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Close to a third of consumers underestimate how much they spend on subscriptions by $100 to $199 each month, a new study shows.
Many people (42%) have forgotten that they’re still paying for a subscription they no longer use.
It’s worth looking into apps that help you keep track of those recurring charges.

Jose Luis Pelaez Inc | DigitalVision | Getty Images

There’s a decent chance you don’t have a good handle on how much your subscriptions are really costing you.
Consumers’ offhand guess of how much they spend monthly on subscriptions averaged $86, according to a survey commissioned by market research firm C+R Research. Yet when asked about subscriptions in specific categories, the actual amount was $219 on average — $133 more than estimated.

“It’s a slippery slope with subscriptions because it just happens automatically and you’re not actively making that purchase every month,” said certified financial planner Douglas Boneparth, president of Bone Fide Wealth in New York.
With the explosion of subscription services over the last decade, keeping track of them all can be challenging. For just media and entertainment offerings, the average number of paid subscriptions per consumer was 12 in 2020, according to Statista. Millennials had the most: 17.
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Because subscriptions are often automatically charged on a debit or credit card, it’s easier for users not to notice the cost. Most people (86%) have at least some, if not all, of their subscriptions on autopay, the survey showed.
And 42% said they have forgotten they were still being charged for a subscription they no longer use.

“It’s the rare person who doesn’t have at least one sneaky charge they’ve forgotten about,” said Kathryn Hauer, a CFP with Wilson David Investment Advisors in Aiken, South Carolina.
Nearly a third (30%) of those surveyed for the C+R study underestimated their subscription costs by $100 to $199. Another 24% were off by $200 or more.
For anyone who wants to get a better grip on how much they are spending and on what, it’s worth considering an app such as Truebill or Mint that allows you track your subscriptions. Many banks or credit card companies also allow you to see your recurring charges all in one place through your account.

Keeping closer track of your subscriptions also can help you budget better so you’re not overspending.
“It really comes down to organization,” Boneparth said. “The more organized you are around cash flow, the more you can identify what you want or don’t want to spend your money on.”
The survey for the study was conducted in late April and early May among 1,000 consumers.

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While most of the travel industry struggled to get back on its feet, the yachting industry had a different problem during the pandemic: serving everyone wanting to charter a boat.
Like the rise in private jet travel during the pandemic, charter demand remains “extremely strong,” said Crom Littlejohn, chief commercial officer of the yacht brokerage company Northrop & Johnson. He said he expects interest to remain this way “for the foreseeable future.”

But it isn’t the same people who have always traveled via sea, he said.
“A big percentage of our business is first-time charters,” said Littlejohn. “They’ve had the ski vacations … they want to try something different.”

Destinations with an increase in summer yacht bookings

South of France
Croatia
Caribbean 
Galapagos Islands 

Source: Northrop & Johnson

Insiders share with CNBC the seven common mistakes of those new to the industry.

Mistake #1: Hard-shell luggage

There are several reasons to leave hard-shell suitcases at home, said Littlejohn.

In the same way that they scuff hotel room walls, hard suitcases can damage the fine finishes on yachts, he said.
“Things bounce and hard things might mar the surfaces,” said Littlejohn.

Military personnel carry Prince Philip’s garment bags to the Royal Yacht Britannia in Lancashire, England, in August 1989.
Tim Graham | Tim Graham Photo Library | Getty Images

Then there’s the issue of storing suitcases that don’t collapse. “You can imagine how much [luggage] ten people or 12 people on charter could bring if they were bringing hard luggage,” he said. “It takes an additional room to store it.”
“The more soft-sided duffel bag type luggage, the better for storage and moving around the boat,” he said.

Mistake #2: High heels

Soft-soled shoes are more appropriate than high heels, said Littlejohn, but “we’re going to ask you not to wear the shoes on board period.”
Travelers are free to pack high heels for land excursions, he said, but even in the south of France – where nightlife is often a big part of the charter — cobblestone roads may make comfortable shoes a better option, he said.

Attendees take off their shoes before boarding a yacht in Miami, Florida, on Feb. 16, 2017.
Scott McIntyre | Bloomberg | Getty Images

But rules on shoes can depend on the yacht owner, said superyacht influencer Denis Suka, who is known as The Yacht Mogul online.  
If guests are uncertain about a yacht’s shoe policy, they can keep an eye out upon boarding, said Suka. Look for “pairs of shoes [at] the entrance,” he said. That means shoes aren’t allowed on the boat.
As for what to pack, Suka recommends “keeping it light” with clothes that have “summer vibes,” calling this part of the rules “that are pretty much set in stone.”

