S. are approaching $4 a gallon. On Friday, United Airlines (UAL) CEO Scott Kirby said the airline will cut some routes as it braces for higher jet-fuel costs, saying the company expects crude prices to stay above $100 a barrel through 2027.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday he doesn’t know how long the higher fuel prices will last, but that paying more is an acceptable tradeoff for “peace in the Middle East.”

“Prices will come off on the other side,” Bessent said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “There is no prosperity without security.”

Bessent also defended Trump administration moves to lift some sanctions on Iranian and Russian oil, and refused to rule out the use of U.S. ground troops against Iran.

On that same show, Sen. Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat, said the Trump administration “has totally lost touch with reality. This war is spinning out of control.”

“There’s no end in sight,” Murphy said. “The secretary of Treasury just said we’re going to escalate in order to de-escalate – it’s like they’ve never read a history book… The only way to lower energy prices is to end this war.”

-Mike Murphy

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Several porridge products in the UK have been recalled over a possible mice contamination at their manufacturing site.

The British porridge and oat drink brand Moma issued a warning for seven versions of its pots and two of its sachets.

Customers have been told not to eat the affected products and to return them to the place of purchase for a full refund.

The Food Standards Agency said in a statement on its website on Sunday: “Moma Foods is recalling various porridge pots and sachet products because of possible mouse contamination at the manufacturing site.”

It added: “These products may contain mouse contamination making them unsafe to eat.”

Point of sale notices will be displayed in all retail stores that sell the products and on stores’ websites. There is also an alert on Moma’s website.

The recall applies to the following porridge pots: almond butter and salted caramel; apple, cinnamon and brown sugar; banana and peanut butter protein; blueberry and vanilla; cranberry and raisin; golden syrup; and plain no-added sugar.

Moma has also asked customers to return almond butter and salted caramel porridge sachets, and the apple, cinnamon and brown sugar sachets.

None of its other products are affected, the company said.

Moma said: “Even though the chance of contamination of any of the above products being affected is low, we have taken this precautionary step to ensure the safety of our consumers.

“Any consumers who have purchased affected Moma porridge products are asked not to consume them. Instead, they should return the products to the store where they were purchased and a full refund will be issued.”

Moma Foods was started in a railway arch in Deptford, south-east London, in 2006 selling porridge and smoothies.

Previously, we’ve heard from a CEO who rejects candidates who say they can start right away, and about the salt and pepper test secretly being deployed at lunch interviews. Now there’s a coffee cup test to add to the hoops job seekers have to jump through to land a role in today’s tough market.

The trick was described by an Australian boss, Trent Innes, who is the former managing director of accounting platform Xeno, and now works as the chief growth officer at SiteMinder.

Speaking on the business podcast The Ventures, Innes said he always takes prospective employees for a walk to the kitchen for a beverage—and although he calls it a coffee cup test, it’s not about whether you take your caffeine hit black or with sugar. You could even forgo coffee for water or tea and still pass the test. 

It’s what you do with your cup afterward that he’s keeping an eye on.

“Then we take that back, have our interview, and one of the things I’m always looking for at the end of the interview is, does the person doing the interview want to take that empty cup back to the kitchen?” Innes said. 

Unfortunately, those who have the right skills for the job but leave their dirty mug at the scene of the interview probably won’t hear back from the hiring manager. Innes thinks it’s a red flag that they’re not the right culture fit for the company. 

“You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge and experience, but it really does come down to attitude, and the attitude that we talk a lot about is the concept of ‘wash your coffee cup,’” the boss added.

Taking your used cup, mug, or glass back to the kitchen highlights that you’re a team player, considerate, and care about the small things.

CEOs at Cisco, Amazon, and Kurt Geiger echo the importance of attitude  

It’s not what you know, or even who you know: Countless CEOs have highlighted that success hinges on attitude. Like Innes, Andy Jassy has said an “embarrassing amount of how well you do, particularly in your twenties” depends on it. 

