Emma Burleigh
Emma Burleigh follows how work, wealth, and ambition intersect for Gen Z, high earners, and founders, using data, salary benchmarks, and executive voices to show who is thriving and who is under strain in the modern economy. She is a reporter at Fortune, covering success, careers, entrepreneurship, and personal finance. Her recent work concentrates on the entry-level job market, evolving workplace norms, and the ways young professionals and ultra-wealthy individuals navigate money, opportunity, and risk.
Gen Z’s uneasy entry into work
Burleigh devotes a large share of her reporting to the challenges facing Gen Z as they move from school into full-time employment. She has covered how, despite what she calls an “entry-level job apocalypse,” more than half of young professionals still plan to look for new roles before the end of the year, drawing on survey data from recruitment firms to show their focus on pay, benefits, flexibility, and growth prospects.
In another piece, she profiles a youth jobs program leader who is teaching Gen Z candidates basic workplace skills - from email etiquette to office behavior - to close gaps that employers say are holding them back. Burleigh also highlights smaller behavioral details that can derail interviews, such as recruiters’ warnings that showing up with iced coffee can signal a lack of professionalism, using these vignettes to illustrate generational friction over norms and expectations. Across these stories, she blends statistics on job searches and hiring with on-the-ground voices from program leaders, recruiters, and young workers to build a textured picture of Gen Z’s uneasy start in the workforce.
Executive and billionaire views on work, AI, and wealth
Another defining strand in Burleigh’s coverage is her use of CEOs, investors, and billionaires as sources to explain shifting ideas about work and success. She has written about a Cisco chief executive warning anxious workers that nothing will “feel good” in the near term as companies adapt to artificial intelligence, framing AI as a source of both disruption and opportunity in corporate life.
In a separate article, she reports on Uber’s leader describing a “really demanding” culture that expects employees to answer emails over the weekend, and openly discourages anyone looking to coast, using the interview to show how some high-growth firms set intense expectations for staff.
Burleigh’s coverage of a billionaire like David Rubenstein focuses less on his net worth and more on his advice, detailing his insistence that young workers master reading, writing, and persuasive speaking in the AI era. She also writes about the TikTok founder becoming Asia’s richest person and about self-made billionaires under 30 whose fortunes are tied to AI, using these stories to underline how technology is reshaping the upper reaches of wealth.
Across these pieces, Burleigh uses high-profile names and direct quotes to explore how power players think about labor, skills, and status in a changing economy.
High earners, lifestyle inflation, and the ultra-wealthy
Burleigh frequently looks past average workers to examine how those at the top earn and spend their money.
One widely shared story focuses on workers making more than $500,000 a year who are still living paycheck to paycheck, attributing their fragile finances to lifestyle inflation and chronic overspending. She has covered the ultra-wealthy Gen Z cohort, profiling money coaches who help young inheritors give away or manage the millions they have received, and charting how they reconcile privilege with a desire for impact.
Her articles also track the cultural side of wealth, reporting on rare Rolex auctions aimed at affluent collectors, multimillion-dollar penthouse sales by high-profile figures, and reading lists that banks say the top 1% should follow. These stories sit alongside pieces on high-paying roles - a Starbucks position advertised at a $360,000 salary, air traffic controller jobs with six-figure pay, and other roles that signal how far compensation can stretch in select niches. Taken together, Burleigh’s work on high earners and the ultra-wealthy emphasizes both the scale of modern fortunes and the behaviors, habits, and occasional anxieties that accompany them.
Entry-level opportunities, careers, and entrepreneurial paths
A consistent focus in Burleigh’s reporting is practical opportunity: where new graduates and early-career workers can build viable paths in a difficult market. She has covered LinkedIn data showing that real estate is one of the fastest-growing sectors for entry-level workers, profiling a young sales agent who earned $75,000 in his first year without a degree to illustrate how grit and self-discipline can turn a low-barrier field into a six-figure career.
In another piece, she reports that job seekers are sending out around 30% more applications than before the pandemic, and explores how platforms like LinkedIn are struggling to identify who can actually do the job as application volume surges. Burleigh regularly spotlights entrepreneurial and founder stories - chronicling how a small chocolate company grew into a major success by focusing on a few core priorities, how the founder of Insomnia Cookies navigated the solitude of building a business, and how an aviation executive turned a small family loan into a stake that eventually made him a billionaire.
She documents setbacks as training grounds, such as a founder who was fired three times in his twenties and now frames those experiences as crucial preparation for later achievements. These narratives, combined with her coverage of corporate culture and hiring trends, position Burleigh as a reporter who maps concrete routes through the labor market - from traditional jobs to entrepreneurial bets - rather than speaking about careers in the abstract.
Beat, format, and background
Within Fortune, Burleigh’s work sits on the success and careers desk, with personal finance, entrepreneurship, and workplace stories forming the core of her beat. Her articles typically blend reported features with clear takeaways, anchoring arguments in data from recruiters, banks, and platforms alongside quotes from executives, founders, and frontline workers. Before her current focus, she co-authored a daily newsletter for chief human resources officers, covering the workplace and the future of jobs in depth, which informs her continued attention to hiring, culture, and labor trends. She has also written long-form stories on culture, entertainment, and geopolitics for other publications, experience that shows in her ability to weave narrative detail into business and careers reporting without losing rigor. Across her body of work, Burleigh stands out for connecting macro themes - AI, wealth concentration, generational change - to specific stories about how real people work, earn, and adapt.
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Abigail Summerville
Abigail Summerville brings a leveraged finance background to her work covering consumer and retail mergers and acquisitions for Reuters. She reports on deal-making and capital markets across food, beverages, spirits, personal care, skincare, bath products and pet food. Her stories focus on transaction terms, ownership stakes, valuation, debt structures and funding sources. She often breaks news on potential sales and strategic reviews before formal announcements. Notable coverage includes Sazerac’s acquisition of Au Vodka, Blackstone’s exploration of a ZO Skin Health sale, CVC’s efforts to sell the parent of Dr Teal’s, and Colgate-Palmolive’s planned divestitures. She also covers consumer IPOs, including Jersey Mike’s and Black Rock Coffee, and co-writes Wall Street market reports. She joined Reuters in 2022 after three years covering leveraged finance and primary debt markets.
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Adekunle Agbetiloye is a senior reporter who connects capital flows, hard numbers and energy transition to the wider African economy. He works at Business Insider Africa, covering how money, technology and energy reshape economic growth, jobs and living conditions. His beat spans the African economy, technology, energy transition, climate change, startups and critical minerals, with a focus on concrete deals and data-led stories. He reports on African startup funding cycles, sovereign wealth funds, billionaire investors, multilateral and private investment programs, energy and power markets, Bitcoin mining, and economic policy choices. His work follows how governments finance spending, manage debt and respond to social pressure, and how sector snapshots and health and development metrics reveal links between macro indicators, corporate strategy and everyday costs.
Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
Alex Harring
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