*By Conor White*
There are only three black chief executives of Fortune 500 companies, and that has to change, according to a CEO who knows something about breaking down racial barriers to the C-suite.
As CEO of Carnival Corporation, the largest cruise line in the world, Arnold Donald says that diversity is a valuable business strategy.
"For our communities to thrive, for our companies to thrive, we have to proactively engineer diversity of thinking into our companies," Donald said in an interview Thursday with Cheddar. "That's what I'm doing at Carnival, that's what I've done at other places, and the results speak for themselves."
In Donald's five years as chief executive of Carnival, its market cap has increase from $27 billion to $45 billion.
Despite living in the age of data gathering, machine learning, and social-media influencers, Donald said he still believes in Carnival's old-fashioned appeal.
"The most powerful marketing tool is word of mouth," he said. "We have a lot of people who cruise, as I mentioned 83 million passenger cruise days a year, nearly 13 million guests just on our ships, and if you know someone who went on a cruise, and you trust them, they're your most reliable resource."
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/carnival-corporation-ceo-talks-record-setting-year).
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Swedish buy now, pay later company Klarna is making its highly anticipated public debut on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, the latest in a run of high-profile initial public offerings this year. The offering priced at $40 Tuesday, above the forecasted range of $35 to $37 a share, valuing the company at more than $15 billion. The valuation easily makes Klarna one of the biggest IPOs so far in 2025, which has been one of the busier years for companies going public. Other popular IPOs so far this year include the design software company Figma and Circle Internet Group, which issues the USDC stablecoin..
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison wrested the title of the world’s richest man from longtime holder Elon Musk early Wednesday as stock in his software giant rocketed more than a third in a stunning few minutes of trading. That is according to wealth tracker Bloomberg. A college dropout, the 81-year-old Ellison is now worth $393 billion, Bloomberg says, several billion more than Musk, who had been the world’s richest for four years. The switch in the ranking came after a blockbuster earnings report from Oracle. Forbes still has Musk as the richest, however, valuing his private businesses much higher.
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Online broker Robinhood Markets will join the S&P 500 index Online broker Robinhood Markets will join the S&P 500 index as its stock rides higher on a cryptocurrency wave.