Mistake #3: Not giving way on the passerelle

Passengers should board the passerelle — the walkway that is used to get on and off a yacht — one at a time, said Marcela de Kern, a business consultant for the yachting company Onboard Monaco.
“It’s quite fragile,” she said. “If you board at [the] same time, it can break,” she said, adding this can create “massive” problems in ports in Greece and Croatia, where it’s especially hard to get from yacht to port.

Professional soccer football player Cristiano Ronaldo and partner Georgina Rodriguez board a yacht on June 1, 2018 in Marbella, Spain.
Europa Press Entertainment | Europa Press | Getty Images

“The one leaving the yacht has priority, so if you are boarding and someone else is coming down, you should wait and let them get down first,” said de Kern.
Celebrities like the Kardashians have “no yacht etiquette,” she said, citing a recent video of them disembarking close together, one clad in high heels, from a yacht in Portofino.

Mistake #4: Not planning for extra expenses

New entrants to the industry shouldn’t spend their entire budgets on the charter rate.
“Then you have the rest of your expenses,” said Littlejohn. “With VAT taxes and beverage and food … dockage and fuel, you’re going to add another 75-100% to the cost of that charter.”

Weekly charters with Northrop & Johnson range from $32,000 to $490,000, plus expenses, according to a company representative.
“There are charters happening in all the price ranges,” he said. He advised working with a broker who is familiar with the boat size and location that travelers want to book.
Without a broker, travelers new to the industry “might end up paying more for a yacht instead of having a better one for the same price,” said Suka.
Brokers can match clients with the right crews too, said Suka. That’s important because travelers and crew members can spend time together for days, if not weeks, at a time, he added.
“It’s not cheap to charter a yacht, so [clients] have to get the very best out of it,” he said.

Mistake #5: Not connecting with the crew

Getting to know the captain and the crew is the best way to receive top-notch service, said Suka.  
When the “yacht is docked then the crew will definitely give you the best tips [on] what to do and where to [go],” including “restaurants, coffees or other attractions because they know the area very well.”

Denis Suka, aka “The Yacht Mogul,” advised those new to charters to “feel just as its your own yacht.”
Source: The Yacht Mogul

If all goes well, travelers may charter the same yacht again, so it’s all the more reason to establish a good relationship with the crew at the beginning, he said.
Onboard Monaco’s de Kern advised travelers to greet the crew at the beginning of the trip.
“Ask for their names, shake their hands and show some respect for the captain on board,” she said.

Mistake #6: Scheduling too many activities  

Don’t pack the days with activities, said Littlejohn.
For land excursions, he advised planning no more than one two-hour inland trip per charter week.
“Most of the folks are probably spending half of the day on board the boat, playing with water sports … and enjoying the boat itself,” he said. Then the other half of the day maybe spent going on an excursion, take the tender out. You might go in and explore … the lands and the islands.”
Then it’s back to the boat for “a wonderful evening aboard,” he said.

Mistake #7: Waiting to book

Littlejohn recommends booking “as early as you possibly can.” He said to start looking anywhere from six months to one year out.
Northrop & Johnson is already making bookings for the Christmas of 2023, he said. Booking this early isn’t uncommon for the bigger, more expensive boats, he said, but since the pandemic, “we’re seeing it in the mid-range as well.”
But there are still some last-minute charters available for this summer, he said.   More

