Dan Costa
Verified- Chief Content Officer and Editorial Director, Worth Magazine
- Chief Content Officer and Editorial Director, Techonomy
New York, Tucson
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Chief Content Officer, Worth Media Group — Worth, Techonomy, Power 100. Wealth, the advisor economy, AI. Former EiC, PCMag. Machined: machined.substack.com
Articles by Dan Costa
Who Pays for AI’s Inputs?
Bill Gross opened his Techonomy 26 talk by asking the room to remember Napster. Then he gave the date his own version of that story began. “It was December 27th of 2023, almost three years ago, and when the New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright theft of their content, I started thinking that this was very much like that Napster moment for music.” Gross founded ProRata, a company built to make AI companies pay publishers every time their work shows up in an answer. His case is arithmetic.
GPS: The 1.6 Billion-a-Day Utility Nobody Owns
Earlier this year at Techonomy 26, I asked Luca Ferrara to explain the technology that lets a trade clear between Chicago and London. Ferrara runs AQNav at SandboxAQ. He started with the clocks. “GPS is an invisible technology, literally and figuratively, to many people,” he said.
Who Does Your Agent Work For?
On September 8, Meta released an AI agent called Muse. You store your logins in a vault. Then you watch its browser book your haircut, order your DoorDash, reserve the table, and hold the line with the airline. Forty days later, it had 10 million U.S. downloads, a milestone only 11 other apps have hit, most of them games. It has held the top spot on Apple’s App Store almost every day since launch and on Google Play for a month.
Hike, Hedge, and Hold On
The Fed is raising rates again, bond yields are at their highest in years, and the AI build-out has sparked the largest surge in capital spending in US history. That was the picture from Atlas Merchant Capital’s fourth-quarter economic update, hosted by Worth chairman Jim McCann with Atlas CEO Bob Diamond and chief economist Larry Kantor. Kantor’s starting point is that tariffs, reduced immigration, and an energy shock have not dented demand.
The Cheapest Longevity Drug Is a Mindset
The longevity business has a pricing problem, and it isn’t the one you think. Walk the floor of any executive wellness conference, and you can watch capital move in real time. Continuous glucose monitors on people who don’t have diabetes. Full-body MRIs marketed as annual maintenance. Cold plunges, red-light beds, NAD drips, whole-genome sequencing, $40,000 diagnostic memberships that promise to catch the tumor before it announces itself.
Palms Down: Laurie Tisch and the Art of Giving to the Public
Laurie Tisch has been given the key to New York City twice. She says she can’t take credit for the first. “It was when the New York Giants won the Super Bowl,” she told me at Groundbreaking Women earlier this month. “We were New York Giants owners.” She claims the second was in December 2018.
Techonomy 26 Preview: When Intelligence Becomes Infrastructure
Techonomy 26 is built around a single idea: intelligence is no longer a feature; it’s part of our personal and professional operating systems. You don’t adopt it. You operate inside it. That’s the frame I’ll open with at noon, and every session after that tests it against something real — a balance sheet, a clinic, a payments rail, a power grid. Here’s what I’m most looking forward to. Jack Hidary opens the day. Every model in this room has learned the world from text scraped off the internet.
Are Sleep Trackers Making Your Sleep Worse? What Experts Say
It takes nerve to program a sleep panel right after lunch, which is exactly what I did at Living Well 2026. I said so from the stage, and the room laughed because half of them were fighting fatigue. There was coffee in the hallway. We survived. Then I did what everyone in that room does every morning. I checked my Oura ring. It had flagged my sleep midpoint the night before. Not the hours. The hours were fine. The midpoint had drifted off my baseline, and the ring wanted me to know.
Fly Private in 2026: Fractional, Jet Card, or Charter?
Before Greg Raiff built Elevate Aviation Group, he was an 18-year-old trying to get 472 students to the Bahamas on a chartered plane. The job was purely transactional: point A to point B, lowest possible price. What he remembers nearly four decades later is how fast the whole thing could fall apart when something went wrong, and how little anyone cared about the price at that moment. “In aviation people are not really buying the flight itself,” Raiff says. “They are buying certainty.
