The World's Most Powerful Women | How CFOs Can Tackle Cybersecurity | Facebook's Antitrust Gauntlet

Plus: The World’s Most Powerful Women

Last week was quite a week here at Forbes, as we engaged CxOs and entrepreneurs alike in inspiring content and conversations from and about some of the world’s most innovative leaders, from the Most Powerful Women’s list to the Power Women’s,  CIO Next and CMO summits, and to the spotlighting of our 50>50 platform—all following the previous week’s launch celebrating 2021’s 30 Under 30 listers.

Conversations with Simone Biles, Melinda Gates, Mellody Hobson, Megan Rapinoe and Tracee Ellis Ross and Glennon Doyle at the Power Women’s Summit, as well as with Robert Downey Jr. at the CIO Summit and some of the most influential marketers from the world’s largest brands at the CMO Summit, enabled us all to regard and deconstruct the massive shifts made in 2020 and think to the year ahead and lay the new paths that will lead to collective success.

This digest of Forbes content is your weekly touchpoint as you negotiate internal, external and cultural factors. We hope you find it useful, and let us know what else you’d like to see here.

Have a good week.

Comings & Goings

Starbucks Vice Chair Mellody Hobson will replace retiring Chair Myron Ullman in March, making her the only Black female chair of an S&P 500 company. Hobson, the co-CEO of asset management firm Ariel Investments, has been on Starbucks’ board for 15 years.

Novant Health has become the latest business to formalize the role of chief transformation officer, appointing Angela Yochem, its current chief digital officer, as its first.

Connection & Collaboration

To the untrained eye, the roles of CFO and CMO couldn’t be more different: One deals with the financial calculus of running a business, the other with managing the perception of the brand. Both roles have expanded greatly, and in ways that have made them overlap significantly.

As businesses’ technology departments transition from supporting roles to key competencies, CIOs should pay particular attention to financial reporting. Tech can be used for accounting games—but that doesn’t mean it should be.

This year’s rapid shift to digital has proved a lifeline for many businesses, but it’s also exposed them to unprecedented risk. Forbes Senior Contributor Jeff Thomson spoke with Paul Auvil, the CFO of the cybersecurity software firm Proofpoint, about how finance chiefs can tackle digital security.

By The Numbers

46

The number of states that have filed antitrust lawsuits against Facebook.

Two of Facebook’s biggest coups of the last decade—acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp—may be coming back to haunt it. As of last Wednesday, 46 states and two territories have independently filed antitrust lawsuits against the social media giant, accusing it of monopolistic practices for acquiring rivals.

Policy & Trade

Despite important progress in vaccine approval in the U.S. (and some flashy news from Disney and Airbnb), the market closed last week on fairly sluggish terms. The reason: Brexit. Two steps forward, one step back.

Should President-elect Joe Biden expect a fraught relationship with the U.S.’s southern neighbor? Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has yet to acknowledge Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, likely a nod to his working relationship with President Donald Trump.

While a widely-available coronavirus vaccine may be around the corner, questions regarding how it will be administered are still up in the air. Is another crisis imminent?

The CxO Profile

Across Forbes