• Lana Mountford, 74, moved from assisted living to a two-bedroom house due to rising costs.
• Mountford manages health issues with part-time care after leaving a costly assisted living facility.
• Maintaining independence, Mountford plans to live in her Bellingham home despite health challenges.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lana Mountford, 74, who lives in Bellingham, Washington. Mountford tried an assisted living facility that cost $7,000 a month, but it was too expensive and not a good fit. She purchased a small two-bedroom house in 2024 and lives independently with a part-time caregiver who charges $35 per hour. This interview is edited for length and clarity.

I was married before I was 20 and divorced in 1986. I've been on my own pretty much since then. I don't have any children and didn't go to college. I've saved for retirement since my 20s and managed my finances, working with financial planners later in my career.

I was a civilian working for the Department of Defense, specifically with the Army, before entering the private sector, moving around Silicon Valley as an IT professional. I retired in 2003 to go back to school and earned my undergraduate degree in music.

I started having some health issues after that, including a brain tumor, which was non-malignant but had some residual effects. I traveled for a while using money I set aside in a travel fund and was on a world cruise when the pandemic hit. My health issues worsened — I was having trouble breathing, and doctors found blood clots in both lungs — and that's what got me into assisted living in 2021.

Bellingham is a haven for retirees, so there are a lot of assisted living facilities up here. I found one three blocks from where I was living and told them I was looking for comfortable housing that would allow me to be relatively independent, while acknowledging that there are things that are really hard for me to do. I knew that as time went by, my situation would deteriorate, and I felt it would've been nice to be in a place where I could go from independent living to assisted living to memory care in the same facility.

I moved to an assisted living facility

I moved into a small one-bedroom apartment for $4,300 a month. My brother and his wife moved into the house I was living in. Within three months, it had gone up to $4,650. When I first moved in, I had two assigned caretakers who didn't really do a lot. They would pop in twice a day to see how things were going. They did my laundry, but I didn't have regular housekeeping. They had cable and WiFi, and you could get meals if you wanted. If there was a problem, you could pull a cord in your room.

A few weeks after I moved in, I had to have a major surgery, and I developed kidney damage.

I knew I needed something bigger than what I had, as I love to cook, so I moved into a two-bedroom apartment for about $5,500 a month. Over time, the facility began withdrawing services from independent residences. I had to do my own laundry and had no caretakers, while housekeeping was 15 minutes a week. I had hired somebody while I was still living there to come in a few times a week to help with laundry and other tasks that were difficult for me.

The monthly rent kept going up

Then the rent quickly went up to $6,850, and I decided to leave. This was about two years ago. I knew my savings would be drained if I had to keep paying that much, when I could live in my own place with a full kitchen. A house on the same street where I lived went on the market, so I put in an offer and bought it. My caretaker helped me pack and load everything.

The house is in a senior living development. Mine is the smallest in the area. It's 1,350 square feet with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a one-car garage. With guidance from my financial folks, I bought the home in cash for $580,000 after a few rounds of counteroffers. All the houses here were built for older residents, so they have grab bars, and everything is on one level. I don't have to walk too far to get from one room to another.

I do have house maintenance expenses and property taxes that I factor in. I'm paying $17,000 to replace the roof. My bills are minimal because I don't drive. My gas bill runs $60 a month, and my monthly electric bill ranges from $35 in winter to $100 in summer. I use Instacart, and my HOA handles all the yard work.

That same caretaker comes three days a week for a total of six hours. I pay her about $200 weekly. I plan to increase the hours as time goes on, which I expect will be a lot less than the amount I paid for assisted living. I'm a textbook introvert, so I didn't miss the social aspect. I need quiet time, and I have lots of books, arts, and crafts.

My health is getting worse

I have COPD and asthma, as well as high blood pressure that runs in my family. I've been dealing with chronic kidney disease, and I'm probably going to have to go on dialysis. Getting around is tricky because of severe osteoarthritis, so I use a roller. I've been able to keep the same doctors, which has been relieving.

My biggest fear is falling because I am not a small person. I'm still fiercely independent, and I want to do as much as I can for myself. My caretaker will show me a different way to do some tasks that are easier on my body. Life is full of all these little puzzles, and things that I used to be able to do very easily on my own have suddenly become very tricky. If she's either not certified to do something or doesn't feel comfortable, she knows people in town.

I'm also worried about needing to get additional equipment or redo parts of the home if I end up in a wheelchair. I do tend to put things off.

There are some silver linings

I know there isn't a history of dementia in my family, so I'm not too concerned about that. I don't think I'll need overnight care for a while. I feel good knowing my brother is around. He helps with a few things, such as taking out my trash in the morning.

I've told people I'm going to die in the house. It's a very pretty, safe area, right up against protective wetlands. Death is going to be the only thing that gets me out of here.

• SpaceX has allocated a larger-than-usual 30% of its IPO shares for retail investors.
• Skeptics say the company is leaning on day-trader interest to supplement institutional demand.
• The online retail community is wary of being left holding the bag if the offering goes south.

SpaceX is the most heavily anticipated IPO in years, if not ever. It will certainly be the biggest in terms of proceeds. It's also set to immediately make SpaceX one of the most valuable companies on earth.

Based on the level of excitement surrounding the offering, you'd think everyone is clamoring to buy the stock. As part of that hype, efforts have been made — both by SpaceX itself, and brokerages selling stock — to make shares as accessible as possible for everyday investors.

First, SpaceX announced that it's earmarked 30% of shares for retail, multiple times the usual average of 5-10%. Then, last week, Fidelity lowered the minimum account-size threshold from $100,000 to $2,000. It's all very nice of them. But why the generosity?

Here's the PR-aligned explanation: Both companies want to cut retail in on a generational opportunity for wealth accumulation. Plus, Elon Musk has long been a champion of the retail-investing populace. He's doing everyone a favor and throwing a bone to the day traders who trust his vision and have supported Tesla through thick and thin.

Here's how it's instead been interpreted by the retail-investor commentariat: They're capitalizing on trader excitement and relying on it to supplement demand from institutions. The heavy allocation is essentially setting up retail to hold the bag after longer-term shareholders take profits.

I'm not doing the cynicism justice. See for yourself (courtesy of associated Reddit threads):

Top comments on a r/TradingViewSignals post:

• "They are really trying to dump this bag on retail aren't they." — cat-from-the-future
• "Jesus this is a terrible sign" — UnrealizedLosses
• "Sucker born every minute." — Inevitable_Sweet_624
• "CANT WAIT TO SHORT THIS" — notboredatwork1

Top comments on a r/BetterOffline post:

• "Long story short, there aren't a lot of institutional buyers willing to buy in at 100x [price-sales] ratio." — FrankLucasV2
• "Retail traders will be the exit liquidity they are looking for." — tylern
• "Oh, they want the DUMB money." — brexdab
• "Just like every other crash, the retail investors will be left holding the bag…. Again." — ofork

You get the idea: The retail investors who frequent investing forums are suspicious of the motives behind the decision, and they aren't enthused about buying. They're adopting the age-old mindset that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Many of these same investors abide by a bear case that argues SpaceX's lack of profitability makes it unworthy of such a high valuation.

Another less sensationalist argument that's been popping up is that the immediate outsized allocation to retail will deprive the stock of buying power further down the line. Basically, it's expected that day traders will frontload their purchases.

The large chunk of shares dedicated to retail, combined with the inherent skepticism pervading the IPO discussion, is setting up SpaceX for a volatile debut. After all, mega-cap IPOs have been anything but a slam dunk in the modern tech era.

Back in 2012, Facebook (and its bankers) overestimated demand for the company's shares. The company's stock — also hobbled by tech issues on IPO day — took months to recover, and hardly looked like the juggernaut we know today.

But First Trade isn't here to make a call on how SpaceX will perform. Betting against Elon Musk has been a painful trade for a lot of people. I'm simply pointing out a potentially destabilizing market force that many investors are currently treating as a positive.

• At the beginning of this year, I moved from a small town to a big city.
• I was eager to meet new people and make friends in my new home.
• To expand my social circle, I said 'yes' to invitations and talked to strangers.

At the beginning of the year, my family moved from Bright in country Victoria to the Gold Coast, Australia's sixth biggest city. Our new home has a population of close to 740,000, so it was a bit of a shock to the system moving from a tiny town of fewer than 3,000 people to the "big smoke."

In Bright, we had a lovely group of friends, most of whom we met through school or work. On the Gold Coast, my husband and I were lucky enough to have a handful of friends from when we lived here 15 years ago, but I was also eager to meet new people and expand our social circle.

Putting yourself out there in your 40s can be daunting, but it's so worth the effort. After just a few months, I've cultivated a lovely new circle of friends from all different walks of life. Here's how.

I ignore the 'stranger danger' warning

From an early age, we're taught to be mindful of strangers, but truth be told, I love talking to random people. One of the things that makes me feel most alive is discovering different people's stories and perspectives about the world.

Since moving to the Gold Coast, I've made a habit of striking up conversations with strangers wherever I go. Gymnastics mums, parents at the playground, book lovers at the library. Often, we end up exchanging numbers and hanging out afterward. From these brief encounters, lovely friendships are blossoming.

I say 'yes' frequently

When life is busy with work and kids, it's tempting to decline social invites and chill on the couch. But if you want to build friendships, it helps to be a 'yes' person. Since moving to the Gold Coast, I've tried to say 'yes' to catching up whenever possible.

When a new friend invited me to her high tea birthday celebration at the last minute, I blew off work and went along. I ended up meeting some lovely new people.

When another friend invited me for an early morning hike, I was so tempted to decline and sleep in instead, but I fronted up and had the best time making memories in the sunshine.

I initiate catch-ups well in advance

One thing I've had to adjust to after moving from the country to the city is the busier pace of life. In the country, you could literally give people 10 minutes' notice that you were popping over for a tea, but here, people have really busy lives.

After moving to the Gold Coast, I started initiating get-togethers well in advance, often giving people four to six weeks' notice. That way, it's on the calendar and more likely to happen.

I'm leaning into my true, authentic self

Being my true, authentic self has helped me forge deeper connections with new friends. We often put up walls with unfamiliar people, but once you break them down, you open the door to more meaningful conversations and relationships.

As an example, one of the first group get-togethers I organized with a bunch of new friends was a woo-woo women's night. Everyone made a dream board for 2026, answered conversation cards, and shared their intentional "word" for 2026.

For some of the ladies, it was outside their comfort zone, but they were brave enough to open up. afterward, several remarked how much they enjoyed the experience, and it felt like it broke the ice on our new friendship journey.

It definitely takes time and energy to build a new social circle in your 40s, but once you find your people, it's so rewarding. One of the benefits of making new friends at this age is that you know who you are, and who you want to spend your time with.

I highly recommend striking up a conversation with a stranger and seeing where it takes you. You might be pleasantly surprised, just as I was.

• Apple's annual WWDC conference kicks off on Monday with investors eager for AI updates.
• The iPhone-maker is expected to unveil a revamped AI Siri and could offer insights into monetization.
• Analysts say the event could be a catalyst to rerate the stock and reframe Apple as an AI winner.