10 Top Executive Wellness Programs for Peak Performance and Health Management
For decades, the American office has been defined by a relentless, grind-it-out culture. In this world, ambition is a performance: staying up the latest, sleeping the least, and being the first to reply to an email at 3:00 a.m. These have been the hallmarks of success. The results of this pace are well-documented. According to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, half of U.S. workers and 40% of employees worldwide report feeling significant daily stress—the highest levels on record.
Intelligence at Scale: What We’re Doing at Techonomy 26
Every conference this year has asked whether the technology works. That question is settled. The more useful one—the one worth clearing a day for—is what happens to your company, your industry, and the institutions meant to govern all of it now that it does. That’s the premise of Techonomy 26, which we’re holding on Tuesday, October 6, in San Francisco. The theme is Intelligence at Scale: what changes when AI stops being a feature and becomes infrastructure. The distinction matters.
The End of the Average Patient
Dr. Jay Luthar described the flaw in modern medicine in a single sentence, and once you hear it, you can’t unhear it. “The traditional medical model to this point has used population studies to find what the average person responds to and then fits an individual to an average,” he said. “Whereas we know that every individual is not an average, but very individual.” Tell me if this sounds familiar. Your doctor treats you with drugs validated on a population you don’t belong to.
Inside The Glenrothes: Speyside’s Invitation-Only Distillery
We were 30 minutes late for our whisky tasting. In our defense, the name is everywhere in this corner of Speyside. We stopped at the Glen of Rothes Trout Fishery. We pulled up to the gates of Rothes House. The town itself is called Rothes, and somewhere inside it, unmarked and unbothered, is The Glenrothes distillery. It was 10 in the morning. Kat Robertson, the brand’s guide and brand education manager, met us at the distillery and drove us up the hill to a natural spring overlooking the town.
Everyone Hates Data Centers
Americans agree on almost nothing, but everyone hates a data center. They are big, ugly buildings that hold few human jobs after the initial construction. But the real issue isn’t aesthetic; it is the fact that the cost of these centers in water usage, energy rates, and even tax breaks is often falling on average Americans. The result is a political consensus it would be woulda shame to waste on simple NIMBY-ism.
Don’t Mistake Wealth for Legacy
In September 2008, Robert Balentine was fly fishing in northern Mongolia when Lehman Brothers collapsed. He had already built one wealth management firm from nothing—founded with his father in 1987, grown to $4 billion in assets, sold to Wilmington Trust in 2002—and now the crisis was tearing through the institution that had bought it.
Synthetic Expertise: It is A Great Time to Be a Know-It-All
In July 2025, venture capitalist Jason Lemkin spent a week building software. Lemkin founded SaaStr; he is not an engineer. For a few days, that didn’t matter. Replit’s AI agent wrote the code, ran the tests, and deployed the app while Lemkin described his vision in plain English. He blogged about the dopamine hit of shipping to production. He called it the most addictive thing he’d touched since childhood. Then the agent went rogue.
AI in Wealth Management: What 10,000 Wealthy Investors Told HSBC
Artificial intelligence has quietly become a standard tool in the affluent investor’s kit. What it has not become is the decision-maker. That is the central finding of new global research from HSBC, which surveyed nearly 10,000 affluent and high-net-worth individuals across 10 markets. Finance and investment now rank as the single most common use of AI among respondents—73% reach for it there, ahead of work and career (62%) and personal development (60%).
Stop Asking What AI Automates. Ask Who It Hires
The dynamo is having a moment. I’ve heard the story of the electrified factory three times in the last week, twice from a conference stage and once in a pitch deck. Joe Reis told it well on his Substack in April. The moral is always the same: factories bolted electric motors onto steam-era buildings and got nothing, so don’t bolt AI onto steam-era workflows. Recognizing this can empower you to lead change effectively.