“Can i keep the monitor and mouse?” a fired tech worker recently asked on Blind, an anonymous social-media platform where techies go to compare notes on employers. The questions used to be about how much Meta was paying or what perks Apple offered. As America’s technology giants contend with supply-chain uncertainties, a looming recession and sliding share prices, many users are instead asking if the sizzling market for tech jobs is cooling. The first sign of trouble came on April 28th. In a quarterly earnings call Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said that the e-commerce titan’s warehouses were overstaffed, costing about $2bn (9% of operating profit) in the past year. A memo leaked a week later from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said the firm was putting a freeze on new hires in most teams. Other big tech names, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Snap and Uber, have made similar noises. So far this year listed tech firms worth a combined $3.4trn have announced hiring freezes or firings. The commotion comes after a prolonged boom in tech jobs. During the 2010s the number of positions in America’s tech industry increased by 4.4% a year on average, triple the rate of the overall economy, according to a study by the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. The pandemic turbocharged the trend. Work, leisure and shopping shifted online, boosting demand for digital services. Last year listings for tech jobs increased by over 80% compared with 2020, observes Amit Bhatia, co-founder of datapeople.io, a research firm. Demand for tech skills also surged outside the sector as companies uploaded their operations to the cloud and boosted cyber-security, making the market even tighter. The number of applications for each tech-industry opening fell by a quarter in 2021. Much of the jobs growth came from startups and newly listed companies. But the tech giants, too, were adding plenty of employees. Between 2020 and 2021 Amazon, Meta and Netflix all increased their full-time staff by over a fifth. The ranks at Microsoft and Alphabet swelled by 11% and 16%, respectively. That compares with a median of 3% for firms in the s&p 500 index of America’s largest companies.So far redundancies, rather than just hiring freezes, have been largely confined to startups, such as Getir, a Turkish grocery-delivery app, and newly public firms such as Peloton, a maker of web-connected exercise bikes. Sackings at established tech companies have been modest. On May 17th Netflix, a video-streamer, laid off 150 staff. The following week news broke that PayPal, a payments firm, was cutting 80 or so jobs. In both cases that was roughly 1% of their respective workforces.Strategically important teams are protected from the measures. Microsoft’s hiring slowdown applies to its software units, such as Windows and Teams, but not its fast-growing cloud business. PayPal’s lay-offs affected staff researching emerging technologies, such as quantum computing, while sparing core functions. Many of the sacked Netflixers worked in marketing rather than on shows. Demand for the most prized skills, such as understanding of advanced data science, is so high that people who possess them will be sought out even in a downturn. At the big tech companies talented employees who hint that they want to jump ship are still receiving generous counter-offers, says Greg Selker of Stanton Chase, an executive-search firm. On May 16th Microsoft said it was raising its budget for salary increases for certain workers, in an attempt to stop talent from fleeing. Amazon did something similar a few months earlier. Tech-focused recruiters say business is perky. Indeed, the number of listings for technology-industry jobs in May and April was far higher than at the same time last year, notes Mr Bhatia. Some analysts argue the tech industry is bigger, more mature and stable than in the go-go 1990s, which may shield its workers from the pain of previous busts. Others note that after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, tech work began disappearing only a year after the stockmarket crash. One thing is certain: the anxiety level of posts on Blind will stay high for a while. ■For exclusive insight and reading recommendations from our correspondents in America, sign up to Checks and Balance, our weekly newsletter. More

“Your kind is headed for extinction!” barks a senior officer to Tom Cruise’s hero in “Top Gun: Maverick”, a supersonic action flick released by Paramount last week. “Maybe so, sir,” replies Maverick. “But not today.”Cinema owners are feeling similarly defiant. Worldwide box-office receipts fell by 72% in 2020, when the pandemic forced film buffs to say goodbye to the silver screen and hello to their sofa. After ticket sales recovered only partially in 2021, many predicted curtains for theatres. Yet “Top Gun”, a sequel to a classic of the genre from 1986, raked in $248m on its opening weekend, the biggest-ever debut for a film starring Mr Cruise. Its domestic haul of $156m over the long weekend broke the Memorial Day record set by one of Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” films in 2007.Theatre owners hope that “Top Gun” heralds the beginning of a broader recovery. It is only the fourth-biggest opener of the pandemic era (see chart 2). However, the other big hits—Sony’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home” last December, Marvel’s “Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” in May, and Warner Bros’ “The Batman” in March—have all been superhero flicks, with young fans. “Top Gun”, by contrast, sold 55% of tickets to over-35s. This suggests that viewers old enough to harbour fond memories of Mr Cruise’s original turn as Maverick 36 years ago are now ready to come back to the movies, too.The recovery is far from complete. This year’s worldwide box office will be only about three-quarters of 2019’s, forecasts Gower Street Analytics, a research firm. China, which these days rivals America as the biggest cinema market, is still locked down and in any case increasingly hostile to Hollywood (“Top Gun” has no Chinese release date). Russia is also off-limits since its invasion of Ukraine. Above all, studios are focusing attention and resources on their streaming platforms, releasing fewer films in cinemas, for shorter runs.The summer release slate is promising: June will see “Jurassic World: Dominion” from Universal and “Lightyear”, the latest in Disney’s “Toy Story” series. “Thor: Love and Thunder”, the next Marvel movie, is out in July. Yet there will be strong reasons to stay at home, too. On the day that “Top Gun” was released, Netflix unveiled its latest season of “Stranger Things” and Disney+ launched a “Star Wars” spin-off, “Obi-Wan Kenobi”. In August Warner Bros Discovery will start a new “Game of Thrones” saga, before Amazon releases a “Lord of the Rings” series in September. This latest adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic is the most expensive piece of television ever made, with a budget around three times that of “Top Gun”. ■For exclusive insight and reading recommendations from our correspondents in America, sign up to Checks and Balance, our weekly newsletter. More

