Trump emphasized that a deal to rescue the financially strapped airline remained under review. The president did not provide details but said an announcement could come later Friday or Saturday.

“We’re looking at it. If we could do it, we’ll do it. But only if it’s a good deal,” he said, speaking to reporters before departing the White House for Florida.

The possibility of a bailout first emerged publicly last week, when Trump floated the idea of the U.S. government offering Spirit a financial lifeline to help keep the airline from going bust and out of business. Separately, a lawyer for the airline told a U.S. Bankruptcy Court that Spirit was in advanced talks with the government over financing that could allow it to exit Chapter 11 protection.

The president suggested the government would be able to resell the airline known for its bright yellow planes and “no frills” service for a profit once oil prices driven up by the Iran war come down.

Lawmakers from both parties and some members of the Trump administration have criticized the idea of using taxpayer funds to keep the ultra-low cost airline afloat. Speculation around Spirit’s future and the likelihood of a deal emerging has mounted with every day that passes without a resolution as the airline’s operating expenses and debts mount.

A spokesperson for Spirit, which has its headquarters in Dania Beach, Florida, declined to comment on ongoing discussions Friday and said “Spirit is operating as usual.”

The Trump administration has delivered what the president described as a “final proposal” to the airline. He framed the possible federal intervention as an effort to preserve jobs but stressed that any financial arrangement worked out would have to benefit the government.

“If we can help them, we will,” Trump said. “But we have to come first.”

Supporters of a rescue — including labor unions representing Spirit’s pilots and flight attendants — say that a collapse would cost jobs, reduce competition and push fares higher.

The airline has struggled financially since the COVID-19 pandemic, weighed down by rising operating costs and growing debt. By the time it filed for Chapter 11 protection in November 2024, Spirit had lost more than $2.5 billion since the start of 2020.

The budget carrier sought bankruptcy protection again in August 2025, when it reported having $8.1 billion in debts and $8.6 billion in assets, according to court filings.

Shortly before, its parent company revealed in a quarterly report that it had “substantial doubt” about Spirit’s ability to stay in business over the next year, citing “adverse market conditions” — including weak leisure domestic travel demand and ongoing “uncertainties in its business operations.”

The company, Spirit Aviation Holdings Inc., gave a more optimistic assessment earlier this year, saying in February that it had reached a preliminary deal with creditors and expected to exit Chapter 11 in late spring or early summer. The reorganization would result in “a new Spirit” — a smaller, leaner carrier still focused on low fares but offering premium economy options and a version of first-class seating with more legroom for customers willing to pay more.

Instead, the war that started days later when the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran intensified the airline’s cash flow problems. With rising jet fuel costs tied to the war generating unexpected costs across the industry, Spirit’s creditors last month expressed doubts about whether it could continue operating, raising the possibility of the airline being forced to sell off assets and shut down.

If Spirit were to cease operations, budget-conscious and leisure travelers would likely feel it the most — especially where the airline has a big footprint, such as Las Vegas and the Florida cities of Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

The carrier flew about 1.7 million domestic passengers in February, roughly half a million fewer than it did during the same month a year earlier, Cirium said. Spirit has also sharply reduced its capacity. According to Cirium data, there are about half the number of seats available this month on Spirit flights than in May 2024: 1,646,878 compared to 3,399,378.

Exxon and Chevron reported first-quarter profits May 1 that beat market expectations, but they both saw their net incomes dip precipitously year-over-year because of lower oil prices early in the year, poorly timed financial hedges, and operational woes in the Middle East and beyond. Chevron, for instance, had to recover from a major fire in January at its massive Kazakhstan operations.

Woods said oil prices—even above $100 per barrel—don’t come close to matching the “historically unprecedented disruption” of almost 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows through the Strait of Hormuz from the ongoing war in Iran.

“If you look at the unprecedented disruption in the world’s supply of oil and natural gas, the market hasn’t seen the full impact of that yet,” Woods said. “So there’s more to come if the strait remains closed.”

There were lots of waterborne deliveries already on their way during the first month or so of the war, so those volumes temporarily kept supplies coming. But those are gone now, and commercial and national inventories are being drawn down each day, Wood said.

Exxon and Chevron are not hiking spending plans and drilling activity to ramp up oil and gas production any further than planned—despite the White House’s pleas to pump more oil—but they are increasing the utilization of their oil refineries and petrochemical plants—including delaying planned maintenance—to take advantage of global supply shortages.

Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said it doesn’t make sense to enact long-term spending changes when so many question marks from the war remain.

