https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonfortt/detail/recent-activity/ https://www.youtube.com/c/forttknox I should have posted this way earlier, but I've been getting questions. Here's the skinny: Fortt Knox is not dead. It's just been reborn. Instead of living in your favorite podcast app, Fortt Knox now lives on LinkedIn and YouTube. Now you can see video of my interviews, and engage with a broader community of Fortt Knox viewers. I stream my interviews live, and the recordings are there for on-demand ...
Sep 26, 2020•2 min
In the late 1990s, Andy Jassy pitched a wild idea to his boss and mentor, Jeff Bezos: What if Amazon developed another business, delivering computing power and storage . Two decades later, it stands as Amazon’s most profitable division – one that Jassy continues to lead as CEO of Amazon Web Services. I sat down with Jassy in a broadcast exclusive at the company’s annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to talk about Amazon’s lead in the cloud today, the controversy surrounding the Pentagon’...
Dec 07, 2019•45 min
A walk to remember. Apple CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump in Texas this week, and it’s a high stakes photo op. They’re at the factory in Austin Texas where Apple’s Mac Pro computer is assembled. Cook no doubt wants to make it hard for the president to put tariffs on Mac Pro components. Cook has said unless they continue to be exempt from tariffs, he’ll have to move manufacturing completely to China. The president wants to push Apple and U.S. CEOs more broadly to manufacture here instead ...
Nov 23, 2019•30 min
I was on the road this week, doing a little tour of California. Three cities in three days. San Francisco Monday, L.A. Tuesday, San Diego Wednesday. Adobe’s MAX conference was this week in LA, where the creative software giant unveils its latest features. Well, everybody’s got challengers, and one of Adobe’s is a startup called Canva. Canva has emerged to help regular folks add high-end creative flair to their presentations. Even better, it was founded by a young woman in Australia who was looki...
Nov 10, 2019•19 min
It's the biggest single cloud contract … possibly ever. Definitely the most talked about. The Pentagon's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract. JEDI, going to: Microsoft late last week. The Empire Strikes Back. The JEDI contract is worth up to 10 billion dollars over 10 years, but just as valuable as the money: It's worth bragging rights and street cred. This was supposed to be Amazon's contract to lose. Amazon practically invented enterprise cloud computing 14 years ago with AWS. Whe...
Nov 02, 2019•25 min
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Washington this week arguing for Libra, the digital currency his company created and wants to build around. This after he last week made the case in front of an audience at Georgetown University that Facebook’s future, its past, its reason for being are all tied up in free speech. With me this week for another bite out of this Facebook and free speech debate: John Stanton, the cofounder of the Save Journalism Project, and Farhad Manjoo, columnist for the New York ...
Oct 26, 2019•27 min
Tech just can’t get away from politics. Senator Elizabeth Warren has a bone to pick with Facebook. Mainly its standards for political ads. After Facebook refused to take down a Trump Campaign ad that accused former vice president Joe Biden of wrongdoing connected to his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine, Warren fired back. She posted her own Facebook ad that started with a false claim that Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg have endorsed Trump for re-election. A little farther afield, Activision Bl...
Oct 19, 2019•27 min
It’s hard to save money these days – and I’m not talking about the new phones and earbuds that come out this time of year and tempt you to spend. Interest rates are really low. Which is great if you’re borrowing to buy a house or a car, but not so awesome if you want to save. The interest rate for the typical U.S. savings account is 9 hundredths of a percent. But! All is not lost. For a long time there have been higher rates for savers, even from mainstream banks. Now a young and scrappy group o...
Oct 13, 2019•43 min
We’ve got a blockbuster hardware announcement this week … from Microsoft. The biggest hardware risk the company has taken since Xbox. Surface Neo, two screens with a hinge in between, coming next year. And there’s more. Surface Pro X, arguably the first ARM-based computer to run full Windows 10. Has Microsoft changed the game here? Or are these cool gadgets that won’t really sell? With me this week, one of my favorite guys to talk hardware, Pat Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategies. Let’s tal...
Oct 06, 2019•25 min
WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann resigned from the CEO role this week, in the face of skepticism about the coworking startup’s plans to go public. There are questions about the business model – we’ve addressed some of those here on Fortt Knox. There are questions about his eccentric leadership style. And there are questions about the way he’s maintained control of the company while taking lots of money out of it. WeWork is in the headlines this week, but we’ve lived through versions of this story ...
Sep 28, 2019•27 min
Days ago California lawmakers passed a bill, AB5, that would force more companies to treat more workers as employees, not contractors. What’s the big deal? The gig economy. Whether it’s Uber and Lyft, or Postmates and Doordash, or TaskRabbit and Instacart, a slew of companies have grown up in the smartphone era with a radical idea. When just about everyone has a smartphone and a credit card, you can assemble a workforce on a moment’s notice, pay workers electronically, and let them be independen...
Sep 21, 2019•26 min
Apple's iPhone extravaganza is still the biggest product event of the year for a simple reason: The iPhone remains the single most successful hardware product of the PC era. We can talk about whether sales are growing or not, whether Apple is innovating or not. But Apple still sells more premium phones every year than anyone else. So what happened this week? Three new iPhones announced, the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and Pro Max. A new Apple Watch with a screen that doesn't turn off. A new entry-level iP...
Sep 14, 2019•32 min
The National Football League was on the brink last year. Not of death – let’s not talk crazy, now – but of the type of loss of relevance that has humbled baseball and boxing over the past generation or so. But now as the NFL's 100th season kicks off this week, there's a sense of fresh energy. And I would argue that if football's going to make a full comeback, technology is going to have to play a big role. First, a word about where we've been. Football was the undisputed champ of the major sport...
Sep 10, 2019•45 min
Summer’s coming to a close, and that means the streaming wars are about to get a lot more real. Apple released a trailer for The Morning Show, one of the big series slated to hit its Apple TV Plus service this fall. Disney just gave us more details behind its slate of shows for the Disney Plus service that launches in November; and Disney and Sony get a movie divorce … and Sony gets custody of Spider-Man. And later on the 1-on-1: Peter Reinhardt is the CEO of Segment, a startup that helps compan...
Aug 31, 2019•53 min
15 years ago this week, Google had its IPO. Initial Public Offering. That means shares of its stock were available to buy for the first time. I was working as a tech reporter in Silicon Valley at the time and remember it was a big deal for a couple of reasons. One, Google’s IPO was a glimmer of hope after the dotcom bust. Two, Google was trying to reinvent the IPO by making it more transparent. They used a process called a Dutch Auction. Today the IPO hasn’t changed for the most part. But maybe ...
Aug 27, 2019•26 min
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 if yo...
Aug 17, 2019•25 min
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 that stud...
Aug 11, 2019•23 min
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 Apple...
Aug 03, 2019•31 min
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 paid its de...
Jul 27, 2019•27 min
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, because Democ...
Jun 29, 2019•24 min
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 at the...
Jun 23, 2019•26 min
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. The mas...
Jun 08, 2019•22 min
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 watcher, you get...
Jun 02, 2019•30 min
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 make ne...
May 26, 2019•30 min
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 does this h...
May 18, 2019•26 min
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.
May 11, 2019•56 min
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. This year it...
May 06, 2019•51 min
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 to break ...
Apr 22, 2019•22 min
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.
Apr 13, 2019•29 min
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 Future...
Apr 06, 2019•15 min
