I’ve got a business idea. I’m going to take out loans to rent a bunch of apartments around the world. Two-year leases. Then I’m going to decorate them with a super-cool modern vibe … snacks, premium soaps, entertainment spaces… and Airbnb them by the week and half week to vacationers and business travelers for less than they’d pay for a hotel room.   But wait, you say. You’re signing up for two-year leases and only getting commitments in the days and weeks. What if the economy goes bad? What...

Let's talk money. Apple, the tech giant, the iPhone maker, this week launched … a credit card. That's right, Apple Card, linked to Apple Pay. Apple's pitch with the card? It starts with cash and goes deep with security and design.  This week we're going to take a closer look at the card and the app … which I have seen up close. And we're going to compare it to the deals and features you can get elsewhere. Is it really a good deal?   With me this week: Sara Rathner from NerdWallet – a site...

Let's talk money. Apple, the tech giant, the iPhone maker, this week launched … a credit card. That's right, Apple Card, linked to Apple Pay. Apple's pitch with the card? It starts with cash and goes deep with security and design.  This week we're going to take a closer look at the card and the app … which I have seen up close. And we're going to compare it to the deals and features you can get elsewhere. Is it really a good deal?   With me this week: Sara Rathner from NerdWallet – a site...

The problem with the Monopoly board game is that only one person ends up happy in the last half hour of the game, and everyone else is miserable.  If you believe tech critics, some of the biggest companies in the industry have figured out a way around this unhappy ending in real life: Each one of these multi-billion-dollar juggernauts has its own mini-monopoly. Google gets to rule search engines, Facebook gets social networks, Amazon gets e-commerce and Apple gets expensive phones … made by...

Five billion dollars. That’s how much Facebook will have to fork over to the government under a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. It’s the biggest fine for violating user privacy by a wide margin – 200 times bigger than the previous record, according to the FTC chair.   If I got hit with a 5 billion dollar speeding ticket, it would hurt. I’m not going to lie. But some are already saying the settlement doesn’t go far enough.   So. After this settlement, can Facebook say it has...

Here’s the thing: It’s really hard to put a dollar value on the data that you or I deliver to internet platforms. What’s the value of a tweet? A Facebook profile that tells my birthday and links to my closest relatives?   It’s even hard to put a value on the data the platforms have on all of us. Sure, it’s probably worth billions of dollars. But how many billions? Does the value of data go up over time like a house, or down over time, like a car?  Our first topic is the value of data,...

Julie Sweet today leads the North American business at Accenture, a global consulting giant. Years ago, she was a high school sophomore with the gift of gab, entering various debate and speech competitions for the prize money, building her own scholarship fund. She wasn't doing it for kicks; at times growing up in Southern California she had just one pair of shoes, or one pair of pants that fit. Her father painted cars for a living, and her mother was a hairdresser.    One particular contest...

Amazon has three people who hold the title of CEO. There's Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO. Then there are two deputies: Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, the cloud business. And Jeff Wilke, CEO of global consumer.  Jeff Wilke got the title CEO of global consumer three years ago, and hadn't done a broadcast interview since – until this week, when he sat down with me for CNBC. Wilke's been with Amazon for 20 years, and now runs the core business of e-commerce and physical retail....

We’re past Memorial Day, and that means two things: barbecue season, and software season.    Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, WWDC, kicks off Monday. It’s an event where Apple gathers engineers from everywhere to announce its vision for the future of software, and to answer their questions about how to make today’s apps work better.  Who cares? Well, if you use an iPhone, iPad, Mac, you’re probably getting new software, even if you don’t buy a new device. And if you’re a tech...

Ever get so mad in an argument that you forget what it’s about? Just so focused on the other person being wrong that you forget what your point was in the first place?  A couple of developments in tech this week bring exactly that to mind. The Trump Administration’s blacklisting of Huawei and the outcry over FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s blessing for the marriage of T-Mobile and Sprint.   Huawei is China’s biggest tech player, kind of like what Samsung is in South Korea. Huawei makes phones, they...

You ever hear about kids taking a gap year after high school? A gap year. It's when they don't go straight to college and don't get a job, they … do something else. Maybe travel to Europe, or hike the Appalachian Trail. Gap years cost money, so mostly rich kids do them. For other people they’re called “being unemployed,” or “vagrancy.”  But! For kids whose parents can afford it? A gap year can be a beautiful period of self-discovery. Or it can be a ticket to delay responsibility.   What...

Uber had an action-packed IPO that did NOT go the way a lot of people expected. And in the lead-up to that, I got a visit from one of the smartest guys in the world in the field of computer vision – which is an important facet of driverless cars. This week on Fortt Knox, Ina Fried of Axios joins me to talk Uber, and Amnon Shashua of Mobileye tells how he went from college professor to billionaire entrepreneur … who is still a college professor. 