“It’s early to have firm conclusions about how the energy system will change in the long term. I do think there will be changes,” Wirth said. “But we have to see how things play out over the coming weeks—hopefully not longer than that.”

Whenever the strait is fully reopened, Woods said it will take a couple of months to resume normal flows, excluding longer-term repairs needed to Qatar’s LNG operations, which are partially owned by Exxon.

“Whether or not a risk premium gets put into the market, I think, is a question that is yet to be answered,” Woods said of longer-term price hikes. A lot of that depends on how much control Iran has over the strait after the war, and how “uninterrupted” the strait remains once opened.

Both Exxon and Chevron are heavily involved in the Middle East, but the region makes up less than 5% of their global operations. Exxon’s refining and petrochemicals in Saudi Arabia are disrupted, as well as LNG in Qatar, and so is its oil production in the United Arab Emirates. With the UAE announcing plans to exit OPEC in order to produce more oil after the war, Woods said Exxon would follow suit to ramp up its activities in coordination with the UAE.

Likewise, Chevron’s oil production in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait remains disrupted, as are its petrochemical operations in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But Chevron’s natural gas production offshore of Israel already has resumed normal flows.

Exxon reported a $4.18 billion quarterly profit, but that’s down 46% year-over-year. Chevron posted a $2.21 billion profit, down 37% year-over-year.

Exxon’s and Chevron’s stocks both fell about 1% on May 1, although their market caps remains near all-time highs. That’s $635 billion for Exxon, and $380 billion for Chevron.

From the Permian to Venezuela

Chevron is the only U.S. company churning out oil in Venezuela, but Wirth said he is holding off before investing more.

While Chevron is making incremental production hikes using existing cash flows, Wirth said he’ll wait to see how Venezuela’s continues tweaking its laws and regulatory reforms first. Progress is being made, he acknowledged.

But “there are still questions,” Wirth said. “We need to see further progress before we would put more capital to work”

Exxon, which left Venezuela after having its assets expropriated almost 20 years ago, is considering re-entering the country while taking a wait-and-see approach on the reforms. Exxon’s experience with the heavier grades of Canadian oil sands should translate nicely to the extra heavy and thick crude oil from Venezuela, Woods said.

Where Exxon and Chevron are taking different approaches is the still-booming Permian Basin in West Texas where they rank first and second in total production.

Exxon is churning out more than 1.7 million barrels of oil equivalent per day from the Permian—its largest base of production globally—while aiming to grow to 2.5 million barrels by 2030.

“We’ve had the pedal to the metal here from the very beginning. We are running full speed, unlike many of our competitors,” Wood said in an apparent nod to Chevron.

Chevron grew its Permian volumes to more than 1 million barrels of oil equivalent daily, but has now chosen to cut costs and keep its production steady to turn the Permian into a cheaper cash flow machine.

More spending might “dilute that focus,” Wirth said.

“It’s really steady as she goes,” he added.

My reply went viral. My phone started ringing with calls from founders, venture capitalists, engineers, operators — people who had been quietly thinking about leaving San Francisco or New York or Boston — who wanted to learn more about relocating to Miami.

I have thought a lot since then about why the four words I posted hit so hard.

I realized that if you are building a company from the ground up, your default experience with government is that it does not help. City Hall is the place that slows you down. You experience a two-year permitting fight, unanswered emails, bureaucracy that treats your ambition like an inconvenience. So when someone in office showed up and asked “how can I help?” it resonated because it broke the pattern.

That moment taught me that the single greatest competitive advantage any region can offer ambitious people is not a tax incentive or a zoning variance. It is a culture that supports them and genuinely wants them to succeed.

That is why, when I recognized that same culture in the people behind “Ambition Accelerated,” I wanted to be a part of it.

Launched by The Florida Council of 100 and backed by Stephen Ross and Ken Griffin, the “Ambition Accelerated” campaign is a nationwide effort to reach CEOs, founders, investors and young, hungry, ambitious professionals with a simple message: Florida’s Gold Coast — Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach — is the best place for the next generation of American business.

I joined as a Senior Advisor because this is an effort led by people who deeply care about Florida, who have experienced what Florida did for them, and who want to extend that opportunity to others. I recognized in them the same grassroots energy that animated my own approach as mayor. And I knew I could speak to the benefits of this region honestly, because I lived it.