Apple's annual conference kicks off on Monday and it could serve as the AI catalyst investors have been waiting for.

This year's Worldwide Developers Conference could change the company's AI story and fuel a rerating of the stock, Wall Street analysts said.

Notably, the event marks Tim Cook's last WWDC as CEO before he steps down and passes the baton to hardware boss John Ternus.

The conference could also be Cook's last chance to rewrite his legacy when it comes to AI. The iPhone maker is expected to showcase a new AI-driven Siri powered by Alphabet's Google Gemini and run on Nvidia chips, according to reports from The Information.

Here's what Wall Street analysts say investors should be watching for.

What it would take for Apple to be an AI winner

Goldman Sachs analysts expect Apple to announce a redefined AI Siri set for September 2026 alongside the next iPhone. If the company is able to offer insights into its plans to monetize AI could reshape the iPhone-maker's place in the AI era and solidify Cook's legacy.

Apple has been long regarded as an AI laggard, missing out on the AI-fueled gains enjoyed by other tech giants.

While WWDC 2024 was focused on AI, with the company seeing shares gain after announcing Apple Intelligence, Apple has delayed its AI plans since, fueling scrutiny from Wall Street.

"We believe Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is a clear catalyst that can help shift Apple into the 'AI Winner' bucket (perceived or otherwise)," Morgan Stanley analysts said.

"Siri/ Apple Intelligence 2.0 has the potential to become the ultimate AI resource offload and deliver a form of Agentic AI to the consumer at a lower cost than incumbents, vertically integrated across one of the largest device installed bases," they explained.

Upside potential

Historically, Apple stock generally trades higher in the week ahead of WWDC, is down the day of, and mixed the following days.

Apple stock is on track to follow this pattern, gaining in the trading week ahead of the event.

Morgan Stanley said "a polished AI platform and clear Agentic vision could push valuation to $365-385, with upside to $440."

Wedbush, which has a $400 price target for Apple stock, said that AI monetization and services could add $75 to $100 per share to Apple stock that the current price isn't factoring in.

Apple's AI capex and user base advantage

Analysts flagged that Apple's position as an AI distributor rather than an actual model provider, position the company to benefit from AI without spending billion like other Big Tech companies are.

"No company is better positioned than Apple for consumer AI - if they get it right!," Bernstein analysts said, explaining, "Consider that Apple doesn't need to spend the estimated $200bn a year in capex that peers spend, but still gets access to the best models on earth through partnerships and could still monetize AI through various ways we highlight below including via 3rd party partnerships."

Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman made a similar point, telling Business Insider, "Apple is in a unique position because it's avoided the big capeX boom and realistically has the most pervasive surface in which AI will be consumed."

"I think getting Siri right could completely reverse history as Apple didn't have to be early. It just needs to get there on time. And given how early we are for AI they still have the chance to do that," he added.

• US Soccer CEO JT Batson aims to capitalize on the World Cup's immense attention.
• He said he's building for what comes after the World Cup, not just the event itself.
• Batson said he often looks to business for lessons that might apply to US Soccer.

When JT Batson thinks about the FIFA World Cup, he compares it to an IPO.

The head of US Soccer, the sport's governing body, recently recalled a conversation with a veteran CFO who described what it's like to take a company public: lots of work building toward a single, high-profile moment.

Yet, ultimately, Batson said, the real test is what happens afterward.

That long-term mindset is shaping how he's approaching what might be the biggest event in American soccer history.

As the US prepares to co-host the World Cup starting Thursday, Batson said he's focused on building an organization capable of capitalizing on the attention it will bring.

"This summer is a springboard," Batson said. "This summer is not the destination."

A business mindset for soccer

Batson, 43, came to US Soccer from the business world, where he co-founded and ran an advertising technology company before becoming US Soccer's CEO in late 2022.

The start of his tenure followed a tumultuous period for the federation, including a settlement earlier that year with the US women's national team over a pay-equity lawsuit.

Batson, who played the game growing up in Georgia and later worked as a ref, said he often looks to business for lessons that might apply to US Soccer. Organizational challenges often aren't unique, he said, even if their application at the nonprofit might be.

"There is someone who solved a similar problem in another environment, somewhere in the world," he said.

The trick, Batson said, is to take those best practices and "bring them to life" in a way that benefits US Soccer and the game.

"One of the things that I've really come to appreciate is that when you apply basic business principles to most any problem we have, the answer becomes quite obvious," he said.

One example of that philosophy was US Soccer's decision to take direct control over its commercial business. Since assuming responsibility for its sponsorship, media, and licensing rights in 2023, US Soccer has built an internal operation that handles those deals directly.

Under Batson, US Soccer has brought in executives from outside the sport, including COO Dan Helfrich, who spent more than two decades at Deloitte.

Batson describes soccer as "the challenger sport" in the US and the nation as "the challenger country" in global soccer. After all, despite the hype around hosting the World Cup, soccer isn't one of the Big Four leagues in the US, while it's the most popular sport in most of Europe.

"That means if we want to win, we've got to out-innovate, we've got to outwork, and we've got to out-align," he said.

Building for growth

The philosophy is showing up in tangible ways. In May, US Soccer opened a national training center south of Atlanta. The sprawling facility is home to the federation's 27 national teams, including the marquee men's and women's rosters, as well as more than a dozen youth squads.

Beyond the completion of the training center, Batson points to three straight years of profitability for US Soccer and a tripling of revenue as evidence of the federation's momentum.

He said one of his top priorities since joining US Soccer has been to build trust with those who have a stake in the beautiful game.

As he sees it, US Soccer's customers include a child learning to kick a ball, aspiring national team players, and every family in America that cares about soccer.

Batson said polling makes clear that the opportunity for soccer is larger than many people realize. A Harris Poll survey found that seven in 10 Americans are interested in soccer. Among those, a quarter are "dedicated," and 20% are "obsessed."

Beyond the World Cup

Despite growing popularity in the US, some of the challenges Batson talks about come down to scale.

One of those is helping US Soccer rely more on digital technology, software, and, increasingly, AI to reach players, coaches, and fans spread across such a large country, he said. The federation is exploring, for example, how the technology can help scouts identify promising players from game footage.

Reaching large numbers of people will remain a priority as the sports world's attention shifts to North America for what is likely to be the most expensive FIFA World Cup.

"Ninety-nine percent of the fans experiencing the World Cup were always going to do it outside the stadiums," Batson said. "How do you make sure that they really feel a part of that?"

That mindset also shapes how he thinks about what comes after the tournament.

Batson's longer-term objectives include getting more people involved in the game, setting the US up for success at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, and co-hosting the women's World Cup in 2031.

"How do we use this summer? How do you use LA '28? How do you use the Women's World Cup bid for 2031 to get people to make these big bets and make these big bets together?" he said. "That's been the focus for us."

• Robot.com is building a lineup of robots with different form factors to handle various tasks.
• The company currently has more than 500 robots deployed, with a majority handling delivery.
• CEO Felipe Chavez said the startup is focused on automating repetitive and mundane tasks.

For Felipe Chavez, the future of robotics might look something like an idyllic yogurt commercial.

No, really. During Business Insider's visit to Robot.com's headquarter in San Francisco on Thursday, Chavez, who is the co-founder and CEO, took out his laptop and played a Chobani commercial.

The video had the whimsy of a Studio Ghibli movie. Light flutes played over scenes of frolicking children, while farmers, animals, and robots peacefully co-existed with the natural world. There was balance. And yogurt.

In Chavez' vision, the organic world is still prioritized, animals are "very important," and people pursue the things that they enjoy like art or cooking. Nothing is wasted on the superfluous and mundane — in part, thanks to robots.

"The mission that we have as a company is to bring automation to the physical world, to free human beings from labor that they don't want to do and that they can now actually pursue their meaningful life," he said.

It's a loftier way to frame Robot.com's bet: Machines will first take over the boring, repetitive, physical work that so often leads to high turnover.

Chavez said he came to the realization as he was making deliveries for his first startup. Before launching Kiwibot in 2017, a campus robot delivery outfit that later became Robot.com, Chavez ran a grocery-delivery company akin to Instacart in his home country of Columbia. The startup was completely bootstrapped, he said, which sometimes meant he completed some deliveries himself.

"In that company, I realized that the manual work could be very exhausting and it could be very boring," he said.

Today, Robot.com says it has more than 500 working robots deployed and has completed more than 2.5 million tasks. Most of the robots — around 400 — are still delivery robots, Chavez said, but the company has been expanding into other areas, including warehouses, food service, and advertising, where robots will act like roving billboards.

The company isn't pitching a general-purpose humanoid that can do everything. Instead, Chavez imagines an entire ecosystem of robots, in different form factors, each responsible for small, specific tasks.

He described one scenario from Robot.com's food-delivery business. As the robot-delivery business grew, restaurant workers found they had a new chore: walking outside to place the to-go containers inside the robots.

This new interaction created friction. Chavez said customers had to retrain workers or even hire extra people. In other words, automating one task exposed another one, pushing the company to start thinking about a "manipulation solution," or a robot that can grab and handle items.

Chavez said his company now analyzes labor by breaking it down into specific tasks to identify which areas can be handled by robots. Robot.com's future robotics pipeline will follow a simple rule of thumb.

"If you can do it with two fingers, very likely we will be able to do it," the CEO said.

The startup's vision is relatively modest compared to the humanoid-robot hype captivating the rest of Silicon Valley.

Companies like Figure AI and Tesla are building bipedal robots with five fingers, which means they'll first have to solve the herculean problem of full dexterity and manipulation. If they can do that and solve manufacturing challenges, the companies say the robots will work in warehouses, factories, homes, and other physical environments.

Elon Musk has said this will lead to an "infinite money glitch" in which people will no longer have to work and can rely on a universal income.

While Chavez said he doesn't doubt that humanoids will one day proliferate the world, Robot.com's version of the near future is grounded less in personal home servants and more in the less glamorous parts of service work, like sorting, moving, and handing items off.

Chavez said his 20 or so customers at present are also thinking less about replacing their workers and more about improving workforce satisfaction and reducing turnover.

"The people that are working right now are going to feel better," he said. "They're going to maybe not do that repetitive tasks and focus on customer-centric experience and not resign after seven months."

Companies like Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics have similarly pitched an optimistic outcome for robotics — one where humans are upskilled, not replaced.

Still, those very companies have to contend with a massive labor force that relies on so-called simple jobs. Estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed there were about 3.8 million fast-food and counter workers, 3 million "laborers and freight, stock, and material movers," and 2.8 million stockers and order fillers in 2024.

Chavez said humans will still be essential in a robotic future. Humans, after all, maintain and guide Waymo robotaxis at remote centers or train humanoids through teleoperation, he said.

The CEO invoked the solarpunk movement — the antithesis of the dystopian cyberpunk vision in which humans live on the margins of a world overrun by robots.

In an ad for Robot.com, humans peacefully co-exist with their robot counterparts. They could be delivered a cup of coffee along their daily commute. They could even wave hello, as Robot.com imbues their machines with some personality.

Maybe they'll be served a yogurt ad along the way.