“I think people would be surprised how infrequently people have great attitudes,” the Amazon CEO revealed. “I think it makes a big difference.”

Likewise, the CEOs of Pret and Kurt Geiger have both stressed that being nice to their boss and coworkers was one of the biggest determining factors in their success.

“You cannot teach positive attitudes and engagement and energy,” Cisco’s U.K. CEO Sarah Walker echoed recently in Fortune. 

That’s the No. 1 green-flag trait she keeps an eye out for when hiring or looking to promote from within, and she said it outweighs what’s on your résumé, especially early in your career. 

“It’s more about the person first and foremost than it is about skills or experience,” she added.

Recruiters say the test actually works

If you want to test for attitude over aptitude, you’d be happy to learn that the coffee cup test actually works. 

Lewis Maleh, CEO of the global executive recruitment agency Bentley Lewis, says it’s one of many subtle tests he’s seen in his 20 years of recruiting experience—“and I think there’s some real value to it.”

“I’ve found that these little behavioral observations can tell you so much about a person that you’d never catch in a formal Q&A,” he says, adding that employers could also watch how interviewees treat reception staff for similar intel.

“So much of hiring is about culture and fit, and I think this is an important part of assessing whether someone would suit your organization.” 

But he wouldn’t pin entire hiring decisions on such tests. 

“I see it more as one piece,” he adds. “Go for it, but keep it in perspective. Not every great candidate will think to clear their cup, especially if they’re nervous or unfamiliar with your office. Some might even come from work cultures where this wasn’t expected.”

After offering to help an assistant clean up coffee cups people had left behind from a prior meeting, Saira Demmer says she landed a role at SF Recruitment. In the four years since, she’s been promoted to CEO. 

“It was between me and another candidate,” Demmer recalls. “I insisted on helping, and she fed back to the 2 MDs making the decision that she strongly felt I was the better fit for that reason.” 

She adds, “I don’t personally put people through this test, but I do think it’s a good one because it’s a real-life test of EQ, teamwork, and understanding of the environment around you. 

“These skills are critical to success and a very good guide as to how likely someone is to have a positive impact on others or not. Culture is such a huge driver of business success that I would applaud any leader who takes the level of care to consistently look for these kinds of details.”  

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on April 6, 2025.

Read more about the latest interviewing hacks in Fortune Success’s The Interview Playbook, including:

• Gen Z’s hiring nightmare is real. These are the curveball questions CEOs are asking to catch out job seekers: ‘Design a car for a deaf person’
• Kevin O’Leary says Gen Z’s résumé goes ‘right in the garbage’ if mom or dad shows up to the interview—but 1 in 5 are still doing it anyway
• Millennial manager used Tinder to job hunt and landed 3 interviews—she says getting a job on the dating app was easier than finding love

“I get asked all the time, do you remember the moment that you became a millionaire? I do,” the Shark Tank star known as Mr. Wonderful said in a video posted to his LinkedIn in July. “But have to admit, it was very anticlimatic.”

How Kevin O’Leary built his fortune

O’Leary founded Softkey in 1986, and throughout the 1990s his company acquired its biggest competitors like Compton’s New Media, the Learning Co., and Minnesota Educational Computer Co. as well as Creative Wonders, Mindscape, and Broderbund. 

This helped Softkey to become the world’s leader in educational, reference, and home productivity software and the second-largest consumer software company in the world at the time with more than $800 million in annual sales, 2,000 employees, and subsidiaries in 15 countries.

While O’Leary’s accomplishment in selling Softkey to Mattel and becoming a millionaire may seem like a major deal, he said it didn’t feel that way. 

“Boom, you wake up one day and you say, ‘Wow, this is interesting, but it doesn’t change anything,’” O’Leary said in the LinkedIn video. “That’s the crazy thing. And every millionaire [or] billionaire I talk to says, ‘Yeah, it’s not that big a deal.’”

