#ceo-terminations

#ceo-terminations

Oracle is aggressively expanding AI datacenter capacity to serve demand tied to customers and partners including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, and AMD. The deal for OpenAI alone is set to be worth about $300 billion over five years.

The shift was apparent. People had a stake in the outcome, and they acted like it. Ideas flowed more freely, teams spotted and solved problems earlier, and employees took pride in identifying and implementing improvements.

According to Bloomberg Law's Workload & Hours Survey, a third of nonequity partners also say they're undervalued in their roles and more than half say they were burnt out in 2025.

In an open letter from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, more than 60 CEOs from local companies that included 3M, Best Buy, Cargill, General Mills, Land O'Lakes, Target, Xcel Energy and UnitedHealth Group, called for "an immediate deescalation of tensions." When I called around to several contacts in those companies yesterday, one executive told me, "These raids are terrorizing our community. We have to speak up without making things worse."

For decades, HR professionals were denied their "seat at the table" in company leadership. But during the COVID pandemic, it became abundantly clear that the C-suite could no longer ignore chief people officers, who guided companies through existential business challenges, including lockdowns, remote work, and the Great Resignation. Now, a quieter and more structural shift is underway. The seat remains, but the authority attached to it is moving elsewhere.

I have been monitoring the degree of diversity in the corporate and political worlds for decades. One useful diversity metric is the percentage of boardroom members who are not white men. And for the third year in a row, white men did not hold the majority of seats on the boards of America's 50 largest corporations, according to my analysis of the most recent Fortune 500 list.