Annual general meetings (agms) of shareholders used to be dull affairs. A company’s owners would gather to elect board members or, after the global financial crisis of 2007-09 exposed the gulf between fat-cat bosses and their workers, cast (mostly non-binding) votes on executive compensation. In the past few years, though, they have turned into corporate confessionals, with nothing short of a company’s soul at stake. Motions are proliferating on decarbonisation and diversity targets, political donations, workers’ rights and much else besides. A record 592 environmental and social proposals were filed in America ahead of this year’s agm season, which spans May and June. In the 20 years from Amazon’s initial public offering in 1997, the e-empire’s shareholders voted on 22 resolutions brought by fellow investors. At the latest agm on May 25th they were asked to weigh in on 14. How can the harried fund manager keep track? Enter proxy-advisory firms, hired by investors to sift through the resolutions and make recommendations on which boxes to cross. There may be no monopoly in the market for ideas, but when it comes to proxy advice the market is a cosy duopoly. Institutional Shareholder Services (iss) and Glass Lewis meet more than 90% of the demand for such counsel in America. The pronouncements of these corporate philosopher-kings grew in prominence after 2003, when new rules required American institutional investors to disclose their voting polices. For most investors it is cheaper instead to outsource the task to iss or Glass Lewis. The work is lucrative. In 2021 iss, which has annual revenues in excess of $250m, was bought by Deutsche Börse, a German exchange operator, for $2.3bn. The same year two Canadian public pension funds sold Glass Lewis to a private-equity firm.The duo’s recommendations carry weight. One study identified 114 institutional investors, representing more than $5trn in assets under management, who “robovoted” in lockstep with either iss or Glass Lewis during the 2020 proxy season, mechanically deferring to their recommendations. It is difficult to tell how a shareholder would have voted but for a proxy recommendation. Still, the advisers have almost certainly moved the needle in some important shareholder votes (and in plenty of unimportant ones, too). They have also wielded a softer power, moulding the ever-changing norms of corporate governance through changes in their voting policies and other public displays of wisdom. No press coverage of an important agm is nowadays complete without a nod to their stance, as when the media leapt on iss’s recommendations that dissented from Amazon management’s guidance on nine issues, from executive pay to human-rights due diligence, plastic use and gender and racial pay gaps. As shareholders’ concerns expand from narrow profits to broader “purpose”, you would expect the advisers to be enjoying a golden age. In fact, their proxy power may start to decline, for three reasons. The first is structural. In the past decade share ownership in America has become ever more concentrated in the hands of giant asset managers such as BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. These behemoths run their own departments of corporate-governance consigliere and so have little need for the proxy advisers’ services. In 2008 the trio between them owned 13.5% of the average company in the s&p 500 index of big American firms, according to Bloomberg, a data firm. They now hold nearly a quarter. In May BlackRock struck a cautionary note on environmental and social resolutions, noting that these were becoming prescriptive to the point of micro-management. Smaller institutional investors may prefer to side with their bigger peers rather than the proxy firms in such matters, especially if the concentration of ownership continues to rise. Second, managements are putting up a fight. This year’s votes are still being tallied, but environmental and social resolutions have not had the knock-out run their backers expected, in part because companies that were caught off guard last year got their act together. On May 27th Twitter went further, announcing in a regulatory filing that it would ignore a shareholder vote which booted Egon Durban, a billionaire tech dealmaker, off the social-media firm’s board, citing the influence of proxy advisers on the result. iss had recommended evicting Mr Durban because he sits on six other public-company boards. That makes him “overboarded” in iss’s eyes. Twitter retorted that Mr Durban is a “highly effective member” with “unparalleled operational knowledge”. Merely sitting on more boards than the iss likes should not automatically disqualify him, the company implied.In 2019, 319 companies signed a letter chastising a lack of transparency and accuracy in proxy advisers’ recommendations and calling for regulatory action. Soon afterwards the Securities and Exchange Commission (sec), which had dithered for years, finally began to rein in the proxy firms—the third challenge to their role. In 2020 the sec adopted new rules requiring increased disclosure of potential conflicts and open channels of communication between proxy advisers and companies. Last November the agency’s current head, Gary Gensler, watered down some of those amended rules, for example removing the requirement that proxy advice be sent to the management allowing it to respond. But they remain less proxy-friendly than in the past.Annual general mayhemClashes pitting the proxy advisers against big investors, management and regulators look poised to intensify—all the more so if, as seems likely, agms continue to be a venue for some investors to push their politics. Asking two opaque firms, supposedly in the name of transparency, in effect to nominate America Inc’s boards of directors was dubious enough. Trusting them to resolve the complex trade-offs at the heart of 21st-century capitalism would be a travesty. ■Read more from Schumpeter, our columnist on global business:BASF’s plan to wean itself off cheap Russian gas comes with pitfalls (May 28th)Why America’s clean-energy industry is stuck (May 21st)Activist investors are becoming tamer (May 14th)For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