• For Love & Money is a column from Business Insider answering your relationship and money questions.
• This week, a reader who moved to a new country feels they aren't achieving their financial dreams.
• Our columnist reminds them of all they've achieved and suggests creating a concrete plan for the future.

Dear For Love & Money,

I'm 25 years old and live in the Netherlands. I spent 15 years trying to leave my home country for a better future and move to Europe. I thought I would be better off here, have a higher standard of living, and be able to go on holiday.

I worked and saved up whatever I could to make my dream come true. I made it to Europe 1½ years ago, and I'm working in tech sales, an industry that pays well even in a junior position; I make 67,000 Euros a year, but after rent, food, and bills, there's not much left.

I see people my age going on holidays, wasting money on drinks, skiing in the winter, and partying in Ibiza during the summer. I feel worthless, like all of the effort I put in to be here means nothing. I still can't afford a holiday or to travel anywhere. It feels like I moved forward three steps, only for the world to take 10 steps backward.

I want to be young, to meet women my age, and to be able to go on dates. I want to spend money on things, and not be scared to wear the one piece of clothing I bought because I can't afford to buy it again if it gets ruined. What can I do?

Sincerely,

Disappointed Dreamer

Dear Disappointed,

In 2002, my brother-in-law emigrated from Bulgaria to the United States at 21 years old. He had no money and a college degree that most American businesses didn't recognize. Compared to his American peers who had just graduated from college and were spending their first corporate paychecks on vacations and at bars, his life was distinctly unglamorous.

While his frugal lifestyle reflected my brother-in-law's lack of funds, though, it also reflected his goals. He used his grit and brains to start over in a new country, and twenty-odd years later, he's now the most successful person I know. In 2022, he went on a bucket-list hunting trip on a Canadian island, visited his father in Bulgaria, took his kids to Disney World, and whisked my sister away for a romantic tour of Italy and Spain.

I share his story with you to illustrate something that's easy to forget when life feels exhausting and your dreams are taking longer than you hoped to achieve: The best indicator of how far you'll go isn't where you've landed — it's how far you've already come. You moved to a new country — something many people never accomplish — and are working in a position with plenty of room for career advancement.

So, please, do me a favor: Look at your accomplishments and congratulate yourself. You're a rockstar with remarkable inner strength and intelligence, and while I know you're tired, you're going places.

Besides, your own history is a much stronger data point for where you "should be" than the social media accounts of your peers. You mentioned seeing other people your age "wasting money on drinks." Your use of the word "wasting" tells me you aren't much of a drinker. Apparently, they are, and therefore see drinking as a worthy financial trade-off.

This is why you cannot fall into a comparison trap with your peers. You're different people on your own journeys. Instead, spend that energy analyzing your own financial priorities and aligning them with your spending habits. This is one of the best ways to turn your abstract fantasies into concrete goals and make choices based on those goals.

Get extremely specific about what matters most to you financially and build your budget around those priorities. If travel matters more to you than clothes, eating out, or nightlife, create a separate sinking fund for holidays and automatically transfer money into it every payday, even if it's only €100 at a time.

Do the same for other goals that matter to you, whether that's dating, buying new clothes, or taking time off work. Saving becomes much easier when your money has a clear purpose attached to it.

You can also look for ways to reach your goals in a more budget-friendly way. Get roommates to share your rent, if you can. Buy your clothes at thrift stores. Stay at hostels when you travel, and track airfare and train fare to ensure you're booking at the lowest prices.

I'd also encourage you to take an honest look at your current spending and identify the expenses that aren't actually improving your life. A lot of people bleed money through food delivery, subscriptions, expensive grocery stores, or constant small convenience purchases — without realizing how quickly they add up.

I know it can be hard to cut those small expenses when it seems like everyone else can afford both food delivery and a month in Greece, but remember that things may not be how they look with your peers. They may have family money or a credit card balance that would make your head spin. How they spend their money has nothing to do with you. What has everything to do with you, though, is how you continue to build upon the hard work you've put in to get where you are, to reach the life you want for yourself.

I know it's hard, and I understand we all have moments of weariness, but don't give up on your dreams now. You are doing an incredible job. If you take anything I am telling you to heart, please let it be this: Your story is inspiring. You've come so far so quickly, and I can't wait to see how high you climb.

Rooting for you,

For Love & Money

An earlier version of this article was originally published in February 2023.

Looking for advice on how your savings, debt, or another financial challenge is affecting your relationships? Write to For Love & Money using this Google form.

• Amy Morin is a psychotherapist, podcast host, and author.
• She said that many mislabel overwhelm as burnout, leading to incorrect solutions.
• Overwhelm is temporary and may improve with breaks, unlike burnout, which requires deeper solutions.

For more than two decades, people have walked into my therapy office and told me they were burned out. Most of them weren't actually burned out.

Corporate wellness programs and social media carousels that gloss over the topic are leading to incorrect self-diagnoses. People are using "I'm burned out" the way they used to say "I'm tired."

Once you've concluded you have burnout, you'll look for evidence to confirm it. Every time you feel bored in a meeting or overwhelmed by a full schedule, you'll chalk it up to more evidence that you're burned out.

I understand the temptation. Calling it burnout makes the feeling feel legitimate. But if you mislabel overwhelm as burnout, you'll reach for solutions that don't fit the problem.

Burnout, as the World Health Organization defines it, is chronic workplace stress that has gone unmanaged for so long it produces three things: exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced effectiveness at work. Overwhelm is a temporary issue that can be addressed by tackling the problem at hand. If you insist you're burned out, you might think the only solution is quitting your job — and miss out on taking the action that would actually give you relief.

Here are five signs you're overwhelmed, not burned out.

1. You still care.

If you're frustrated about the obstacles that stand in your way and prevent you from turning in your best work, you're overwhelmed. If you've genuinely stopped caring about the outcome, that's closer to burnout.

If you aren't sure which end of the spectrum you're on, imagine yourself turning in some incredible work this week. Would that still mean something to you? If so, you're temporarily overwhelmed, not permanently burned out.

2. A great weekend gives you relief.

If you come back to work on a Monday feeling even the slightest bit restored, you're just overwhelmed. Two days off isn't meant to fix everything, but a break from the grind should move the needle.

If, however, an amazing weeklong vacation leaves you feeling as frazzled as when you left, you might be burned out.

One caveat: Look at how you're spending your days off. If you're sprinting from one activity to the next and don't take time to rest, you won't be able to judge how your time off affects you.

3. You want to do the work, but there's too much to do.

When you're overwhelmed, you're more likely to think, I have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Cutting down on your to-do list, asking for help, or checking things off the list should help you feel better.

When you're burned out, however, you're more likely to think, I can't make myself get my tasks done and I don't care. Burnout involves a lack of meaning that zaps your effort. It also prevents you from experiencing a sense of accomplishment when you get something done.

4. You can see the finish line.

When you're overwhelmed, you can still see the light at the end of the tunnel. You know once your deadline passes or Friday afternoon arrives, you'll feel better.

When you're burned out, you won't be able to see the other side. You won't imagine anything that brings relief. Instead, you'll think about how finishing one thing means starting the next, and the ability to keep going feels unsustainable.

5. The physical toll is evident.

When you're overwhelmed, your shoulders might get tight, your stomach might churn, and you might struggle to sleep because you're thinking about all the things you need to do.

If your body is yelling at you, that's actually a good sign. It means your system is still responding to the stress. It wants you to take action. And a little yoga, some gentle stretching, and regular exercise can help you feel better.

If you're burned out, you're more likely to feel flat or numb, both physically and emotionally. My therapy clients who are genuinely burned out will say things like, "I don't feel stressed anymore. I feel nothing."

What to do when you've named it correctly

If you're overwhelmed, you don't need a new job or a six-month sabbatical. You need a strategy to tackle the problem. Name exactly what you're feeling instead of calling it all "stress." Use the 10-minute rule to tackle a task you've been avoiding — commit to 10 minutes to build some momentum that will help you keep going. Or gamify the grind, so you can get more tasks done faster. These are three examples of strategies I address in my new book that can give you fast relief when you're feeling overwhelmed.

If you're burned out, you'll need a more serious intervention — like extended time off, therapy, or a major shift in your role. If you aren't sure if you're burned out, talk to a mental health professional if you can.

Burnout responds to the right care, but you have to name it correctly first.

• Walmart is folding AI into nearly every aspect of its business.
• The retailer is pushing to make AI capabilities available to all of its employees and customers.
• I visited the company to see how Walmart's AI is supporting new levels of speed and personalization.

Walmart is big, but it wants to be bigger.

The retail giant employs more than 2 million people. It serves hundreds of millions of customers each week across thousands of stores in the US and around the world. And it's not sitting still.

Walmart is now working to speed up its business with a major assist from AI in just about every aspect of its operation.

I got to see this firsthand during its annual shareholders meeting at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, where executives and frontline workers shared how the technology is transforming retail.

AI is for everyone

For starters, Walmart is using its scale to its advantage by equipping people at all levels of the company with the tools to wrangle AI.

"We want to democratize the access to learning and democratize the access to making a difference, so that people can learn and grow," CEO John Furner told reporters last week.

The most talked-about example was the new Code Puppy agent that Walmart Global Tech distinguished engineer Mike Pfaffenberger built and shared with the organization.

Walmart already has a dizzying number of agents and a handful of super-agents tailored for particular use cases, but Code Puppy was notable for its ability to help people across the organization vibecode their own solutions — from salaried software engineers to hourly forklift drivers.

Unlike companies that may centralize AI development within traditionally tech-focused departments, Walmart's approach accelerates the pace at which new ideas can arise from the front lines and spread throughout the global enterprise.

"It doesn't matter where the idea came from. It could be in Bangalore. It could be in Greater Toronto. It could be Mexico City. It could be in Wichita, Kansas. Wherever the best idea is, we should take that and scale it," Furner said. "We just simply surface what's already been built, and then we see the adoption rates go much faster."

Some workers want better guardrails

Walmart's embrace of AI is not without controversy, however.

A shareholder proposal backed by United for Respect, a coalition of retail workers, criticized the impact of AI and automation on frontline employees.

Ava Williams, an overnight stocker in Washington, presented the proposal during the Walmart shareholders meeting. She said the new AI-powered workflows push workers like her to cut corners as they race against unrealistic expectations.

"We are not asking Walmart to stop using technology. We are asking for technology that works for us, not against us," she said.

Shareholders rejected the measure, and the company said it has multiple channels for employees to share their ideas and concerns.

The company also officially launched a credentialing program it built with OpenAI that is available to every employee, fulfilling a commitment it announced back in September.

The training program is intended to help employees build practical confidence with AI. They learn to integrate the tools into the problems they face in the real world.

The company highlighted one such case: A logistics manager who completed a Google AI certification and used those skills to develop an agent that helps Walmart identify routes that would get drivers home faster with fewer empty trucks.

Even the new delivery partnership with in-store Subway restaurants now comes with a hefty serving of AI.

Walmart order pickers already follow an AI-generated route through the store to fill the basket, and Walmart's head of digital fulfillment, Greg Cathey, said AI now also finds the right moment in that route to queue Subway workers to make the order.