But that may be O’Leary reflecting on the entirety of his career. In 2003, he became co-investor and director in Storage Now and a founding SPAC investor and director of Stream Global Services in 2007. 

He now holds investments in more than 30 private-venture companies, and is the chairman of O’Shares ETF Investments and automated internet-based investment advisory service company Beanstox. And, most famously, he’s been an investor on Shark Tank since the show’s premiere in 2009. O’Leary also owns several companies he founded, including O’Leary Fine Wines and O’Leary Ventures, his private venture-capital investment company.

Why the first million is the hardest

While becoming a millionaire feels like a blip on O’Leary’s radar at this point, he also said in a 2023 video on his YouTube channel that it can feel impossible to make your first million—but meeting a $5 million milestone feels much easier.

“You work your ass off. It’s so hard. What it really takes to do is have the discipline of not buying s*** you don’t need,” O’Leary said in the YouTube video. “To make that first mil is you’ve got to invest it. Market’s going to make you 8%. And then I thought, well my sights are on five [million]. It’s going to be impossible. It wasn’t as hard to get to five [million] as it was to one [million].”

And even though O’Leary has an estimated net worth of about $400 million and pushes pitchers on Shark Tank to really know their numbers and prove their valuation, he insists it’s not about the money to him.

“If you’re very passionate about what you’re doing [you’ll] wake up one morning successful,” O’Leary said in the LinkedIn video. “[The] key is the passion. It’s not the pursuit of greed or money. That doesn’t work. You’re so in love with what you’re doing in business, and you get rewarded for it, particularly if you’re solving a big problem.”

More on Kevin O’Leary:

Political leaders like United States President Donald Trump and business oligarchs like Elon Musk have increasingly suggested that human behaviour and social outcomes are rooted in genetics.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that problematic behaviours are genetic and inherent, while Musk has advocated for “intelligent” people to have children. His Grokipedia even frames racist concepts like racial nationalism positively while drawing on eugenic ideas, claiming that preserving distinct racial genetic profiles “maximizes individuals’ inclusive fitness.”

These arguments are taking us back to one of the darkest periods in human intellectual history: when eugenics was alive and well. Eugenics is the mistaken belief that a society’s genetic pool can be “improved” by limiting the reproduction of those deemed inferior and encouraging the breeding of those deemed superior.

Eugenics is now regarded as “the most egregious example of the destructive misuse of science in all human history,” as evolutionary biologist Richard Prum put it.

Yet this pseudoscientific way of thinking has not disappeared. It has re-emerged in new forms, primarily among tech capitalists and conservative politicians advocating for policies like forced migration, fertility assistance and genetic engineering to create a “fitter” nation.

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Read more:
Racism never went away – it simply changed shape

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In our recent book, The American Gene: Unnatural Selection Along Class, Race, and Gender Lines, we show that differences in complex behavioural traits among groups are not the natural outcome of inborn human biology, but the product of systemic economic inequality.

We can illustrate this by focusing on two of the most popularly discussed in the nature-versus-nurture debate: health and intelligence.

The limits of the human genome

The US$3 billion Human Genome Project set out to identify “the key genes underlying the great medical scourges of humankind.” Bill Clinton called it “the most important, most wondrous map ever produced” when he was U.S. president.

Yet except for rare diseases caused by one or a few genes, genomic data has had limited success in predicting complex diseases like heart disease, cancer, mental health disorders or addiction.

Scientists have found dozens of genetic variations associated with complex diseases, but the combined effects of these genes have explained very little about heritable risk. Even with the complete human genome sequenced, predicting health outcomes from genetics has proven challenging.

In fact, in 2013, the Food and Drug Administration ordered 23andMe to stop marketing certain genetic disease risk information to consumers until they received regulatory clearance.

Environment shapes health more than genes

Some scientists, including molecular biologist James Watson, the first director of the Human Genome Project and a disgraced Nobel laureate, have argued that genetics largely determine health hierarchies.