A phrase that first became fashionable a decade ago is everywhere. “Bring your whole self” is one of four values that British Land, a property developer, trumpets on its website. Quartz, a publisher, ran a workshop last year called “How to navigate the whole-self workplace”. “Your whole self is welcome here,” pledges ing, a bank, to prospective employees. (Whole Foods uses the phrase on its global careers site, too, but it has a decent excuse.) There are spin-off selves. Workday, an enterprise-software firm, wants its employees to be their “best selves” at work. Finn, a classified-ads site in Norway, is hiring for a compensation and benefits specialist who loves to bring their “full self” to the office. Key, an American bank, prefers to use the term “authentic self”. The idea that unites these phrases is that employees need not pretend to be someone they aren’t. Instead of having a workplace persona and a non-workplace persona, people can just relax and always be themselves. Behind this thought lies a good intention—or rather lots of good intentions. The notion of the whole self variously captures the idea that people are more engaged in work if they believe in a firm’s purpose; that teams are more effective if colleagues understand each other; that people with different identities should feel comfortable in their own skins; that firms should care about and respond to issues that affect their staff’s well-being, from mental health to child care; and that leaders need to show some of their personal side to be connected with their staff. None of these things is silly. Many are in fact actively desirable. However, any idea that covers so much ground is bound to have holes in it, and this one would make a colander blush.Most obviously, no one should actually bring their whole selves to work. People are a melange of traits, some good and some bad. Many of them should be kept well away from the workplace. Your professional self displays commitment to the job and eats lunch at a desk. Your whole self is planning the next holiday and binges ice cream on the sofa. Your professional self makes presentations to the board and says things like: “Let’s get the analytics team to kick the tyres on this.” Your whole self cannot operate a toaster and says things like: “Has anyone seen my socks?” Pretending to be someone you are not is not a problem; it’s essential. For the same reasons, your employer may say it wants you to bring your whole self to work but doesn’t really mean it. A company is a hierarchy, in which even the most understanding bosses expect people to follow orders rather than their hearts. Say something that causes your firm embarrassment, as a senior hsbc executive did last month by making fun of apocalyptic warnings about climate change, and you will end up being disowned rather than lauded for authenticity. This column is named for a short story by Herman Melville, in which the eponymous character speaks his own truth by saying “I would prefer not to” to every single request made of him by his manager. He ends up dead. Any job that involves a uniform is by definition asking employees to subsume their personalities, not express them. When times are tough or performance is shoddy, an employee is an individual second and a line item in the budget first. If the circumstances require it, he will be asked to leave and take his whole self with him. As a result, the bringing of whole selves is carefully circumscribed. Candidates for jobs typically feel obliged to tell interviewers a few things about themselves in order to show that they are rounded human beings. Without fail those things are along the lines of “I have a dog called Casaubon, run a local food bank and love to go sea kayaking.” They are never “I hate animals, exercise and my fellow humans.” Lots of executives, too, deal in whole-selfery of a very synthetic kind. As a rule of thumb, if you are taking advice on how to be authentic, you are not being authentic. And if you are scheduling meetings in order to display vulnerability, you are mainly showing controlled cunning. One of the attractions of the workplace is that it is a place where there is a shared endeavour. That endeavour is called “work”. You need to be friendly to be a good colleague, but you don’t need to be friends. You need to be capable of empathy, but you don’t need to constantly emote. You have to turn up, try hard and play your part. You have to bring your role self. Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work:The power of small gestures (May 28th)Making brainstorming better (May 21st)The woolliest words in business (May 14th) More

IOT: Powering the digital economy

“We are talking about the energy transition, but it is … a prerequisite of a much bigger transition, which is the ecological one,” Andrea Illy, chairman of illycaffè, says.
Business practices connected to the idea of a circular economy have gained traction in recent years.
For Dickon Pinner, senior partner and co-leader of McKinsey Sustainability, nature is “like the balance sheet of the planet.”