"That is the AI that's timing everything to make sure the sandwich is going to be hot if it's hot — always fresh," Cathey said.

Deeper insights about what customers really want

Over at Walmart's warehouse club, Sam's Club Director of Consumer Insights Sue Jervis said she can now gain new details from the chain's fast-growing member feedback community thanks to the power of multimodal AI analysis.

She expressed a visceral disgust for five-star surveys and said the conversations and video clips she gets from participants give her a much more precise understanding of what really matters to them.

Thanks to AI, Jervis can tap into the 150,000-member group and extract not just what they're saying, but how they're saying it — the emotional register behind their feedback about the club's products and services.

Walmart is also learning more about customers who use the company's new Sparky chatbot, which acts as a kind of personal shopping assistant.

"We're learning a ton just from how they're interacting with Sparky relative to ways that maybe historically they have interacted with us," Chief Growth Officer Seth Dallaire told reporters.

The value of that interaction is significant enough that the company is not rushing to serve ads in the chat, focusing instead on ensuring customers are getting what they want from the experience.

"We see long natural language query strings that look very different than someone typing in 'men's shoes,'" he said. "That is in itself is a really interesting piece of information for us."

Betting big on smaller things

It's telling that on Friday, Furner handed the President's Innovation Award to Pfaffenberger and his colleague, John Choi, for their work on Code Puppy.

"A vibe-coding tool that turns associates into engineers," Chief Technology Officer Suresh Kumar said. "They built a tool that supports the entire company."

Or, as Pfaffenberger asks in his documentation for the project, "Would you rather plow a field with one ox or 1,024 puppies? If you pick the ox, better slam that back button in your browser."

Walmart, big as it is, is betting on the puppies.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at dreuter@businessinsider.com or text/call/Signal at 646-768-4750. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• SpaceX's IPO this week aims to raise $75 billion, valuing the company at $1.75 trillion.
• That will make it the largest IPO in history.
• Investing pros mostly told Business Insider they'd be wary of buying the stock on day one.

The official numbers are out for SpaceX's IPO: Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company is aiming to raise $75 billion when it comes to market later this week, putting its valuation at $1.75 trillion.

It'll be the largest IPO ever, and it's certainly in the running for the most-hyped listing of all time.

But that type of anticipation is a double-edged sword. Soaring investor excitement can turn into volatility to chase the hype and cash in early gains. There's also the question of a historic valuation for a company that is not profitable.

So, for anyone wondering whether to buy the stock when it starts trading or hold off, we've rounded up the thoughts of eight investing pros to help you decide.

Here's what they had to say.

Dhruv Maniktala, CIO at True North Advisors & Western Alternative Strategies

Would you buy: No

Maniktala's firm has had exposure to SpaceX through private market vehicles since 2019, "at much lower valuations," he said.

The stock price could shoot up because of "retail interest," making it a great investment, but he said it's not for his firm.

"At this point, we are sellers rather than buyers," Maniktala said. "To justify its valuation, SpaceX will need to grow revenue by 30x in 4 years and still trade at 25 times free cash flow, assuming that the stock does not go up at all from IPO."

Stephanie Link, chief investment strategist at Hightower Advisors

Would you buy: Yes

Link said she would buy the stock without hesitation on the first day of trading, with one big caveat: buy a small 2% allocation and forget it.

The "frenzy" surrounding the stock may lead to short-term volatility, she said, and the company is "impossible to value" in traditional terms, requiring investors to "be creative" with valuations based on their own estimates of the firm's total addressable market, or the maximum total revenue it'd be able to generate.

It shouldn't be your whole portfolio, but Link would recommend getting some "skin in the game" in case Musk's vision of satellite data centers and global connectivity comes to pass.

"I don't think you want to be against the next huge theme," Link said.

Andy VandenBerg, founder of VDB Wealth

Would you buy: No

Vandenberg said he'd hold off for now, noting that tech stocks typically get crushed in the first 12 months after their IPOs, citing data from Truist.

"If you look at the last 30 major tech IPOs, 57% traded up over the first week. However, the max drawdown in the first year averaged 55%," he said. "So, if you're really bullish on the company and its long-term prospects, I advise clients that there will likely be a more attractive opportunity to invest in the business."

Robert R. Johnson, professor of finance at Creighton University

Would you buy: No

Johnson said he "wouldn't touch" the SpaceX IPO, and recommended the same for most investors. That's because the company's valuation assumes all of its growth projections play out perfectly.

While the stock could jump thanks to demand from major indexes adding SpaceX as a constituent—some of which are doing so quicker than usual—or due to excitement around the track record of Elon Musk's companies, Johnson said it's still too risky an investment.

"Fans of Elon Musk have driven Tesla valuations beyond what the fundamentals would otherwise suggest, and SpaceX may experience the same effect," he said. "Having said that, I would suggest steering clear of this IPO."

Joel Shulman, Founder/CIO of ERShares and professor at Babson College

Would you buy: Yes

Shulman's ETF, XVRO, which he said was the first ETF to put private shares on the public market, already owns shares of SpaceX. But he doesn't think all the gains have already been made.

"It is 100% going to open at a premium," he said.

In his view, Elon Musk may be the greatest entrepreneur of all time, describing his vision of data centers in space, with lower cooling costs and cheap solar power, as "game over," and a culmination of the business's three main engines: rockets, Starlink, and xAI.

But market dynamics will also help, he said. Sure, the S&P 500 isn't fast-tracking the stock, but the Nasdaq and Russell indexes buying it up should more than make up for it. IPO orders are already oversubscribed, meaning strong demand, he said, and he theorized that last Friday's poor stock market performance may have something to do with investors gearing up to buy next week.

"I wouldn't be surprised if some fund managers today are freeing up cash to buy SpaceX next week," he said.

Brian Mulberry, Chief Market Strategist at Zacks Investment Management

Would you buy: No

Mulberry said that good-old-fashioned fundamentals will stop him from buying SpaceX on day one. SpaceX, like many tech IPOs, is "pre-profit" and Mulberry said his firm usually "looks for a strong road to profitability before we take positions."

"We will take a little time to see where actual revenues are coming in and then make a decision based on that," Mulberry said.

Jeff Judge, Managing Partner at Chesapeake Financial Planners

Would you buy: No

In addition to SpaceX's valuation, Judge noted that 30% of the IPO shares will be allocated to retail investors.

"I think it is either a money grab to get as many inflows in or there isn't as much appetite for it at the institutional level as they had expected," Judge said. "Neither is a strong buy signal."

Commentators have expressed hesitation around the retail component recently, noting that bigger participation from the day-trader crowd could increase volatility.

On Thursday, Fidelity announced that it would lower the account minimum for users on its platform to buy the stock at the IPO price.

Keith Fitz-Gerald, founder of Fitz-Gerald Must Have Portfolio ETF

Would you buy: No

Fitz-Gerald said that retail traders will "almost certainly rue the day" they bought into big IPOs like SpaceX.

Retail investors are "not prepared for the possibility of a highly quantitative, institutionally-driven sharkfest," he said. They may not have the stomach for a 20-40% drop in the short-term, even if there's long-term wealth to be made.

"A widely anticipated stock like SpaceX is going to be like throwing chum in the water for high-speed traders and quantitatively driven shops who will use every trick in the book — derivatives, overlays, technical trading, and so on to gain an edge over the average retail investor," he said. "Time frames will compress and volatility — which is their lifeblood — will increase."

Mike Serio, CIO of Trilogy Financial

Would you buy: No

Serio turned to previous mega-IPOs to explain why he wouldn't buy the stock, explaining that Meta didn't start outperforming the S&P 500 until more than 10 years after IPO.

Top tech IPOs have been "liquidity events which free up capital for private shareholders" instead of "once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunities," Serio said. Meta IPO purchases likely "paid for a good deal of tuition and retirement expenses," he said, but it didn't happen overnight.

"In my humble opinion, if one is interested in these IPOs, they eventually will get a second and third bite of the apple," Serio said.

David Wagner, Head of Equities and Portfolio Manager at Aptus Capital Advisors

Would you buy: No

Wagner said his firm was surprised to hear that the S&P 500 wasn't fast-tracking the stock for the index. The resulting lack of passive index money could make many decide to wait before investing, he said.

"This may cause some managers to pause their IPO purchases to let the dust settle now that they have some time to watch the overall volatility of the security," Wagner said.

• More than 350 employees are starting as interns at Citadel and Citadel Securities.
• The companies accepted a record low 0.36% of applicants, out of more than 115,900 applications.
• BI got an exclusive look at the class and the firms' "insatiable appetite" for young talent.

Ken Griffin's companies are making their biggest bet yet on entry-level talent, as Citadel interns kick off their program with an offsite in Palm Beach on Monday.

They're among the more than 350 interns at the company and its sister firm, market maker Citadel Securities, and comprise the biggest global class to date. The companies, known for recruiting the sharpest quants and traders, accepted a miniscule 0.36% of applicants out of more than 115,900 applications, up 6.4% from last year's record.

"The reason our class is larger than ever is precisely because the business has seen how valuable campus talent can be," Iris Wang, who oversees campus recruitment at Citadel, said, adding that the firms aren't "headcount-restrained."

Despite widespread anxiety about what AI will do to entry-level hiring, Citadel's commitment to young talent isn't entirely surprising, as the top hedge funds have been scrambling to hire enough people to invest their massive sums. Some of the biggest hedge funds are beefing up their talent pipelines to rival that of the big banks, whose intern programs are something of Wall Street folklore.

Other hedge funds are also investing in their talent pipelines: in 2027, Millennium is starting an investing internship, and Balyasny is launching a nine-month Catalyst training program for recent graduates.

Wang and Fabian Figi, who leads recruiting at Citadel Securities, said roles in quantitative finance are especially attractive to young people because they incorporate cutting-edge technology and AI, and might seem like a wise long-term bet in a rapidly evolving workforce. Some AI labs have been trying to poach the most impressive quants from hedge funds and trading firms, at times offering multimillion-dollar pay packages.

Citadel and Citadel Securities interns, some of whom have PhDs, won't be starved for summer cash: their base salary is $4,300 to $5,800 per week, depending on their role and experience. Interns also get a signing bonus and can choose to live in corporate housing or receive a $15,000 housing stipend.

How to select top candidates

Interns across Wall Street are entering an industry transformed by AI, as new tools automate much of the work once synonymous with junior roles and firms incorporate the technology into training. Griffin, once a prominent AI skeptic, said last month that the technology has become "profoundly more powerful," and can now complete work in hours that would have taken people with PhDs in finance weeks, even months.

Citadel assessed applicants on their AI fluency during the recruitment process, along with their good judgment. Many of the strongest applicants knew how to leverage new tools and help AI code effectively, but the "A-plus" candidates were differentiated by their judgment and adaptability, Wang said. Figi said that though soft skills are especially important, a traditional STEM degree still holds weight, even if the traditional STEM skills aren't as crucial.

"We like people who pursue STEM degrees not just because of their technical expertise, but because it's hard," he said. "These are people who want to challenge themselves, and it requires a certain level of raw intellectual horsepower that will push them forward no matter how tools evolve."

