In today’s edition: the impact of BLS turmoil, Martha Stewart gets into skincare, and this year’s Most Powerful People in Business.
– Power moves. For the second year in a row, Fortune has ranked the 100 Most Powerful People in Business. This list runs alongside our longstanding Most Powerful Women franchise—and once again shows why it’s still important to cover business’s Most Powerful Women on their own.
Of 105 people on the Most Powerful People list (there are some ties), 19 are women. They’re woven into the ranking in the same order they appear on our 2025 Most Powerful Women list, published in May. The top woman on the MPW list, GM chief Mary Barra, comes in at No. 10 on the Most Powerful People list. She’s preceded by today’s business titans—Jamie Dimon, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and, at No. 1 this year, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
While Silicon Valley founders like Zuckerberg and Altman appear high on the ranking, the top women in business are mostly career executives. (After Barra, there’s Accenture’s Julie Sweet, Citi’s Jane Fraser, and AMD’s Lisa Su.) The only female founder who makes the MPP list is Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei, who appears alongside her brother and co-founder Dario Amodei.
The female founders like Mira Murati, Fei-Fei Li, and Canva’s Melanie Perkins who have become mainstays on the MPW list are poised to build generational companies like OpenAI and Meta—but are still on the way there. A few years from now, perhaps they’ll dominate the top of the ranking, too.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
– Side effect. The turmoil at the Bureau of Labor Statistics could threaten the ability to close the gender pay gap in the U.S., experts from Equal Rights Advocates point out. Without reliable data collection, it’s difficult to address the issue.
– Money moves. After my colleagues broke the news earlier this year of the Gates Foundation’s plans to spend $200 billion and then shut its doors, we’re learning more about how that money will be spent. The foundation is committing $2.5 billion through 2030 to women’s health. That includes everything from efforts to decrease maternal mortality globally to developing new vaccines for infections that disproportionately affect women. Plus, the foundation’s Dr. Anita Zaidi wrote an op-ed about the move for Fortune. STAT News
– Martha’s latest. Martha Stewart has launched many, many brands over her career. For the first time, at 84, the U.S.’s first female self-made billionaire now has a skincare brand. Elm Biosciences will launch in September. Wall Street Journal
– Never-ending. Well, Trump has waded into the Sydney Sweeney discourse. After the actress’s ad for American Eagle was criticized for a eugenics vibe with a play on “jeans/genes” the president said she has “the HOTTEST ad out there.” He also took the opportunity for a dig at Taylor Swift (who endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 election). “She was booed out of the Super Bowl and became, NO LONGER HOT,” he wrote on Truth Social. Politico
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Wondery CEO Jen Sargent will leave the Amazon-owned podcast studio as the company reorganizes its audio business.
ON MY RADAR
The mental load trap Fast Company
Chappell Roan on The Subway, writing through heartbreak, and loving her job again Vogue
Nancy Mace launches campaign for South Carolina governor CBS News
PARTING WORDS
“I feel like I understand myself more every single day.”
— Actress Margaret Qualley, on the cover of Cosmopolitan