My grandfather was a political prisoner under Fidel Castro. His brother died in a Cuban jail. In Florida, my family found freedom and opportunity. My father became the first Cuban-born mayor of a major American city. I went to a state school and then a state law school, built a career in real estate and corporate law, then became city commissioner. Eventually I became the 43rd Mayor of Miami — the first Miami-born mayor in the city’s history. Every step of that path happened here and was made possible by this special place.

Millions of people, immigrants and native-born alike, have come to South Florida across generations with the same basic impulse: find a place that will let you work hard and get ahead. That impulse built this region. The same conditions that made my family’s story possible — low barriers, real opportunity, a culture that rewards effort — are exactly what business builders are looking for today. And these conditions are fundamental to what the region is today.

The problem is that many of the people who would benefit most from what exists here do not yet know it exists. That is the gap the “Ambition Accelerated” campaign was designed to close.

Florida and the Gold Coast are not perfect. No region is. But what sets this place apart is not the absence of problems — it is the will to solve them. There is a culture here, in government, in the private sector, in the civic institutions, that treats problems as things to fix rather than things to accept. When I was mayor, we did not sit around waiting for permission. We picked up the phone. We showed up. We asked what people needed and then we went and did it. That same problem-solving energy runs through this entire region, and it is one of the reasons companies that relocate here tend to stay.

In December 2020, I asked “How can I help?” and dozens of companies chose to take me up on my offer. The “Ambition Accelerated” campaign is that same question, asked by the entire Gold Coast region, backed by real capital, and directed at every ambitious company in America that is ready to stop fighting headwinds and start building with tailwinds.

If you are weighing where to base your next operation, your next fund, your next headquarters, I want to have that conversation.

How can I help?

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

The company, which reported its first quarter results Wednesday afternoon, exceeded analyst expectations on both net income and revenue, which stood at $26.8 billion (partly boosted by a one-time $8 billion tax benefit) and $56.3 billion, respectively, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Meta also saw a 33% revenue increase compared to the same quarter last year, its biggest year-over-year increase in five years.

Yet, investors apparently paid more attention to the bad news.

The company recorded 20 million fewer global users for its family of apps in the first quarter compared to the previous three months, a setback that Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, blamed on “internet disruptions in Iran, as well as a restriction on access to WhatsApp in Russia.” Still, Li said the company recorded more than 3.5 billion daily active users across its app portfolio, which includes Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, and that without the disruptions in Iran and Russia, daily active users for its family of apps would have been positive quarter over quarter. Meta has not yet responded to Fortune’s request for comment.

Maybe the bigger problem, though, was the company’s expected capital spending, much of which is due to the company’s increasing focus on AI, which jumped by almost $10 billion to between $125 billion and $145 billion. Li said on Wednesday’s earnings call that the new predicted expenditures were necessary because “we have continued to underestimate our compute needs even as we have been ramping capacity significantly, as the advances in AI have continued and our teams continue to identify compelling new projects and initiatives.” 

Notably for Meta, the company also reported Wednesday that it has continued to pour billions of dollars into the metaverse. In the first quarter, the company’s metaverse and virtual reality division, Reality Labs, reported an operating loss of $4.03 billion, even as the company has been laying off employees across multiple rounds in 2026, including a 10% cut to Reality Labs’ roughly 15,000 person workforce. Meta said earlier this month it would lay off 10% of its overall workforce, or about 8,000 employees. The company has lost approximately $80 billion on its Reality labs since it started breaking out its results in late 2020. 

While Meta’s stock sank, Alphabet’s stock hit an all-time-high Thursday and closed up more than 9% while it also raised its capital expenditure expectations. The company said it now expected to spend between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from its last estimate of between $175 and $185 billion. 

Matt Britzman, an analyst with U.K.-based investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown, wrote in a Thursday note that investors were more mixed than previously on AI spending. 

“The market was less united on what to make of the spending plans, with investors still trying to balance the scale of the AI opportunity against the cash required to chase it,” he wrote.

As for Meta, Britzman said while investors are focusing on costs they may miss the company’s strong fundamentals, including its advertising momentum and AI advances that improve monetization.

“Meta still looks like one of the clearest examples of heavy investment translating into returns for its core business,” he wrote.

Ternus, who will officially replace CEO Tim Cook in September, promised to continue the “deep thoughtfulness, deliberateness and discipline” in financial decision making that has marked Cook’s 15-year tenure leading Apple, calling his predecessor “one of the greatest business leaders of all time.”

He even showed off his proficiency with the Apple marketing playbook of secrecy-tinged hype, teasing that the iPhone maker is working on “an incredible roadmap” of products but that “you’re not going to get me to talk about the details of that roadmap.”