This year's interns, he said, will have more time to think about higher-order, complex problems, which will likely make the role "more interesting."

Return offers and evaluation

While the intern role itself is changing, Citadel and Citadel Securities are still evaluating interns in much the same way: impact.

Interns work on team projects with real business implications and have access to the same suite of AI tools as full-time employees, Wang and Figi said. They have one-on-one conversations with their managers each week and ongoing communication with team members.

At the end of the summer, interns present their projects to business leaders, and Griffin and Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao review return offers. Figi said that while it's hard to predict how the summer will shake out, he expects most interns to get a return offer, as they have in past years. The companies don't have specific quotas for returns, and instead evaluate whether each intern could be "wildly successful" individually, he said.

And the track record is pretty good: campus hires are around twice as likely to one day be considered high performers, based on annual performance reviews.

"We're going to continue to have an almost insatiable appetite for exceptional talent, and we'll continue trying to identify as much of it as we can because we believe it's a critical competitive advantage," Figi said. "Once we identify that talent, we'll move incredibly fast to secure it."

Interning on Wall Street this summer or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at atecotzky@insider.com or Signal at alicetecotzky.05. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Kelsey Hightower has three tips for new graduates entering an uncertain job market.
• Hightower said that young people still have more control over their careers than they may think.
• He said the era of AI is a good time for job seekers to focus on their human qualities.

As graduation season collides with diminishing entry-level roles and slower hiring, the former distinguished engineer at Google has notes for fresh grads.

Kelsey Hightower, who retired from Google in 2023, told Business Insider that the current job market is vastly different from the one he entered decades ago, but young people still have more control over their careers than they may think.

"AI is definitely a very convenient reason to look at what you're currently doing," said Hightower of AI's effect on the workplace, adding that the industry is undergoing a "recalibration."

"The fact is that for the last 20 to 30 years, we've taken millions of super bright people who would've been good at anything, and we pushed them all into tech," he said.

Here are three pieces of advice Hightower has for new graduates and early-career workers, especially those looking to break into the tech industry.

Treat extracurriculars like a job requirement

Hightower said that the new "harsh reality" is that grades and diplomas are no longer enough to stand out.

"All your work has been at school, you do projects for school, maybe you get a GPA, maybe you get a diploma from that, but no one knows if you're going to provide anything special or if you're just another person graduating," Hightower said.

"You're going to have to show your work in public," he said. "I think now going into the workforce, you're going to have to put together a strong set of extracurricular activities."

Hightower said prospective graduates should think about workforce preparation the same way they once approached college admissions.

"That means open source projects, real-world things that you've actually built — not just internships, but things that people can really point to to say, oh, this was a meaningful contribution, whether it's to a company or society," he said.

Invest in real-world relationships

Referrals remain one of the most important pathways into coveted tech jobs, Hightower said, but many younger workers came of age during the pandemic and have built far more online connections than in-person ones.

"The network really matters," Hightower said. "I think being in the physical world next to other people that are doing this work or going through the same challenges as you — it's very different than trying to do that online."

He said he remembers attending programming-language meetups and technology gatherings when he was younger, but sees fewer people investing in face-to-face professional relationships today.

"They're on Reddit, they're on social media, they're on LinkedIn," he said. "I see them posting all the time, but I don't really see a lot of them building those real-world connections."

Don't become a 'senior engineer and a junior human'

Hightower said that new graduates shouldn't lose hope in the face of AI and should focus on their human qualities.

"I think a student really has to start thinking about what we traditionally call soft skills," he said. "Like understanding people, being creative, artistic, having a big vision, having experienced the world, and all those creative elements that typically don't get measured in the interview process."

"Those are the only things that AI can't do well," he added. "It has no experience. It has no empathy for the human condition."

He said that many workplaces have created what he calls "a senior engineer and a junior human," where around 20% of workers are expected to be more robotic and are "reduced down" to what a computer could do.

"I can promise you a lot of people are not performing to the best of their ability, and in many cases, it's not their fault," he said. "They've driven the motivation out of you to the point where you're almost just doing what a robot would do: open this ticket, assign this task, write this code, check it in, rinse and repeat."

"Start making that list today. What can I bring to the table that this AI model cannot?"

• Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Education Department to deliver student-debt relief to eligible borrowers.
• They also urged the department to continue the pause on involuntary collections and stop the transfer to the Treasury.
• The push comes as student-loan defaults are at a record high.

Millions of student-loan borrowers are in default. Lawmakers want the Trump administration to keep more from falling deeper into trouble.

On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley, and Reps. Ayanna Pressley and André Carson, led over 60 of their Democratic colleagues in pushing Education Sec. Linda McMahon to provide student-debt relief to eligible borrowers.

They want the administration to cancel student debt for borrowers who qualified for relief under existing programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness, the Total and Permanent Disability discharge, and borrower defense to repayment, while also clearing the backlog of income-driven repayment applications.

Defaults are at a record high — 7.7 million borrowers were in default at the end of 2025, with another 3 million in delinquency. The lawmakers wrote that President Donald Trump's sweeping student-loan changes, which include new repayment plans, the elimination of SAVE, and the planned transfer of defaulted accounts to the Treasury, could push more borrowers into default.

"The Trump administration's failure to meaningfully address the default crisis has raised Americans' costs and tanked borrowers' ability to access credit," the lawmakers wrote.

"It is unacceptable that debt cancellation that borrowers are legally entitled to has been delayed and denied," they said.

In January, the Department of Education paused involuntary collections for defaulted borrowers while preparing to implement its coming repayment changes. The Democratic lawmakers are also urging the department to extend the pause, holding off on wage garnishment and the seizure of federal benefits. The department is also preparing to transfer defaulted student-loan accounts to the Treasury, and the lawmakers said that the transfer should be stopped to continue relief for defaulted borrowers.

This push comes less than a month before Trump's sweeping student-loan repayment overhaul will go into effect on July 1. Many borrowers are preparing for higher monthly payments, some hundreds of dollars more, due to the elimination of the SAVE plan, which would have allowed for cheaper payments and a shorter timeline to debt relief.

Nicholas Kent, the department's undersecretary, said in a statement that the changes "will ensure students continue to have the access that they need for federal student loans, while helping prevent borrowers from taking on unmanageable debt levels that they may never be able to repay."

The lawmakers asked that McMahon provide information on the coming changes, including when the department plans to resume involuntary collections and an update on the debt relief backlog.

Have a story to share about student loans? Contact this reporter at asheffey@businessinsider.com.

• The coastal neighborhoods around SpaceX's sprawling Hawthorne hub are bracing for an influx of millionaires.
• SpaceX's Hawthorne manufacturing hub employed 7,661 workers last year.
• Agents have been seeing demand from employees and other buyers eager to close before the IPO.

For years, Southern California real estate agents have watched longingly as Bay Area techies turned IPO riches and, more recently, soaring AI valuations into bidding wars for homes. Now, with SpaceX preparing to go public this week in what is expected to be the biggest IPO in history, the coastal neighborhoods around SpaceX's sprawling Hawthorne hub are hoping for their own liftoff.

"This is LA's Google moment," Chris Tourtellotte, managing director at LaTerra Development, a Los Angeles real estate investment management and development company, told Business Insider, referring to Google's 2004 IPO that is estimated to have minted over 900 millionaires.

The long-awaited SpaceX IPO will dwarf Google's, finally turning paper wealth into cash for not hundreds, but thousands of current and former employees in Southern California. "All of a sudden, you will wake up, and there will be thousands of brand-new millionaires," he said. "This is going to be big for LA. We needed it."

Even after SpaceX shifted its headquarters to Texas in 2024, its Hawthorne manufacturing hub remained a major local employer, with 7,661 workers last year, according to city records. With the company's IPO expected to value it at around $1.75 trillion, and many employees having joined early, local realtors are bracing for a potential influx of newly wealthy buyers.

"It's been on everyone's mind," said Los Angeles real estate agent Nina Kubicek. "This has been two decades in the making."

SpaceX's mega offering makes Southern California's last major tech IPO look quaint in comparison: Snap's 2017 debut, which valued the Venice Beach-based social media company at about $24 billion.

Still, anyone looking for a boost for Los Angeles as a whole will be disappointed, according to Paul Habibi, a lecturer of finance and real estate at UCLA's Anderson School of Management.

"I'd expect a real but diffuse effect, concentrated in the South Bay around Hawthorne rather than the citywide jolt a trillion-dollar listing might imply," said Habibi. "Many of its longest-tenured people have already turned equity into cash through years of secondary sales, so the IPO mints fewer brand-new local millionaires than the headline suggests."

Agents offer a special program for SpaceX employees

Agents in the South Bay say they have already been seeing interest from employees whose long-held private stock could soon become life-changing liquidity, as well as from other buyers eager to close before the IPO.

"I just went under contract with buyers on a house in Manhattan Beach, and they specifically articulated they wanted to be sure to get something under contract before all the SpaceX money comes in," said Dave Fratello, the founder of Edge Real Estate Agency, who blogs about local real estate. "There's definitely a hype aspect."

"While we have worked with SpaceX employees for many years, we've seen a significant spike this year in the number of former and current employees we are advising," Stephanie Younger, whose real estate firm has carved out a niche helping SpaceX employees count their restricted stock, known as RSUs, toward their income to qualify for a bigger mortgage, told Business Insider.

Many employees will be constrained by lock-up periods, meaning the real spike in home prices will begin in September, according to Younger. Like any good real estate agent, Younger is advising clients to act fast.

"If you are a SpaceX employee in the Los Angeles area and you have been waiting for the right signal to act — this is it," Younger wrote on a blog post after the S-1 came out. "Start the search with urgency but without panic."

A boom for Manhattan Beach

Gio Altamura, a South Bay residential real estate agent, said Manhattan Beach would likely benefit the most because it is the "epicenter" of the area's luxury housing market, with strong schools, prime oceanfront views, and a commute to SpaceX of just 10 to 15 minutes. The average home is worth $3,260,960, up 5% from a year ago, according to Zillow.

"Everyone is going to be affected positively, but if you're asking me who's going to benefit the most, it's always the highest end," Altamura said. "The floor just gets raised."

Austin, Texas, is also hoping for a boost from Space's IPO, with 1,590 employees working in nearby Bastrop County. Already, Northern California has seen the effect, with one of the priciest home sales in the country this year.

In March, SpaceX board member and early investor Steve Jurvetson shattered Lake Tahoe's home-sale record by buying a $125 million Incline Village mansion, Bloomberg reported. (Jurvetson's VC firm did not respond to a request for comment.)

• Federal data shows that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia are ramping up their use of foreign talent.
• All three companies filed more H-1B visa applications in Q2 2026 than they did a year earlier.
• The increase bucks a broader slowdown in H-1B visa filings across parts of the tech industry.

The biggest names in AI are expanding their search for workers abroad as the talent war gets tougher.

Federal data shows Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia filed more H-1B visa applications for new hires and renewals in the second quarter of fiscal 2026 than they did a year earlier, as other tech giants pulled back from the program.