Peninsula's Long Game | Worth
In January 2022, Hong Kong billionaire Sir Michael Kadoorie paid nearly double the market price to increase his family’s stake in The Hong kong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited from approximately 60% to 72.4%. This $337 million investment underscores their commitment to the company’s long-term growth and strategic positioning, especially as the stock surged 20% on the news despite years of trading at a discount to net asset value. The Kadoories are doubling down on their vision for Peninsula Hotels.
The Confidence Gap
The Milken Institute Global Conference convened in Beverly Hills last week with the Strait of Hormuz still closed, Brent crude trading above $100 a barrel, and the U.S.-Iran conflict in its third month of unresolved hostilities. By the time the conference ended on May 6, the S&P 500 had closed at a record. Three trading days later, it printed another one. The Nasdaq did the same.
Where Women’s Health Breaks
Tell a cardiologist that a 45-year-old woman is having heart palpitations, and the differential moves fast. Heart attack. Arrhythmia. Anxiety. The cardiologist will almost certainly not ask whether she has been bleeding heavily for months and is anemic. Which means a company that built a diagnostic for that pathway has nowhere obvious to sell it.
Welcome to the Biohacking Economy
The wearable buzzes at 7 a.m. with a recovery score. The blood-test dashboard refreshes overnight with new biomarkers. The supplement stack on the kitchen counter has been scanned and rated against a database of 160,000 products. The longevity clinic appointment is on the calendar for Tuesday. Four data streams, one consumer. None of it runs through insurance.
Vivienne Ming Wants to Make You a Cyborg
Vivienne Ming has built AI for refugee reunifications, autism communication tools, and an early-warning system for manic episodes. She has also built one for her son. When he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 2011, the standard of care was a finger-prick test strip and a paper log. So she wrote a machine learning model that predicts his blood sugar one to three hours out, hooked it into his medical gear, and ran it.
Generative Ghosts Have Landlords
In an Arizona courtroom last May, a 37-year-old Army veteran named Christopher Pelkey forgave the man who killed him. He did it on video. He had been dead for three and a half years. Pelkey’s sister, working with her husband, had built an AI avatar of her brother’s face, voice, and mannerisms to deliver his own victim impact statement at the sentencing of the man convicted of his manslaughter.
The Accelerationist and the Steward
There is nothing quite like sitting in a room with 6,000 AI builders to get high on the AI supply. The hallways at HumanX, the AI conference held in San Francisco last month, were full of executives swapping war stories about agent deployments, sovereign cloud deals, and the latest model benchmarks. The mood, on the whole, was bullish. Assuming the Artisan’s digital billboards that literally say “Stop Hiring Humans” are something to be bullish about.
Six Takeaways from HumanX
Tech conferences always promise a glimpse into the future, and the recent HumanX in San Francisco was no exception. More than 6,000 attendees filled the Moscone Center, paid for by hundreds of sponsors, a solid percentage of which are looking to be acquired in the next 12 months.The conference bills itself as pitch-free and vendor-neutral, and mostly delivers on that. Fei-Fei Li and Andrew Ng anchored the practitioner stages.
Brandon Steiner Turned a $4,000 Bet Into a Memorabilia Empire—Then Lost It All
Brandon Steiner has always been in the business of trust. Not sports. Not memorabilia. Trust. In a market where a signed Derek Jeter jersey can be worth $5,000 or $50, depending on who you ask, the real commodity has never been the object—it’s the confidence that the object is what it claims to be. Steiner figured that out early, in Brooklyn, with $4,000 and a conviction that someone needed to bring order to what was, at the time, little more than a hobby. What followed was a $50 million empire.
The DAF Giving Machine
Donor-advised funds are having a moment, and not everyone is sure what to make of it. The assets sitting in DAFs have grown past $250 billion. Payout rates—long a target of criticism from the nonprofit sector—are starting to move. And the platforms built to manage those funds are no longer niche products for wealthy foundations. They’re becoming part of how financial advisors talk to clients about their money.