Investors seemed to shrug at their introduction to the new boss—which may have been exactly how Apple wanted it. 

Shares of Apple, which had dipped less than one percent in after-hours trading following the release of the company’s fiscal second quarter earnings report, barely budged during Ternus’ comments or those of Cook, who called Ternus “the right leader to step into the role.”

When Apple CFO Kevan Parekh provided a much stronger-than-expected revenue forecast for the current quarter, however, Apple shares sprang to life and rose more than 4%. Sales of iPhones in fiscal Q3 should increase between 14% and 17% year-over-year, Parekh said, compared to the 9% increase that analysts were expecting. 

The iPhone remains the critical pillar that supports Apple’s business, representing just over half of its $111 billion in revenue last quarter. Cook said demand for the smartphone was robust in virtually every geographic market in the first three months of the year despite challenges obtaining sufficient supply of the processors inside the devices. 

The right time for a change

Cook, who cut his teeth as an operations executive fluent in the intricacies of electronics supply chains, said the moment was right for him to hand over the reins, noting that among other things “the business has been performing extremely well.” 

While investors Thursday seemed more preoccupied with the business’ near term performance, particularly iPhone sales, than with the CEO transition, Ternus will likely face a more critical audience with broader questions as his tenure gets underway. Apple has fallen far behind on developing in-house AI models, to the point that it has had to partner with Google for its AI needs. And the successor to the iPhone, which is now nearly 20 years old, remains a mystery. Apple’s last attempt at a new device, the $3,500 Vision Pro augmented reality headset, has been a flop with consumers, and the company is already trailing rivals like Meta in the category of lightweight smartglasses.

During Thursday’s earnings call, an analyst cited Tim Cook’s previous anecdote about the advice he received from Apple cofounder Steve Jobs: Don’t ask what I would do, just do the right thing.

What advice is Cook giving CEO-in-waiting Ternus, the analyst asked?

“My advice is that one of the most important decisions he’ll make is where to spend his time. And I would spend it where the greatest benefit to the company and the users are,” Cook said.

“And never forget the north star for the company: We’re about making the best products in the world that really enrich other people’s lives,” he continued. “If you keep focusing on that and make your decisions around that, it will produce a great business and we’ll be able to build more products and do it all over again.”

The White House had warned that temporary funding Trump had tapped to pay Transportation Security Administration and other agency personnel would “soon run out,” and that sparked new threats of airport disruptions.

DHS has been without routine funds since Feb. 14, causing hardship for workers, though much of Trump’s immigration agenda that is central to the dispute is being funded separately.

“It is about damn time,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, who proposed the bill more than 70 days ago.

The House swiftly voted by voice, without a formal roll call, to pass the measure. It was an abrupt end to the standoff that began months ago, after Trump’s deadly immigration crackdown in Minneapolis launched a reckoning on Capitol Hill over the money being sent to fuel the president’s agenda.

Trump’s deportation strategy fueled the dispute

Democrats refused to fund U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol without changes to those operations after the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by federal agents during protests against the immigration actions in Minneapolis. Republicans would not go along with a plan pushed by Democrats to fund TSA and the other parts of DHS without the money for ICE and Border Patrol.

While the Senate unanimously approved the bipartisan package a month ago, the bill languished in the House.

Johnson, R-La., himself had just last month called the bill a “joke.”

To break the impasse, Republicans in both the House and Senate decided to tackle the immigration enforcement funding on their own through what is called budget reconciliation, a cumbersome weekslong process ahead.

By beginning that budget process Johnson was able to unlock a broader bipartisan bill for TSA agents and the rest of DHS. House Republicans late Wednesday adopted budget resolution on a largely party-line vote, 215-211, that is focused on eventually providing $70 billion for immigration enforcement and deportations for the remainder of Trump’s time in office and ensure Democrats can no longer block funding. Trump’s term ends in January 2029.

Johnson acknowledged after the vote that he had trashed the bill before. But he said that with the new budget process for funding immigration enforcement on its own, he was ready to pass it “with no crazy Democrat reforms.”

One key Republican, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, said isolating the immigration-related money on a separate track is “offensive to the men and women who serve in ICE and Border Patrol, and are serving this country every single day.”

White House warning

The White House urged Congress this week to act, warning that the money Trump tapped to temporarily pay TSA and other workers through executive actions was drying up.

