So what does this investment mean for them and what can they do with that? And how do they expect or plan to grow?

Yeah, they had customers, they had revenue, and more importantly, they had profits, which is not something that you often put in the same sentence with startups and A.I., So they had a real advantage there.

Even though they're profitable, they do need capital.

And in large part, that's because they also provide hardware.

You see this with high-end software companies, for instance.

The product that they've got is largely software, but it's much easier, particularly when you're a startup, to put that software on a known piece of hardware.

and send it off to the customer, and they can get up and running sort of right out of the box.

What do you think this bodes for other companies that are doing similar things in Chicago or other startups and our tech industry writ large here in the city and, of course, in the state with major universities that I'm sure have students who are having their ideas about getting into this sector and maybe want to stay here?

Like, I wasn't aware where that volume of spending was happening strictly within one particular group of immigrants.

It's an eye-popping number for sure.

You know, $1.26 billion is a lot of money.

But, you know, Cook County is the economic engine for the metro area.

So, you know, there's roughly $120 billion in annual retail sales in Cook County, which is more than half the total for the metro area.

In context, that gives you some idea of what we're talking about.

As it relates to the who and how much, the researchers, what they did was they identified neighborhoods or areas in the city and in the suburbs of Cook County.

How confident are the researchers that just the immigration enforcement rather than those other levers was the primary driver of that drop?

How did, how did we get to, to right now?

Well, over the last, you know, basically the last decade, uh, there had been some unrelated things that have happened with freight railroads in Chicago.

You know, you've had some intermodal yards, you know, which are the growth sector of, of, uh, of freight transportation, which are, you know, um, you know, boxcars come in on rail, get offloaded, put on trucks, and two of the biggest yards are out near Joliet.

Well, uh, the Union Pacific a few years ago opened a new intermodal yard out in Joliet, which meant a whole bunch of the freight traffic they had on a line that's, you know, west, you know, sort of west of downtown.

That suddenly freed up a stretch of rail.

And a similar, similar thing happened with Canadian National several years ago.

They bought the, uh, the AJ&E, which allowed them, you know, which i- is, is further out and th- that rail line, you know, basically runs through the suburbs.

Yeah

And do you have a sense of the potential economic impact of this new plan in terms of jobs and dollar amounts?

Well, they're going to invest much more than they thought they would.

The last announcement that they had about a year ago when they said they wanted to start making... jeeps there again they were going to invest 600 billion they're going to invest 800 now they didn't specify job number uh this time but the last time uh when they the last announced they made they were looking at more than 3 000 jobs when this plant got idled several years ago they were down to about 1200 So it looks like potentially you're going to end up with more jobs that feel potentially a little more stable, a little more secure for that plant.

And it's, you know, one of just a handful of auto plants that Illinois still has.

You know, there's the plant here in Belvedere.

There's the Ford plant on the south side of Chicago.

And then obviously there's Rivian down in Normal.

Any comment from him on this new move?

So what kind of statements are you hearing from companies that perhaps might sort of offer a tell into how they're thinking about ongoing tariff discussions?

Well, at the same time, they're reporting the sort of one-time windfalls.

It gave them a meaningful boost to their profit margin, but it does give you a sense of how much the tariffs, not only in just absolute amounts, hundreds of millions of dollars, but also that it gives you a window into just how the tariffs flow through for companies, particularly very large, very diverse companies that source materials from all over the world.

But the other thing that you're seeing here is at the same time that the companies are disclosing the tariff refund, They're also still telling their investors that they expect more tariff costs because while these tariffs were invalidated, the tariffs have completely gone away.

In fact, there was another round of tariffs announced a couple of weeks ago.

So, you know, companies, in some cases, at the same time, you know, Caterpillar's a good example of this.

At the same time, they were reporting almost $400 million in refunds.

And then there was also a

Those seem like pretty steadily busy airports.

They are.

And that's, you know, slight blips in the amount of passenger traffic.

You know, what I really focused on was looking at sort of the ranking of what that list looks like now versus what it looked like in 2019.

And Hartsfield, even though they had a slight decline in traffic last year, they're still down about 4% in terms of passengers from 2019, but they're still far and away the largest.

That's not going to change.

The thing that really jumped out at me was Dallas and Denver, Dallas-Fort Worth and Denver airports.

Hmm.

What did he have to say?

Well, he'd really like the legislature to take it up potentially in the veto session.

You know, they didn't get the, you know, he had pitched this in his budget address in February.

it didn't get traction and didn't get, you know, didn't get voted on, didn't end up in the final budget package.

So, you know, now he's talking about just having DCO by executive order pause approval of these applications.

And there's been some question about whether or not he has the authority to do it or whether it requires the legislature.

And, you know, clearly he'd, he'd like to have the legislature act on it.

And John, did you hear anything more on that? I know the governor, of course, talking about it this week, but any indication something's happening soon?

What is that range that we're generally seeing for these top leaders and top CEOs, dollar signs wise?

The top CEOs are, you know, sort of at the very top of the food chain are, you know, sort of 20 million and up.

And the people at the very top of the list, you know, before it was, you know, sort of crossing that 30 million barrier was very significant.

You know, recently you've had some CEOs, including Eric, you know, north of 40 million.

The average pay for a CEO of a Fortune 500 company is about 18 million dollars a year and again they you know as we talked about with the um the average paycheck that these guys are taking home is somewhere around a million two to a million five is sort of what you see and a lot of that has to do with some you know with some tax laws one thing that will skew this list that you will see from year to year is when either a company goes public or a CEO retires, you tend to see, you know, large, um, large, uh, stock payouts.

And that happened this year.

Um, Marcus Limones, uh, who retired as the longtime CEO of camping world, you know, uh, generally not somebody who's, uh, who's on this list very often turn, you know, turned up at number five and large, uh, part because of, you know, uh, a big, uh, stock grant as he exited camping world.

What does it help us better understand about companies?

Okay.

The advantage of it being an eight-story or a multi-story building is that the physical design and layout of the place allows you to go through his career and his presidency in sort of natural stages and blocks.

If this had been laid out like a, you know, traditional sort of one or two-story museum, it would be very, very different.

But the height actually really works to their advantage in, in multiple ways.

It allows you to experience and progress through the museum itself and the experience.

And one thing that you get at the, at the end of the rainbow, as it were, the, at the end of the tour, you know, there's this amazing sky room, the top of that building.

And, you know, one of the things that makes it really distinctive is it's the tallest building in the area.

Yeah.

And, and talk to me about how other large cities fared.

Well, in our case, Chicago saw a very slight gain, and I mean very slight.

You know, it's like five thousand people.

But, you know, the two cities that most look like us, New York and Los Angeles, actually lost a little bit of population.

And mostly that is reflective of the fact that, you know, Chicago is one of those big cities that gets a lot of international immigration purely based on size and, and trad- and, and history.

New York and Los Angeles, given where they're located, are even more influenced by international immigration, so they, you know, they really felt the sting.

Um, Chicago's international immigration was down a little more than half, but it was down even more than that for both New York and LA.

Overall, what would you say the, the census data kind of tells you in terms of, like, the story of Chicago and the people that live there, uh, city and suburbs?