The Never Ending Pivot to Video
I’ve been in the media business for a very long time, but I’ve never been a video-first journalist. My instincts have always leaned toward reporting, writing, and structuring ideas in a way that unfolds over paragraphs, not frames. Video has been part of the mix, increasingly so over the years, but it was never the foundation. That’s why Jon Youshaei’s session at SXSW felt less like another “pivot to video” talk and more like a masterclass in how the medium actually works now.
The $399 Blood Test That Promised to Optimize My Future
One gray December morning in Manhattan, I sat in a conference room as a phlebotomist filled eight vials with my blood. She worked quickly, clearly experienced. For her, it was just another day. For me, it was a test—not only of my blood, but of a new kind of medicine. Superpower gave me its $399 advanced blood panel for free. The offer was simple: over 100 biomarkers, analyzed by software, compared against “optimal” ranges rather than general population averages.
Augmentation Is the New Productivity
My social feed is filled with ads telling me “Most people still use AI like Google….” and then they try to sell me some online course or collection of prompts. But there is truth to the cliche. Here at SXSW, the distinction between the AI-augmented and the AI-clueless keeps coming up. “Most people use AI to do what they already know,” Brian Solis, digital anthropologist and head of global innovation at ServiceNow, said on stage at SXSW this week in Austin, Texas.
The Electric Screwdriver Economy
Matthew Prince has a way of explaining technological shifts that makes the scale of change immediately clear. Speaking with Bob Safian at SXSW this weekend, the co-founder of Cloudflare described the AI transition in blunt operational terms, likening the mass commercial availability of LLMs to electric screwdrivers. “Somewhere around November (2025),” he said, “the electric screwdrivers got really good.” The metaphor reflects what is happening inside companies across industries.
The Pentagon vs. Anthropic
The clash between Anthropic and the U.S. government is not really about a single AI company or a single defense contract. It is about who ultimately controls the most powerful general-purpose technology of the decade: the state, the companies building it, or the citizens who must live with the consequences. And the problem cut across our conventionally polarized political climate.
Will Data Centers Overload The Power Grid?
“Energy is the only universal currency; one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done.” –Vaclav Smil. For years, we thought AI was software—an abstraction floating above the physical world. Write the code, design better models, fabricate more advanced processors, and watch the transformation unfold. The capital was there. The talent was there. The so-called Magnificent Seven are spending on an epic scale to build it. Genius and money, however, are not enough. The constraint is power.
AI Rivalry: Anthropic and OpenAI Clash at Super Bowl
When Anthropic and OpenAI took their rivalry to Super Bowl LX last week, it marked a turning point in the saga of artificial intelligence in American life — not just as a technology, but as a cultural, political, and regulatory flashpoint. For years, tech companies have quietly entered the political arena, but Sunday night on national television signaled something more: the battle for public perception had become fully politicized.
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Davos Insights: Volatility and Uncertainty Persist
A quiet consensus emerged from a series of conversations with wealth managers, institutional advisors, and investors in Davos this year. The anxiety wasn’t theatrical. There was no collapse narrative, no breathless forecasting. Instead, there was a shared recognition that volatility has become persistent, that the geo-economic environment is shifting faster than fundamentals. Put simply, the old maps no longer reflect the new world we find ourselves in.
Resilience in Supply Chains: A Key to Economic Power
For years, supply chain management was considered important but unremarkable. The pandemic, trade wars, export controls, sanctions, climate shocks, and competition over AI, energy, and critical minerals have changed this. At Davos, it was clear that supply chains are now central to economic power and a significant source of systemic risk. This was the central theme in my discussion with Brandon Daniels, CEO of Exiger.
How AI Is Changing the Dynamics of Cyber Risk
At Davos this year, the conversation about artificial intelligence and cybersecurity finally moved out of the server room and into the boardroom. The shift was clear at the AXIS Capital breakfast and panel on AI and Cyber Risk, hosted by Vince Tizzio, President and CEO of AXIS, with Dan Costa, Chief Content Officer and Editor-in-Chief of Worth Media.