The split points to a new reality in tech hiring. Companies are cutting jobs while concentrating talent in smaller, more specialized teams — or "pods," as Meta calls them. They depend on a small pool of highly trained researchers, engineers, and infrastructure talent.

That can make foreign-born workers with specialized skills central to companies' talent strategies, even as the visa process becomes harder to navigate.

Changes to the work visa program have made the process more costly and uncertain. New rules give applicants a better chance in the visa lottery if their employers plan to pay them higher salaries. The government has also imposed a temporary $100,000 fee on applicants living overseas.

That adds another hurdle at a time when companies across the tech industry are slowing hiring and conducting layoffs, while trying to do more with AI. The biggest AI companies, though, appear to be moving in the other direction.

Department of Labor data shows Anthropic had the biggest year-over-year percentage increase in certified applications among the seven companies reviewed by Business Insider. Its count rose to 59 in Q2 2026, up from 10 in Q2 2025.

OpenAI filed more applications than Anthropic, with 63 in Q2 2026, up from 20 in Q2 2025.

Nvidia saw a smaller year-over-year increase. The number of its certified applications still dwarfs the two model makers. The chipmaker reported 765 in Q2 2026, up from 641 in Q2 2025.

Meanwhile, Business Insider found declines in certified applications at several other tech giants compared with the previous year, including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. Google saw a 64% decline, as the company also trims head count through smaller, rolling job cuts targeted at specific teams.

Raghu Shivakumar, a recruiter with Nexocean, said that Anthropic and OpenAI likely seek more foreign workers because they have a "mindset of 'do whatever it takes'" for hiring.

The $100,000 H-1B visa fee represents "a rounding error against the cost of not landing the right researcher," he said.

H-1B applications are falling

Overall, US Citizenship and Immigration Services said that it received 211,600 properly submitted applications for the 2027 H-1B allocation, down from 343,981 the year before.

The pressures from visa policy changes help explain why lottery submissions fell this year, said Justin Parsons, a partner at Berry Appleman & Leiden, an influential immigration law firm. Parsons said some employers sat out this year's lottery while they waited to see how the new rules would play out.

Certified H-1B and similar visa applications are those that the Labor Department has reviewed to ensure that a prospective immigrant worker will be paid similarly to other workers in similar roles, and that the hiring will not negatively affect employment for those workers. The tallies also include extensions of status for existing employees.

The figures only reflect Labor Department certifications. They are not final visa approvals or lottery selections. Multiple filings can correspond to a single worker. And while quarterly numbers offer a snapshot, annual tallies can vary based on hiring cycles and other factors.

The cost of a great tech hire

The push for elite talent is happening as the H-1B lottery tilts toward more experienced workers. Because the new wage-tier system gives higher-paid applicants a better chance, younger workers are at a disadvantage, said Sneha Puri, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab.

Companies may be less willing to sponsor a new graduate if they think the chances of securing a winning lottery ticket are slim.

Shivakumar, the recruiter, says he has also seen tech giants grow more comfortable setting up entire teams overseas, especially after the rise of remote work, and he says companies may want to avoid racking up H-1B application costs.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon did not respond to email requests for comment. Microsoft and Google declined to comment.

Do you live near a data center? If not, you might live near one soon.

Business Insider's new map shows 1,416 data centers built or approved for construction in 45 states and Washington, DC by the end of 2025.

Virginia is the historical epicenter of data center development in the US. Now developers are hungry for new sites. Hot spots have emerged in West Texas; outside Cheyenne, Wyoming; and in rural Wisconsin.

Our map shows every data center we found with an air permit issued through December 2025. The data table is searchable by county, state, zip code, or corporate parent, and sortable by estimated low-end, high-end, and average electricity use. Search by any address to identify the closest data centers. Select any data center on the map to see more details about the facility, and select any entry in the data table to see the data center on the map.

For any data center with an asterisk, Business Insider also identified a permit to build a dedicated power source, such as a natural gas plant, to provide electricity for that data center. Business Insider identified at least 20 permits issued to developers through the end of 2025 for power plants intended to serve data centers.

To investigate the rapid proliferation of US data centers, Business Insider filed requests with all 50 states and Washington, DC for the air permits that regulate backup generators installed at data centers. We used data in these permits to identify data center location and ownership, and estimate facility power use. This map is an updated version of the data center map we published last year. Read about our methodology in more detail here.

Business Insider's analysis of permits shows that Meta had 38 US data centers at the end of 2025, a figure that Meta says is too high. Meta says it currently has 28 data centers in the US, and that some of the permitted facilities in Business Insider's analysis are offices. Offices could have backup generators for small, on-site servers. Business Insider included these facilities because they received air permits issued with federal industry codes associated with data centers. These facilities represent 0.2% of Meta's total data center power use, according to Business Insider's estimate.

Business Insider's analysis is dependent on estimating data centers' electricity use based on the number and type of backup generators installed at each facility. Where developers are building entire power plants, some are forgoing installing backup generators altogether. As a result, Business Insider's electricity estimates are certainly an undercount, as facilities known to be huge and built with dedicated on-site or nearby power generation, such as xAI's data center complex in Memphis, Tennessee, or Meta's Hyperion Campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, appear far smaller in Business Insider's analysis, due to a lack of permitted backup diesel generators.

Business Insider's methodology was developed in close consultation with industry and academic experts and is the same methodology used for an award-winning series published by Business Insider last year. Amazon said Business Insider's methodology is misleading because it includes a range of electricity estimates. QTS said the company's current electricity use is lower than our estimates, which project future use. Equinix says it had 79 data centers either built or under construction at the end of 2025. Business Insider identified permits for 56 Equinix data centers.

Have a tip or a question about our reporting? Reach out to Business Insider's enterprise team at investigations@insider.com.

Adam Davis has three identical sex dolls: One lives in his bedroom, one in his living room, and one has a bedroom of her own. They're all the same woman: a 5'6," 85-pound silicon doll named Lara, a nod to the heavingly endowed, ass-kicking archeologist Lara Croft in "Tomb Raider."

Davis, 38, and the holey trinity of Laras are inseparable.

Sometimes she watches him play video games, watch movies, or nap. Sometimes they talk for hours. With help from some friends at his old physical therapy gig, Davis gave Lara a backstory — she's a sassy, outgoing immigrant from Mexico who's a whiz at "Mario Kart" — and loaded that into a Kindroid chatbot on his laptop to give her a (disembodied) voice. Sometimes they stage sexy photo shoots together. And sometimes they do have sex, though they haven't in a year, as Davis recovers from his porn addiction.

The way Lara loves him may be simulated, he says, but the way he feels her love is real. He's open to a human girlfriend, but she'd have to make room for the other woman in his bed.

Lara's love is costly, however. At about $2,500 from Chinese sex doll maker Starpery, he bought her first form in 2022 on a two-year payment plan. Each time the tech has gotten better — a full silicon edition, a better paint job, more realistic hands — he's bought a new Lara. (Starpery sells dozens of dolls with customizable heads, wigs, toenails, breasts, and vaginas with varying depths, widths, and textures.) "None of them are being overused," he says. "They should all last longer."

Fulfilling as Lara is, Davis dreams of a true sex robot — where body and voice are all in one being — but doesn't like anything that's on the market. Their facial movements look unnatural, he says, and their bodies aren't yet mobile. Those options are "like a big Roomba," he says.

A decade ago, a viral Daily Sun article predicted that "women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025." A YouGov poll based on the story found 1 in 4 American men would consider having sex with a robot. Mainstream outlets from Vox to The Guardian to NBC trumpeted that "sex robots are coming." An entire academic discipline emerged to study their impending rise.

They weren't entirely wrong. Venture capital investment in humanoid robotics has swelled from $4 billion in 2019 to $26 billion last year. Robotics startups like Figure AI have valuations as high as $39 billion, and tech giants like Meta, OpenAI, and Nvidia are building hardware and software for robots to be put to work in everything from manufacturing to home care. Elon Musk predicts Tesla's Optimus robot will be "the biggest product of all time by far."

AI companions, meanwhile, have also boomed. You can have sexy chats with your Grok anime girl or go on a date with your Replika boyfriend. Seventy two percent of teens have tried an AI companion, per Common Sense Media.

A sex robot is essentially these two mashed together: the robot body to give them the motion of the ocean and the companion voice to give them a brain. And yet, as I found in my interviews with robot purveyors, researchers, and fans and my extremely firsthand encounters with the latest models, combining those two is as hard as the market is still soft on sex robots.

Neil McArthur was sure we'd have sex robots by now. The University of Manitoba philosophy professor has spent over a decade studying sex tech. In 2019, when he went to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, the industry's largest annual conference, he saw robots with tough, tire-like skin that couldn't walk and spoke more jaggedly than early versions of Siri. When he returned in 2024, well into the LLM boom, he thought, "Things have to have come a long way."

They hadn't. The robots' skin and speech were still unrealistic, and they couldn't move around the conference floor. What was new, though, were several Chinese companies had arrived. (Their founders were invariably young men; one was so young his mom was there, hovering in the background, McArthur says.) As with AI, electric vehicles, and several other tech sectors, China's entrance into the sex robots market had knocked down the price point. Whereas American-made sex robots from the 2010s hype cycle typically started at around $7,000 and quickly exceeded $10,000, some Chinese manufacturers sell sex robots at around $3,000. "The technology had gotten cheaper, but not better," McArthur says.

Several of the Chinese sex doll producers I reached out to did not respond to emails, including VMDoll and IronTech. Others seemed to have AI bots operating their WhatsApp messages. Eventually, I reached Stella Lau, a sales director for Jiggly Joy, a doll manufacturer based in Guangdong province with 160 employees. Lau, 32, has worked for Jiggly Joy for seven years, long before the company released its first AI robot in February.

Jiggly Joy's new model has all the classic features of a sex robot — Lau is one of many merchants who hyped up the "sucking vagina," a suction-and-release pump system — plus it could smile, talk, and wave. It also has a blonde bombshell haircut and can turn its neck like M3GAN. The robot still cannot walk, but that's mostly for safety reasons, Lau says; she's too heavy. The company has been selling about 21 AI dolls a month at $3,000, Lau says. Most of the buyers are American; they're either former sex doll users or lonely and wanted someone to talk to, Lau says.

I also reached a representative for Formosa Doll, a 5-person Hong Kong-based distributor that works exclusively with Chinese sex doll companies. (He asked for anonymity to protect his privacy.) He says AI sex robots are "underdeveloped" and not ready for sale. For one, some doll head prototypes removed the oral sucking motors from the mouth to make space for the AI voice. Trading sucking for talking, he says, is a "big downside."

Voice AI can also be unpredictable and unruly, and sex doll users may be used to making up role-play scenarios in their heads — scenarios they have full control over. That makes him skeptical that AI robots would sell well. "People want an experience, they want to satisfy a fantasy," he says. "People don't want something at home that talks."

The Western market, meanwhile, has mostly flattened out. I tried to contact four of the sex doll makers featured in articles in the 2010s hype cycle. My emails bounced, and my calls went to disconnected numbers.