He once suggested that New Jersey’s high cancer rates were mostly due to residents’ “genetic constitution” rather than environmental factors.

This logic is flawed. It would suggest that the people of New Jersey had uniquely cancer-prone DNA compared to the rest of the population, which seems unlikely. Further undermining Watson’s theory is the fact that cancer rates followed the changing location of the chemical industry, which fled New Jersey’s increasingly costly environmental regulations for Louisiana.

“Cancer Alley” in Baton Rouge, Louisiana — an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River lined with some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical production plants — became home to the nation’s highest cancer rates, affecting the region’s disproportionate Black and Brown population.

In the words of bio-statistician Melanie Goodman: “ZIP Code is a better predictor of health than genetic code.”

Further evidence against genetic determinism comes from migrant studies. Research has found ethnic groups with low breast cancer rates in their home countries, such as China, Japan and the Philippines, often experience higher disease rates after migration.

Similar patterns appear in studies of coronary heart disease among people of Japanese ancestry who lived in Japan, Hawaii and California. Those who adopted more westernized lifestyles had higher rates of disease.

Intelligence is a product of opportunity

Researchers like Richard Hernstein, Charles Murray, David Reich and Nicholas Wade have insisted on a link between genetics, race or ethnicity, and what they describe as a hierarchy of intelligence.

In these arguments, Ashkenazi Jews are often placed at the top of the hierarchy, while people of African descent are placed lower. Although the discussion always revolves around genetic inheritance, they have yet to identify the specific genes that would justify this hierarchy.

Where proponents attempted to provide empirical support, the argument often rested on a residual claim: even after accounting for all the social variables that might influence intelligence, an unexplained component remained and was therefore presumed to be genetic.

On the other side of the debate are researchers like James Flynn, who argued intelligence is determined more by environment than genetics.

Flynn documented a steady rise in intelligence test scores across the 20th century in a pattern now known as the “Flynn Effect.” He found that between 1933 and 1983, American IQs increased by around three points per decade. He argued people’s minds were sharpened by better education and more intellectually demanding jobs and hobbies.

Flynn also found larger impacts in lower-income nations. Kenya and several Caribbean nations, for example, had much larger increases in IQ scores than Scandinavian countries because, he argued, the conditions for learning had improved more in the former nations than the latter.

Lived experience influences our genes

Advances in the revolutionary field of epigenetics have shifted the nature-versus-nurture debate by identifying a pathway through which lived experience can impact what were previously thought to be fixed processes.

Epigenetics refers to mechanisms that affect gene expression — how much a gene is used or not — without changing the DNA sequence itself. These mechanisms function somewhat like a dimmer switch, turning genes on and off, or adjusting the intensity of their effects.

Growing evidence suggests that epigenetic mechanisms are impacted by the conditions in which people live, which in turn influence human traits and outcomes. Some of these epigenetic changes may even be transmitted across generations.

In other words, nurture has a direct influence on nature.

Claims about the supposed genetic superiority of some human beings over others rarely account for the complexity of these additional types of inheritance.

Opportunity matters more than genetics

A growing body of research suggests that social and economic opportunity plays a far greater role in shaping human outcomes than genetic inheritance.

As biologist Siddhartha Mukherjee pointed out, “it is impossible to ascertain any human, genetic potential without first equalizing environments.”

Decades earlier, Henry Wallace, who served as vice-president under Franklin D. Roosevelt, similarly suggested that if children from rich and poor families were given the same food clothing, education, care and protection, class lines would likely disappear.

Historical evidence supports this view. Our research shows that when structural barriers are reduced and marginalized groups have the same opportunities as more privileged groups, inequalities shrink dramatically.

By way of example, the economic and social changes following U.S. civil rights legislation led to major improvements in the health, education and income of Black Americans — despite no change in their genetic makeup — highlighting the role of structural racism and social policy.

People should be significantly more concerned with the effects of the policies imposed by the Trumps and Musks of the world than the DNA passed on by their parents.