“DHS will soon run out of critical operating funds, placing essential personnel and operations at risk,” said a memo Tuesday from the Office of Management and Budget. Most of its employees are considered essential and have remained on the job.

Paychecks at risk again

Immigration enforcement workers have largely been paid through the flush of new cash — some $170 billion — that Congress approved as part of Trump’s tax cuts bill last year. Others, including at the TSA, have had to rely on Trump’s intervention through executive action to ensure their paychecks.

But with salaries topping $1.6 billion every two weeks, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said recently, those funds were dwindling.

More than 1,000 TSA officers have quit since the shutdown began, according to Airlines for America, the U.S. airlines trade group that on Wednesday called on Congress to fully fund the Cabinet department.

“The urgency to provide predictable and stable funding for TSA is growing stronger by the day,” the group said in a statement. “Time and time again, our nation’s aviation workers and customers have been the victim of Congress’ failure to do their jobs.”

Complicated budget strategy ahead

The go-it-alone strategy under the budget resolution process is the same that was used last year to approve Trump’s tax cuts bill, which all Democrats opposed.

With the budget resolution now adopted by the House and Senate, lawmakers will next draft the actual $70 billion ICE and Border Patrol funding bill, with voting expected in May.

Trump has said he wants it on his desk by June 1.

___

Associated Press writer Rio Yamat in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

A national study by the Media Insight Project finds 36% of U.S. adults say they get news from social media at least once a day. But for people ages 13 to 17, that number rises to 57%.

Similarly, 43% of adults say they get information on national issues and events from influencers or independent content creators at least “sometimes,” compared with 57% of teenagers. The project is a collaboration among The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, the American Press Institute and journalism schools at Northwestern University and the University of Maryland.

The new poll points to the pervasiveness of social media in teenagers’ lives and shows how more teens are consuming their news from these platforms or independent content creators, rather than directly from national or local news sources.

While Americans haven’t abandoned traditional journalism, they are reevaluating what sources they trust, said Robyn Tomlin, executive director of the American Press Institute.

“Traditional national and local outlets continue to stand out as a trusted source, but people, especially younger audiences, are also building relationships with younger creators they believe are transparent and authentic,” Tomlin said. “That reality has enormous implications for the future of news.”

More teens turn to social media and search for news

Besides social media, teenagers are also more likely to turn to search engines and artificial intelligence chatbots as they hunt for news.

The survey found that about 4 in 10 teens get news daily from search, while about 2 in 10 say that about AI chatbots.

There’s little difference among age groups in people who said they get news from digital sites or apps, and television and streaming, the survey found. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults and a similar share of teenagers are getting news from TV at least once a day, with a similar share tuning into digital news sites.

“The idea that television is going away is a misapprehension,” said Tom Rosenstiel, journalism professor at the University of Maryland who worked on the survey. “Watching news through video is not going away. It’s changing. The way you see it on YouTube is different than on the ‘CBS Evening News.’”

Many teens approach AI and influencers with some doubts

Despite the fact that many teenagers are getting news from influencers and AI, many have a healthy dose of skepticism.

Though teens are more likely than adults to say they have “a great deal of confidence” in the information they are getting from AI chatbots, relatively few have high confidence in AI’s output. Just 11% of teenagers have a high level of certainty in the information coming from AI, compared with 4% of adults.

Teens are also more confident in their ability to determine whether something was made by a human or AI. About one-third of teens expressed a high level of confidence in their ability to distinguish AI-generated content from human-generated content, compared with about 2 in 10 adults.

When it comes to influencers, there are similar doubts. Only 12% of teenagers also have “a great deal of confidence” in the information they get from independent creators or influencers, whether that’s coming from TV, social media or other sources. That’s higher than the 6% of U.S. adults who say the same, but still very low.

Teens are more engaged with celebrity and gaming news

Not surprisingly, the survey also found that teenagers are more interested in news about celebrities, music, movies, sports and other entertainment. Adults have more interest in political news, business issues or the economy.

For teenagers and adults alike, there’s a significant news fatigue, particularly around political news, Rosenstiel said. Most U.S. adults and teenagers say they “often” or “sometimes” try to avoid news stories about national government and politics, and about 6 in 10 say they try to sidestep news related to President Donald Trump.

“People are tired of the feeling that things are spinning out of control that they’re very judicious in what they’re spending their time on,” Rosenstiel said.

Rosenstiel said many teens also hunt for news and information in different ways. They are much less likely than adults to say they avoid celebrity news or news that is delivered via social media. It’s possible, Rosenstiel added, that the most important journalism for some people is what helps them live their lives, even if it falls outside conventional news sources.