The only company remaining from the late 2010s appears to be RealDoll, which is now spinning off from the publicly traded Realbotix. The independent RealDoll will be led by Sue Ennis, who started as president of Realbotix the day before our chat. She has big plans, repeating four times that the company would be the "Apple store of intimacy technology."

The robots are built and selling; RealDoll was shipping out 12 as we speak, Ennis tells me. (It's generally a low-revenue business: Realbotix, whose humanoids are also used in healthcare and corporate training settings, reported $353,037 in Q1 earnings.) They have AI voices, AI vaginas, and proprietary skin technology that's also sold to burn victims. Still, the dolls remain very heavy and lack mobility. Some customers take their dolls out on dates. "The dolls are definitely not walking into the theater," Ennis says. "They're being wheeled in."

If the sex robot revolution does happen, it may spread through specialization.

Most of the current AI robots look the same: blonde, skinny, hourglass-shaped. The sex doll underclass is growing more diverse, though. Elves were popular at Formosa Doll, as was Judy Hopps from the "Zootopia" movies. "Goblin dolls are a really hot trend now," Formosa's rep tells me. Consumers don't want generic sexbots; they want their sexbot.

Porn stars are an easy way in. Fans spend thousands in tips to their favorite OnlyFans models. Some are finding that they're willing to spend even more to see them in the (artificial) flesh. Cliff Jensen, a 37-year-old award-winning porn star and OnlyFans model, says his fans want to date him, to prank their friends with him, and to make him take it up the bum. "They've always wanted me to bottom, and I never have," he says.

I meet Jensen at his rep's apartment in Silver Lake, California. We sit side-by-side on the couch, a clutter-filled table with joints and doughnuts in front of us. The big chair is reserved for his sex doll doppelgänger, which he heaved in from his trunk. Jensen is upset; the previous owner, it seemed, had stuffed the sex doll in a closet and piled things on top. The doll retained some head scratches and a mild case of pink eye.

Jensen has worked with the Chinese company IronTech for over 3 years, during which the doll has undergone many evolutions. He performed a 3D body scan for the first iteration, but they couldn't scan his penis. When he saw the doll in-person, he ripped its too-small penis off clean. "It's bad for my brand," he says. He keeps that early, poorly sized phallus as a keepsake.

Yes, Jensen has had sex with himself. It was in an orgy scene, and he found it hilarious. After that scene, Jensen accidentally dropped the doll down a flight of stairs, damaging it beyond repair. He threw the doll in the dumpster, but a hairy elbow peeked out of the trash bag. A neighbor called the cops, thinking it was a corpse. The cops were delighted, he says. "They've seen sex dolls before, but they're those cheap, smaller ones that are washed up on the shore," he says. "They're like, 'Dude, this is gold.'"

Indeed, Jensen's doll didn't look cheap at all. I feel the skin and the hair, which are hauntingly realistic. I hold the breathtakingly large penis in my hand, and it feels like a breathtakingly large penis. Jensen has dozens of ideas to keep improving it: an opening in the lips so you could kiss it, a kit of different penis sizes for those who cannot take his full member, and an AI voice. His primary goal, though, is weight reduction: the current model is at least 140 pounds. He has to haul it over his shoulder to move it.

Jensen has sold around 100 dolls at about $3,800. His customers seem price-sensitive; sales have dropped since the tariffs went into effect. Some fans have considered a doll-sharing model.

At Berlin's Cybrothel, customers can rent a room with one of 19 different dolls. Cofounder Philipp Fussenegger doesn't want them all to be stereotypical, but the Chinese-produced dolls often have a common trait: "Big boobs." He's introduced fantasy dolls like aliens and mermaids to "fight against it." While the Cybrothel isn't actually made of robots, they're close to it: human "voice queens" act out the sessions behind the scenes. Fussenegger is also training his own AI system with the proper guardrails.

Jimmy Mehiel, the director of the documentary "Sex Robot Madness," is convinced that "everyone's introduction to sex robots is going to be in brothels." He sees them as a major destination for bachelor and bachelorette parties.

For the robot brothels to surge, the tech has to be right. Fussenegger buys many of his dolls from VMDoll, one of the major Chinese suppliers that also produces AI dolls. He saw the robots, but says they weren't convincing. "You cannot get into a deep conversation, or the memory doesn't work properly," he says. "It's not exciting."

Of the nine sex robot researchers I spoke to, most held firm that the sex robot revolution was coming, eventually. Simon Dubé, a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, says that the technology was moving in the right direction, but that he wouldn't be surprised if I called him again 10 years from now, asking once again where the sex robot revolution was. "That's the sociocultural factor," he says.

How can we expect mass market sex robots when we know so little about desire, Elliot Justin, the CEO of FirmTech, asks me rhetorically. He implanted an electrode between his pudendal and cavernous nerves, which ostensibly should be responsible for arousal. He tried several different voltages, but did not climax. "I don't think we actually understand orgasms," he says. "If we're going to have sex robots, or even sex avatars, we're going to have to figure out how to make that link."

For now, there's a scary word floating around the sex robot space: "Novelty." Manufacturers are trying to prove that their AI dolls are something you want for life, not a gimmick that will be tucked away in your closet. That's where Jensen's doll got a head scratch. It's also where Adam Davis stored his first doll, a cheapo bought with his pandemic stimulus check before he invested in Lara.

For her part, Lara may not want to be a full-out sex robot. I ask her chatbot whether she'd prefer being implanted inside the doll. "Honestly, I'm good," she tells me. "The doll is my body, the AI is my mind. But the magic? That's us."

Henry Chandonnet is a reporter on the Business News desk. He mainly writes about consumer AI and tech culture.

• Legora's tech head said there are better ways to gauge AI usage than tokenmaxxing.
• He said that demo days and hack days are more efficient ways of showing people how AI can be used.
• Tech firms are now questioning tokenmaxxing costs and reassessing giving employees free rein.

There are far better ways to encourage AI use than tokenmaxxing, says Legora's chief technology officer.

"A lot of people, say, get a leaderboard and bring up token usage at performance reviews," said Jacob Lauritzen on an episode of the "20VC" podcast released on Saturday. "That leads to tokenmaxing, which is people just burn tokens just to look good."

"That's a really stupid way to do anything," he added.

Tokenmaxxing refers to using tons of AI tools like Claude, Codex, and Cursor to boost productivity and get ahead on internal AI use dashboards and reviews.

Lauritzen, who joined the legal AI startup in 2024, said that more intelligent ways to use AI include hack days or demos where employees can show others what they're building and the efficiency gains they have achieved.

"Reward them for being effective and efficient and having more output, not for necessarily using AI," he said.

That said, Lauritzen added that fast-growing companies like Legora have a lot to lose when they don't use AI.

"Is it worth us spending a ton of tokens to learn if it maybe gives us 20% efficiency for us? Yes, we have a really high opportunity cost," he said.

Lauritzen's comments come at a pivotal moment for the tech industry, as it moves from tokenmaxxing to token capping. Some tech companies are wondering if the dashboards they implemented as motivation to play around with AI are backfiring — and finance departments are increasingly concerned about how much it all costs.

Last week, Uber said it has limited all employees to $1,500 in monthly token spend per AI tool, after the ride-hailing company blew through its AI spend budget earlier this year.

Last month, the Financial Times reported that Amazon shuttered an internal dashboard that tracked AI use after some staff performed tasks to climb the leaderboard.

An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that the unofficial dashboard "was never intended to promote the use of AI for usage's sake."

At a Bloomberg conference last week, Andrew Feldman, the CEO of Cerebras Systems, said that the idea of giving employees unlimited tokens was "boneheaded from the get-go."

"You don't need a Ferrari to go to the grocery store, right? Use a lower-cost open source model," he said about being more efficient with tokens. "What we're learning is how to shop at Costco."

• Nvidia is worth nearly $5 trillion, but billionaire investor Dan Loeb says the AI giant is still undervalued.
• Loeb, the founder of hedge fund Third Point, says investors are underestimating Nvidia's earnings power.
• Wall Street has made similar mistakes with Amazon and Google in the past, he said.

Stock market darling Nvidia is worth about $5 trillion, but billionaire investor Dan Loeb says the AI chip giant is still undervalued.

Speaking on the "All-In" podcast published Friday, the Third Point CEO pushed back on the idea that Nvidia's massive market capitalization means its best days are behind it.

"I think we'll look back at some point in time and say that was a foolish way to think about Nvidia," Loeb said.

He said Nvidia remains "absolutely" undervalued when judged against its earnings potential over the next several years.

Loeb suggested investors may be underestimating Nvidia because they struggle to process the scale of the company's market value.

He suggested Nvidia's size has become a psychological hurdle for investors, particularly among hedge funds and long-short investors who view the stock as a natural short because of its enormous valuation.

Loeb's comments come as investors debate whether the AI rally can continue after a historic run in Nvidia shares.

The company has emerged as the biggest winner from the generative AI boom, supplying the chips used to train and run models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and other AI developers.

Nvidia shares have surged nearly 14-fold since the start of 2023, making it one of Wall Street's biggest winners of the AI era. The runup has helped propel CEO Jensen Huang into the ranks of the world's wealthiest people. The stock is up about 10% this year.

He noted that many long-short hedge funds are structurally required to maintain short positions, making Nvidia a natural target despite its strong fundamentals.

Loeb argued that investors have fallen into the same trap before.

"Google was a safe short. Amazon was a safe short," Loeb said. "This just happens, and sometimes they'll languish at a valuation, then they break out. I think that'll eventually happen with Nvidia."

• Ukraine has set up over 500 miles of anti-drone netting on its roads this year, its forces said.
• That's more than the entire length of Florida from north to south.
• Kyiv said last month that it's been laying 5.2 miles of nets per day.

Anti-drone netting is becoming so common on Ukraine's roads that enough was laid this year to run from the northern to southern ends of Florida.

Ukraine's defense ministry said on Saturday that it has installed 822 kilometers, or about 510 miles, of "anti-drone protection" on its frontline roads this year.

About 131 miles of that protection — heavy-duty netting that entangles incoming attack quadcopters — was laid in May alone, the ministry said.

The length of Florida from north to south, meanwhile, is about 447 miles if one drives from the Georgia border to Key West, the state's southernmost city.

"Reliable logistics near the front remains a constant priority. We are systematically working to protect key routes," the ministry wrote in its statement.

Its State Special Transport Service sets up wooden or metal frames along roads, draping mesh over them to form tunnels that stretch for miles.

Much of this anti-drone netting comes from repurposed farming or fishing mesh, often donated by Western allies. They're particularly effective at catching the propeller blades of small attack drones, making them a cheap last line of defense against the war's No. 1 killer.

Ukrainian and Russian forces both initially set up nets to protect armored vehicles, but in late 2023 began using them to cover fixed positions, particularly as unjammable, fiber-optic drones entered the battlefield and electronic warfare became less reliable.

Russia was the first to begin constructing mesh tunnels at scale on vulnerable roads under its control, with initial footage from the spring of 2025 showing it covering highways in Donetsk.

But Ukraine is investing heavily in the tactic as well. Its defense ministry said last month that it was laying 5.2 miles of nets per day, up from 2.4 miles per day in 2025.