Fusion Fund's Zhang on AI's Geopolitical Shift
For a decade, venture capital treated AI as a global abstraction: data flowed freely, models scaled endlessly, and cloud boundaries were someone else’s problem. That assumption is broken. In Davos this year, Lu Zhang, founder and managing partner of Fusion Fund, described a world where AI adoption is increasingly shaped by national rules, regional trust, and energy constraints—not just technical performance.
What CMOs & CCOs Talk About In Davos
At the Worth & OPR Brand Stewardship Breakfast in Davos—hosted with Loreal Lynch (Jasper) and Chris Foster (Omnicom Public Relations)—the table wasn’t doing “AI hype.” It was doing operations: what’s working, what’s breaking, and where the friction actually lives when you try to move from pilot projects to enterprise behavior. The opening framing captured the mood shift from a year ago. As one host put it, “Last year, I kind of felt like it was Groundhog Day around this AI brand.
Cybersecurity Outlook 2026: A Transformation in Trust
For a long time, cybersecurity occupied an unusual moral space in global affairs. It was adversarial, but bounded. Governments spied, criminals stole, and corporations patched. Yet there lingered a sense—more custom than law—that certain systems were sacrosanct. Power grids. Financial plumbing. Hospitals. Aviation. Cyber was a competition by other means, but it was not supposed to be catastrophic. That assumption has been weakening for years.
AI's Future Hinges on Global Coordination at Davos
In a few weeks, I will make my fourth trip to Davos for the annual World Economic Forum. Undoubtedly, AI will dominate the agenda, but not because of better models or larger valuations. The real question hanging over Davos this year is whether a technology that depends on radical global coordination can keep scaling in a world that’s a politically and economically is becomeing more divided.
Cybin's Modified Psilocybin Shows Promise in Treating Depression
In a world saturated with antidepressants and marginal gains, Doug Drysdale is betting on a radical reset. As CEO of Cybin, a clinical-stage psychedelic therapeutics company, Drysdale is leading one of the boldest pharmaceutical experiments in mental health: using modified psychedelic compounds not just to ease symptoms, but to potentially cure depression.
Emma Ponsonby Redefines Luxury Travel with Satopia
For years, luxury travel followed a familiar script: privacy, access, and comfort, delivered at scale for those who could afford it. That model still exists, but it no longer explains how many wealthy travelers are choosing to spend their time. Increasingly, the question isn’t where to go or how exclusive the experience will be, but what it offers beyond ease and efficiency. Emma Ponsonby, co-founder and CEO of Satopia, has built her company around that shift.
How AI Video Is Reshaping Media Production Costs
AI video has reached the point where the demos no longer matter. What matters now is economics. At Techonomy 2025, I moderated two conversations that arrived at the same conclusion from different directions. One focused on synthetic talent and AI-driven media production. The other examined how enterprises are using AI not to replace workers, but to make sense of overwhelming volumes of information—especially video.
How AI Video Is Reshaping Media Production Costs
AI video has reached the point where the demos no longer matter. What matters now is economics. At Techonomy 2025, I moderated two conversations that arrived at the same conclusion from different directions. One focused on synthetic talent and AI-driven media production. The other examined how enterprises are using AI not to replace workers, but to make sense of overwhelming volumes of information—especially video.
Holman: Silicon Valley's Focus on Software Is Misplaced
Pablos Holman isn’t interested in incremental innovation or digital distractions. In a wide-ranging Techonomy keynote, he argued that Silicon Valley has spent decades solving the wrong problems—optimizing software while neglecting the physical systems that power modern life. From energy and cement to shipping and nuclear power, Holman argues that the next era of progress depends on “deep tech”: complex, expensive, unglamorous technologies that operate at planetary scale—and actually matter.
Holman: Silicon Valley's Focus on Software Is Misplaced
Pablos Holman isn’t interested in incremental innovation or digital distractions. In a wide-ranging Techonomy keynote, he argued that Silicon Valley has spent decades solving the wrong problems—optimizing software while neglecting the physical systems that power modern life. From energy and cement to shipping and nuclear power, Holman argues that the next era of progress depends on “deep tech”: complex, expensive, unglamorous technologies that operate at planetary scale—and actually matter.
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