“Part of the problem for traditional journalism,” Rosenstiel said, “is the traditional journalism definition of what is real news.”

___

Sanders reported from Washington. David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.

___

The Media Insight Project survey is an initiative of the American Press Institute, Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, Local News Network at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll of 2,101 Americans included 1,092 U.S. adults ages 18 or older and 1,009 teenagers ages 13 to 17. The poll of adults was conducted Feb. 5-8 and the poll of teens was conducted Feb. 2-16 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points, and the margin of sampling error for teenagers overall is plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.

That logic is now an artifact. The “grey hull” era of deterrence didn’t end with a kinetic explosion. It just quietly stopped being the thing that mattered. What’s happening in the Gulf isn’t a traditional naval confrontation. It’s the violent, accelerating breakdown of a global system that destroyers aren’t equipped to target.

[A note on sourcing: Several of the data points below come from Windward, whose CEO co-authored this piece, and from the maritime data sector in which co-author Erik Bethel’s firm, Mare Liberum, is an active investor. We have flagged these instances and stand behind the underlying figures, which are corroborated by satellite and open-source intelligence. Readers should weigh that context accordingly.]

Run the numbers. When U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran kicked off on February 28, traffic through the world’s most critical oil artery didn’t just slow — it cratered by 97% in a single week, according to Windward’s Q1 2026 shipping risk report. Upwards of 800 ships were left idling west of the chokepoint, effectively paralyzed. Of the 142.5 million barrels loaded in March, a staggering 128 million never cleared the gap. By late April, with the ceasefire fraying and tankers still taking hits mid-transit, the Strait is, in the authors’ assessment, closed to commercial traffic.

The missiles and drones make for good headlines, but they’re a distraction. The real story is that the Strait has gone dark. Not in some poetic sense, but literally. The Automatic Identification System (AIS) — the network that’s supposed to be the “gold standard” for commercial tracking — has stopped telling the truth.

AIS was designed in the 1990s as a collision-avoidance tool, so ships wouldn’t run into each other in fog or at night. It has since become the backbone of how the world sees maritime trade: insurers, regulators, commodities desks, port authorities and central banks all price, enforce and plan against the signals flowing out of ships’ transponders. The catch is that AIS is self-reported. The ship tells the world where it is and who it is, and the world believes it. There is no independent verification baked into the system. In peacetime, that works, because lying serves no one. In Hormuz right now, it is being weaponized.

Ships are vanishing into digital black holes only to materialize hours later on the other side of Hormuz with the transit completed in total silence. On April 21, Windward’s platform identified 296 vessels off Bandar Abbas. Of these, only 74 were transmitting AIS signals — a cooperative rate of roughly 25%.

Others are caught in the crossfire of GPS spoofing attacks — fake satellite signals, broadcast from shore, that fool a ship’s navigation into thinking it’s somewhere it isn’t. The result is a fleet of tankers whose screens show them circling inland airports or drifting across the Iranian desert. Windward identified at least 30 jamming clusters across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, Oman and Iran. Some have gone further, broadcasting the identity numbers of hulls that were scrapped years ago. These are zombie ships — very real tankers operating under the digital signatures of vessels that no longer exist.

Even the destination fields, meant to tell port authorities where a hull is headed, have been repurposed into desperate pleas. Instead of a port of call, the screens read: “India Ship, India Crew.” “China Owner and All Crew.” It’s not data anymore; it’s a prayer. Please don’t shoot.

Data suggest AIS is now underreporting Hormuz traffic by half. In Q1 alone, nearly a million GPS jamming incidents hit over 1,100 vessels. Satellite imagery recently caught seven VLCCs — 14 million barrels of capacity — off Iran’s coast with zero digital footprint. Iran claims 11 million barrels exported during a blockade where commercial feeds show a graveyard. Both are true. That is the problem.

Here’s why this should worry anyone whose job depends on a functioning global economy. Our entire maritime architecture is built on the naive hope that data is honest. It’s a costly delusion. Insurers are now benchmarking war-risk premiums against vessel tracks that are often little more than digital fiction — and in the Strait, those premiums haven’t just risen, they’ve tripled, adding a $250,000 surcharge to every supertanker transit. But insurance is just the most visible edge of it. Commodity traders price crude on the same feeds. OFAC enforces sanctions on them. Refiners in Asia schedule deliveries against them. Central banks fold them into inflation models. Pull the thread and a surprising amount of the world’s financial plumbing ties back to satellite signals from ships that, at the moment, are lying about where they are.