Is Endgame just the beginning? Disney has its eyes on the prize in the streaming wars, and now that it’s clocked the biggest movie opening ever – by a mile – all the pieces might be falling into place.    I now consider myself to be something of an Avengers Endgame expert. I saw it in Orlando on vacation Friday, then got stranded in Vegas for work Monday and saw it again. Don’t ask.   And basically Disney couldn’t ask for a better setup for the launch of its streaming strategy this fall....

I grew up in Washington, DC in the ‘80s. And 4 out of 5 playground fights ended before they started. Oh, there was plenty of trash talk – name calling, threats, even pushing. But when it was time to throw down? Most kids didn’t really want that busted lip.   This week we saw that same story play out in the multi-billion-dollar world of tech. Apple was gonna teach Qualcomm a lesson. Qualcomm wasn’t scared. Yesterday, minutes into their high-stakes court battle, the giants settled.   With me...

John Rogers, Jr. Is Chairman and CEO of Ariel Investments. It has $13 billion under management. It's the largest black-owned investment firm in the country, and he's been running it more than 35 years.   This week, my conversation with John. We talk about a lot of stuff, including why he likes to eat one meal a day at McDonald’s, and how he once beat Michael Jordan playing basketball, 1-on-1. Seriously. It’s on YouTube.  

This week I spent some time talking to Ginni Rometty, the chairman and CEO of IBM.   I've been wanting to do a CNBC and Fortt Knox interview with Ginni for years now, and this year, it finally all came together. As a matter of fact, she and I have been making up for lost time. She's been kind enough to sit down with me three times: in January after her keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in February at IBM's Think conference in San Francisco, and this week at CNBC's first...

Apple TV Plus. Apple News Plus. Apple Arcade. Apple Card. We still don’t have all the details, like pricing and mechanics, but Apple CEO Tim Cook hosted Hollywood royalty at the company’s Cupertino headquarters this week. The promise: a new model for digital commerce and digital content that emphasizes privacy over targeting and subscriptions over ads.   But is Apple too late? And for publishers and producers who have been burned by the big platforms before, is this time different?  Joining...

Twenty-five years ago today I was probably really stressed out about the college application and admissions process.   Things have arguably gotten tougher since then for students trying to chart their futures. And the headlines this month don’t help.    The U.S. Department of Justice charged 50 people last week in a multi-million-dollar scheme that allowed rich parents to cheat the college admissions system. By faking standardized test scores and bribing athletics officials, those parents...

Have tech companies gotten so big that it’s bad for the economy? Senator Elizabeth Warren says so. She’s proposing to break up not one, but several tech giants, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. She says they shouldn’t be allowed to both run distributor platforms and compete on them. It’s like being an umpire and a team owner at the same time.   Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek not calling for a breakup, but he is calling for an overhaul – specifically when it comes to Apple....

You’ve probably heard of Fortnite. It’s a game and more than a game – a cultural moment that’s swept in with all the force of Pokémon Go, and arguably more of the staying power. There’s the game itself, but there are the dances, the addictions.   Now, here’s a twist: Fortnite has competition. Electronic Arts a month ago dropped Apex Legends, its own free-to-play multiplayer team combat game, and it MIGHT be hotter than Fortnite. It has grown as much in a month as Fortnite did in four....

There’s little question that technology – software – is shaping the future of our work, our play, and even how we form opinions. But who is shaping that technology?  It’s been quite an economic run. The stock market’s been climbing for a decade, and in that time, tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook have gone from underdogs to overlords. Even as that’s happened, employees and observers have settled on a nagging question: Is there room for more women and minorities on the...

So long, New York! Amazon has pulled out of its commitment to build a massive campus and bring 25,000 to 40,000 high-paying jobs to Long Island City in Queens. On Valentines Day!  Roses are red / violets are blue / you’re not getting / my HQ2 – Love, Jeff  What went wrong? Why the breakup?   First of all, some critics were mad that New York offered 3 billion dollars in tax incentives to lure Amazon in the first place. Most businesses just come here because they want to be in New York and...

Facebook is worth almost a half trillion dollars. It has more than 2 billion users who log in at least once a month. It has a famous CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, hailed in Silicon Valley as a Bill Gates for the Internet age – the suburban Harvard kid who dropped out of Harvard to start a company and change the world.   Facebook also has problems. Its once non-controversial mission of connecting the world has taken a dark turn. Connecting the world to what, exactly? After the Cambridge Analytica...

Apple this week pulled a Facebook app from the App Store. It’s called Facebook Research, and its purpose was to let Facebook watch everything that users did on the phone. Apple says the snooping app is too invasive, even if users had consented to letting Facebook watch their every move.   Which raises the question: How much social media is too much? Are we giving these platforms too much data? Are we posting stuff too quickly without thinking about it? Is it time to step back?  With me this...

He did this the hard way – grew up playing guitar in a band, skipped college, became an accountant by testing into the profession and, after he got into the corporate world, made a lateral move into marketing. He is Andy Mooney, the CEO of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation.  Mooney and Fender are trying to change the way we look at musical instruments, and the process of buying one and learning to play. It all made sense after he told me his role in the Disney Princess concept becoming...