A hot cup of coffee is the perfect start to the day for millions of people around the world. But when taking that first sip, it’s easy to forget how much work goes into bringing it to the table.
From the farmers cultivating and harvesting coffee plants, to milling and roasting, many crucial and labor-intensive steps are involved in coffee production. Like all industrial processes, it often uses a lot of land, water and energy.

This means there’s an increasing amount of scrutiny surrounding the sustainability of the journey from bean to cup — something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the bosses of the some of the world’s biggest coffee companies.
“We need to change our development model,” Andrea Illy said at the World Economic Forum earlier this month, referencing the “extractive model” of the present and past.
The chairman of Italian coffee giant Illycaffe, who was talking in broad terms, said the current system was depleting natural resources and producing an “infinite” amount of residues.
These were “polluting and accumulating in the biosphere, eventually suffocating it and preventing the biosphere to self-regenerate,” he added.
“The idea is we need to shift this model and create a new ‘bio-mimic’ model, working like nature, using only renewables … possibly solar.”

“We are talking about the energy transition, but it is … a prerequisite of a much bigger transition, which is the ecological one,” Illy also told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick on the panel at WEF.

Read more about energy from CNBC Pro

Illy’s argument feeds into the notion of the circular economy. The idea has gained traction in recent years, with many companies around the world looking to operate in ways that minimize waste and encourage re-use. 
Also speaking on the WEF panel was Maria Mendiluce, CEO of the We Mean Business Coalition. She stressed that ideas connected to circularity were not restricted to food production.
“I don’t think we have exploited, fully, the power of [the] circular economy — also in the industrial systems,” she said, adding that now was “the right moment to do so.”
Mendiluce went on to discuss the rare materials required for the transition to a more sustainable economy, with specific reference to original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, such as automakers.

More from CNBC Climate:

“If you talk to the OEMs, [the] circular economy is front and center on the strategy, because we need to recycle these materials — cobalt, nickel, etcetera — to be able to provide the batteries for the future,” she said.
Slowly but surely, companies are developing processes to recycle materials used in technologies crucial to the energy transition.
Last November, for instance, Swedish battery firm Northvolt said it had produced its first battery cell with what it described as “100% recycled nickel, manganese and cobalt.”
And a few months earlier, in June 2021, General Electric’s renewables unit and cement giant Holcim struck a deal to explore the recycling of wind turbine blades.
Returning to the theme of how the natural world could influence business practices, Dickon Pinner, senior partner and co-leader of McKinsey Sustainability, described nature as “like the balance sheet of the planet.”
“There are so many dependencies of the real economy on nature that many companies [and] governments have not yet fully realized,” he said. “The interdependence is … so great.” More

“When i took this job in 2008, I hoped I would be in this role for five years,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg on her Facebook page on June 1st. With that the chief operating officer of Meta, the social network’s parent company, announced her resignation. The year she joined Facebook made $272m in revenue. Last year turnover reached $118bn. Aside from Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s boss, no one has done more to build the tech behemoth, which boasts more than 2bn users around the world. In 2008 Facebook was in its infancy. Mr Zuckerberg, then 23 years-old, had no concrete plans to make it a viable business. Ms Sandberg had been running Google’s advertising operation, after stints at McKinsey, a consultancy, and America’s Treasury. A compulsive organiser, she was brought on to provide adult supervision. She “handles things I don’t want to”, Mr Zuckerberg once said. That included commercial strategy and staffing, as well as politics.Ms Sandberg flourished in the role. She masterminded the firm’s growth as an ad platform. By 2010 Facebook was profitable. Last year only Alphabet, Google’s parent, earned more advertising revenue. One of her books, “Lean In”, became synonymous with female empowerment in the boardroom. All this helped cement her place as Mr Zuckerberg’s second-in-command.But over the past few years speculation grew that the relationship was fraying. Mr Zuckerberg apparently blamed Ms Sandberg for a scandal which involved the sharing of Facebook users’ private More