The shadow fleet — roughly 2,100 tankers already seasoned in sanctions-dodging — has spent years rehearsing for this. But the scale has shifted. Selective invisibility isn’t just a niche trick for moving illicit crude anymore; it is now the ambient condition of the world’s busiest oil corridor.

This isn’t a temporary spike to wait out. When the data signal itself is compromised, you’re looking at a permanent tax on everything downstream — from charter rates to asset values and insurability. The smart money is fusing AIS with satellite and behavioral analytics to find the truth. The rest are flying on instruments, unaware that the gauges are lying to them.

The bigger implication for governments is overdue: Maritime data is no longer a commercial nicety — it is critical infrastructure. When a fifth of the world’s oil moves through a digital blind spot, awareness must be funded and defended accordingly.

Three shifts are required:

1. Abandon AIS as “Ground Truth”: Stop treating a 1990s collision-avoidance tool as wartime intelligence. Cross-validating with satellite, radar, and behavioral patterns must be the baseline, not a premium add-on.

2. Shift Verification Upstream: The burden shouldn’t fall on the port that catches a fraud. Flag registries and insurers must bear the cost of legitimacy. If a flag state can’t track its own fleet, it shouldn’t be a flag state.

3. Treat Spoofing as a Cyberattack: A “zombie” ID is a forged credential; a spoofed GPS signal is reckless endangerment. We have frameworks for digital intrusions — salt water shouldn’t be a loophole.

The ships in Hormuz that matter most right now are the ones nobody can see. Until that changes, every risk model touching the world’s most important waterway — a London underwriter’s premium, a Tokyo refiner’s hedge, a Treasury sanctions package — is being built on data that has quietly stopped telling the truth.

The missiles make the news. The silent transponders are the crisis.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

On Wednesday, that began to change. 

The company’s cloud computing business was the undisputed star of parent company Alphabet’s first-quarter earnings, posting an eye-popping 63% revenue growth from the prior year, for a total of $20 billion.

AI is of course what’s driving the booming growth in the Google Cloud business, as CEO Sundar Pichai and other company executives noted on the earnings call. And investors were delighted, sending shares of Alphabet up 7% in after hours trading. 

But lost in the excitement of the moment is something more fundamental: Google Cloud now represents 18% of the company’s overall business. It’s perhaps just one quarter or two more quarters away from comprising one-fifth of the Google empire—something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. 

At this time last year, Google Cloud represented 13.6% percent of Alphabet’s total revenue. In the first quarter of 2024, Cloud was just 11.8%. 

Alphabet

Advertising has always been the center of gravity for Google, with its high-margin and recession-proof search ads at the top of a mountain that includes YouTube video ads, display ads that Google distributes to other sites, and ads that appear in Google’s portfolio of popular properties like Gmail and Maps. 

It’s not that Google’s ads business is in any danger of going away. Ads generated $77 billion in the first three months of the year, up roughly 16% year-over-year. That’s more revenue than American Express generated in all of 2025. And many Google-watchers believe that AI will only enhance the company’s capacity to serve ads to searchers.

But the cloud business has reached an inflection point where it’s no longer just a cute sideshow. In addition to the revenue growth, Google’s cloud’s operating income tripled from the year-ago period to $6.6 billion. More impressive still, the cloud business operating margin expanded from 9.4% a year ago to 32.9% in Q1.

The blooming of the cloud business is likely to have a significant impact at Google beyond the income statement. The cloud business is run by enterprise sales people in suits like Cloud boss Thomas Kurian, an Oracle veteran. It’s a completely different culture than the rest of Google, where sandal-wearing engineers, product managers, and media types set the tone. How that cultural contrast plays out inside the company in the quarters and years ahead will be fascinating to watch, especially when the time comes to choose a successor to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. 

Of course, the main factor that will determine how big the Cloud business becomes is AI. Right now, customer demand for AI is insatiable (Google Cloud’s current backlog is $460 billion) and Google’s cloud business is rising along with it. If the AI train suddenly comes to a halt, or even slows—which many observers think could happen—Google’s cloud business could find itself back in second class.

The Republican administration adopted this strategy after federal courts thwarted President Donald Trump’s efforts to stop offshore wind development through executive action. Three agreements have been announced.

U.S. Reps. Jared Huffman of California, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, and Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, are demanding information about the first and largest of the three. Under a deal made public in March, French company TotalEnergies is getting $1 billion — essentially a refund of its leases for offshore wind projects off North Carolina and New York— if it invests the money in fossil fuel projects instead.

Huffman said that is a “scam” and the administration is going to “light a lot of federal taxpayer money on fire if we let them.”

In a letter sent Wednesday to TotalEnergies and provided to The Associated Press, Huffman and Raskin are letting the company know that Democrats have begun an investigation, are demanding documents and communications and are advising the CEO not to take the money. The letter outlines the ways they think the deal appears to be illegal.

“You can’t come into the United States and do a backroom deal like this, that just essentially treats the treasury as a slush fund, and walk away with a billion dollars,” Huffman said.

Asked for comment, TotalEnergies pointed to its news release when the payout was announced. CEO Patrick Pouyanné said at the time that TotalEnergies renounced U.S. offshore wind development in exchange for the reimbursement of the lease fees, “considering that the development of offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest.”

Nearly $2 billion in payouts so far

In the latest deals announced Monday, the administration said Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind agreed to end their leases in exchange for reimbursements totaling nearly $900 million, provided they invest equally in fossil fuels. Trump has gone all in on fossil fuels for generating electricity, which he says will lower costs for families, increase reliability and help the U.S. maintain global leadership in artificial intelligence.

Both Bluepoint and Golden State are co-owned by Ocean Winds, a joint venture of EDP Renewables and French energy giant Engie. Michael Brown, CEO of Ocean Winds North America, said that when market conditions change, “we must adapt.”

Opponents of offshore wind projects praised the administration for being creative.

“This is the latest strategy and we think it’s a winner,” Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast New Jersey, said Wednesday. Shaffer said the administration “is well within their rights to do this and private businesses can’t be forced to build anything.”

But to the top Democrat in the U.S. Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York, it is a “bailout for fossil fuel donors dressed up as a deal.”

“Donald Trump spent years calling offshore wind subsidies a waste of taxpayer money,” Schumer said in a statement. “Now his administration is handing nearly $2 billion of those very same taxpayer dollars to companies to abandon clean energy projects that would have powered millions of American homes and created thousands of good-paying union jobs.”

Once the deals are complete, Ocean Winds will have one remaining U.S. offshore wind project, SouthCoast Wind off Massachusetts. Its development has slowed under Trump.

Amber Hewett, senior director of offshore wind energy at the National Wildlife Federation, said forcing developers to abandon offshore wind energy for more oil and gas sets the U.S. further behind in efforts to curb climate change. Burning coal, oil and gas is the largest contributor to global climate change by far.

Lease buyouts are part of a campaign against offshore wind

When Trump returned to office in January 2025 he ordered a temporary halt to leasing and permitting for wind energy projects. His administration has paused work wind farms under construction, canceled plans to use large areas of federal waters for new offshore wind development and added an extra layer of review for wind and solar projects.

Federal judges allowed construction on the wind farms to resume, struck down the Day One order blocking wind energy development, and stopped the administration from requiring that all solar and wind energy projects on federal lands and waters be personally approved by Trump’s interior secretary.

Energy law expert Kristoffer Svendsen said that after the administration’s losses in the courts, the lease buyouts appear to be a last attempt to close down as many offshore wind projects as possible. He was not aware of any other arrangements where energy projects owners have been paid to walk away.

“This saga never ends. They continue to surprise the industry and those of us following the industry,” said Svendsen, assistant dean for energy law at the George Washington University Law School.

Svendsen said he expects to see energy companies head to markets in Europe and Asia because the future for new offshore wind development in the United States is “quite bleak.”

“At this point if you’re interested in offshore wind, you’ll most likely go to a jurisdiction where they want you,” he said.

The global wind industry installed a record 165 gigawatts of onshore and offshore wind last year, with 138 countries now powering their economies with wind energy, the Global Wind Energy Council said last week in its annual report. That is enough to power 118 million households. The Asian market, led by China and India, had 80% of the global total.

David Carroll, CEO and chief renewables officer for Engie North America, also thinks offshore wind will not advance in the United States in the next few years. He cited the administration’s pulling of permits that were granted after years of work and much money spent, and the stopping of fully permitted projects under construction, eroding business certainty.

“The offshore wind industry does not have a strong future here in the U.S. And that’s unfortunate,” Carroll, who is chair of the board at the American Clean Power Association, said in an interview this month. “The Northeast needs more energy and that is one of the very key ways we can get energy in the Northeast.”

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