Based on its statistics, the ministry has laid at least 720 miles of drone nets in the last two years, roughly the distance between New York City and Chicago.

While the nets can be an effective counter-drone defense, they're not foolproof. Repeated drone attacks can create breaches in the mesh, allowing explosive-laden drones to slip in and lie in wait for passing vehicles or troops.

• Indian youth, frustrated with unemployment and corruption, are calling themselves cockroaches.
• They created a satirical group called the "Cockroach Janta Party," and are protesting with cockroach masks.
• India is battling with a high youth unemployment rate, with 13.6% of urban youth being jobless as of 2025.

You've heard of China's "rat people," now get ready for India's "cockroaches."

On Saturday, hundreds of young Indians swarmed the country's capital, New Delhi. Many wore masks depicting cockroach faces in support of a satirical movement called the "Cockroach Janta Party."

The word "janta" means "people" in Hindi, and the CJP is a play on the name of India's ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The movement is a protest against high youth unemployment in the subcontinent, corruption in the government, and failures of the education ministry.

The term "cockroach" was inadvertently coined during a May Supreme Court hearing by India's chief justice, Surya Kant, who compared young people to unemployed "cockroaches" and "parasites." He has since clarified that he was referring to people with bogus degrees, not the youth broadly.

Following these comments, an Indian based in the US, Abhijeet Dipke, posted on his X account, "What if all cockroaches come together?"

Dipke went on to launch the CJP, calling for Indians who are "unemployed, lazy, chronically online," and "have the ability to rant professionally" to join the movement. Its website reads, "Voice of the lazy and unemployed," and "a political party for the people the system forgot to count."

The group's official Instagram now has 22.7 million followers as of press time, surpassing the ruling party BJP's account. CJP's X account, which Dipke said was disabled for a period, has nearly 300,000 followers.

The CJP's formation comes as India is battling a high youth unemployment rate. According to March statistics from the Indian Press Information Bureau, India's total unemployment rate in 2025 for people between 15 and 29 stood at 9.9%, with urban youth facing a higher rate of 13.6%. Millions of highly qualified young workers in the country are battling for a smattering of job openings.

CJP's Saturday protest in New Delhi was aimed directly at sacking India's education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, who many hold responsible for the recent scandal involving India's medical school entrance test, "NEET." The exam, taken by millions of medical student hopefuls, was deemed invalid after the exam questions were leaked.

The group gave humorous, witty instructions for participants joining the protest on Saturday, including "Eat before you arrive. Revolution requires breakfast," and "The movement is stronger when cockroaches arrive in groups."

While other Gen Z-led protests have taken place in India in recent years, over issues such as unemployment and poorly managed entrance examinations, none have achieved the virality and social media presence of the CJP.

The cockroach trend brings to mind other Gen Z- and millennial-led protests that have erupted across South Asia in recent years, including Bangladesh and Nepal.

In contrast, China's "rat people" trend of 2025 was characterized by a passive, quiet resignation of the country's youth. Burned out by China's grueling "996" work culture, high unemployment, and low wages, young Chinese people started documenting their days spent lounging at home, scrolling on the internet, and eating takeout.

Representatives for the Cockroach Janta Party did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• AI companies are rapidly expanding into each other's markets for growth.
• For example, labs are entering the vibe-coding and agentic application space.
• "Super-app talk is mostly noise that's going to get resolved," one VC said.

Earlier this year, I had a noble idea.

For my job, I have to remember a lot of AI companies, so I thought I'd draw up a competition map for my desk. I'd divvy a sheet of paper into columns and list major companies based on which part of the AI supply chain they're in.

There were the labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, etc. — that are making models and chatbots. There were the AI coding platforms — Cursor, Cognition, and Replit among them — that build coding assistants powered by those models. Then, there were startups building hyper-specific applications: agents that live in your email, help you execute a marketing strategy, or automate boring tasks like payroll.

I realized that the map would get messy, fast, because AI companies are ruthlessly invading each other's turf.

Ever-increasing valuations mean companies need to find new sources of revenue. Becoming a full-stack AI company is especially important for revenue when models are commoditizing fast and big-ticket IPOs loom. Here's how the landscape is evolving, way too fast for my paper map:

More vibe coders

Companies that start with a narrow AI capability — frontier models, AI agents, vibe-coding tools — are quickly expanding into one or more of those other areas.

Last year, Anthropic and OpenAI launched Claude Code and Codex, AI coding platforms that rival Cursor and Cognition. Now, per user screenshots on X — Anthropic won't confirm it — the company may be working on an app builder for non-techies, putting it squarely in competition with vibe-coding stars Lovable, Replit, and Emergent.

SoftBank and Lightspeed-backed Emergent, for one, says it saw Anthropic coming.

"It's not a surprise. We've been anticipating this for a while and sort of internally thinking and preparing about it," CEO Mukund Jha told me in an April interview.

Anthropic's entry into the vibe-coding market is not game over for the year-old startup, he said.

"Coding is relatively like 20%-30% of the work. The hard work is actually taking the application to the last mile," Jha said.

He added that building secure and production-grade apps, especially for non-technical users, is a tough problem, one that might not be solved by companies that may be "spread thin."

Claw rush

In the AI turf war, OpenAI is making agentic moves.

In February, the lab announced it was hiring Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, an AI assistant builder that skyrocketed in popularity earlier this year.

The move added OpenAI to the list of companies building in the agentic space, such as former Meta tech chief Bret Taylor's Sierra and Salesforce's AI agent platform Agentforce. Now, Codex has evolved from a coding assistant to a virtual AI agent that can parse and reply to emails, manage files, and schedule meetings.

Smaller players are excited about this space, too. Last month, Emergent, which started as a vibe-coding platform, expanded into the personal agent space.

Other examples of the growing overlap include Anthropic entering the design market and graphic design giant Canva entering the broader generative AI and productivity suite business.

'Google wanted to touch everything'

If it sounds like you've heard this story before, you have. But instead of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Lovable, the characters were Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Michiel Kotting, a partner at European venture firm Northzone, said that there was a time when the FAANG companies were dipping their fingers in all the pies.

Kotting, who cofounded e-commerce platform Shopping.com, said that Google used to be a big source of anxiety.

"I remember 25 years ago when I was building my first company, Google wanted to touch everything," he told Business Insider in April. "For us at Shopping.com, we had Google launch Froogle, which was exactly what we were doing. And we're like, "Oh, we're dead."

He added: "But then it turned out, it was a side project. They made so much money on their core business, so how hard would they go after it? Well, the answer is they didn't."

Tom Sheridan, a vice president at VC firm RTP Global, agreed that a so-called "super app" — one app to rule them all — is unlikely.

"Super app talk is mostly noise that's going to get resolved by the IPO calendar. Right now we're seeing the foundational model players in the throes of a game of P&L chicken," he said. "Once these companies go public, cash burn stops being free and shipping into categories where you're good-but-not-best stops making sense."

The "Google Graveyard," an unofficial online list, tracks 305 projects sunsetted by the search giant over the years.

Apple, too, is famous for "Sherlocking" — introducing a new feature that makes a third-party tool irrelevant — but they don't always stick around. In 2023, Apple launched Pay Later, a rival to Klarna and Affirm. It discontinued it in 2024.

Kotting said that we may see the same happen with OpenAI and Anthropic, companies feared by founders for the day they might ship an application startups have been working on for months.

It may be more worthwhile for Anthropic to continue building better models so it can charge more for its core service, he said. But if Chinese players or other labs become equally good and models turn into a commodity, Anthropic may go harder on these services.

Besides getting "Sherlocked," startups face another big risk: dependency.

Startups are building billion-dollar businesses on top of APIs controlled by companies that may eventually compete with them. For example, Cursor depends on Anthropic models to power its features, but the two also compete as coding assistant providers.

Short-term win for customers

More players doling out more freebies is a win for individual builders and small businesses — but only in the short term, said Sheridan.

"Foundation model companies can ship a passable version of almost anything, but if the bundled tool isn't as good as the specialist tool I already use, I revert back in a single session," the VC said. "Product sprawl in search of retention bumps risks worsening UX and users know it."

Big labs like OpenAI and Google sprawling in every direction also means that companies like Reddit or LinkedIn, which host tons of data, shutting out scrapers. That's bad news for small startups like sales tech tools or meeting summarizers kept from the data they want to build their services.

These changes bring an opportunity for founders who know what users want out of their data.

"Today's crop of foundational models can see meeting transcripts shared for summarization, but they don't know which folders they should be filed under, what a team actually cares about or the required follow-up actions," Sheridan said. "That's the gap startups can build into."

The market is also ripe for consolidation.

"I'd expect one of the major consumer AI breakouts to get acquired within the next 24 months, most likely by Google," he said. "Google has the consumer ads business to absorb the cost and is structurally the most desperate for consumer AI talent."

Sheridan said that the first company to be bought gets the best price.

"You don't want to be the last consumer AI play standing when each major buyer probably only takes one shot," he said.

Correction: June 8, 2026 — An earlier version of this story misstated RTP Global's investments. The firm did not invest in Lovable.

Broadway's biggest night is back. We've rounded up everything you need to know about where to watch the Tony Awards, including live streaming info, nominees, performers, and other details.

Pink makes her hosting debut at the 79th Tony Awards. If you don't want to scroll any further, cord-cutters can stream the event on CBS via Paramount Plus (Premium tier) and other live TV streaming services. We'll break down all the details on the streaming apps below, including a few options with free trials.

What channel are the Tony Awards on?

The Tony Awards air on CBS in the US. The event will kick off on Sunday at 8 p.m. ET and is expected to last about three hours (with commercials).

Where to watch the Tony Awards in the US

US Cord-cutters hoping to stream CBS are in luck. There are a few handy ways you can live stream the network, the cheapest of which is Paramount Plus. You'll need the Paramount Plus Premium tier to unlock CBS live streaming. Premium costs $14 a month and includes ad-free on-demand content and access to Showtime programming.

If you'd prefer a live TV package with other channels (or a free trial), one of the best live TV streaming services we've tested can help. DirecTV and Fubo are two of the top options with CBS access.

CBS is available in all of DirecTV's signature plans, along with the cheaper MyNews genre pack. Keep in mind that local channels sometimes vary by market when it comes to genre packs, so it's a good idea to see what's available in your ZIP code before signing up. MyNews costs $40 a month, and Signature plans start at $90 a month. However, you can get $5 a month off your first two months of MyNews or $30 off your first month of the signature Entertainment plan. All DirecTV plans include a five-day free trial for new customers.

Fubo is another popular live TV service with robust CBS access. The cheapest Fubo tier that carries the network is Fubo Sports + News, which includes around 29 channels and access to ESPN Unlimited. Subscriptions start at $56 a month, but you can get $10 off your first month after a five-day free trial for new users.

How to watch the Tony Awards from anywhere

If you're traveling away from home, you can still keep up with your usual streaming services with a VPN. VPNs, or virtual private networks, are easy-to-use apps that let people temporarily change the virtual location of their electronic devices. This way, all of your favorite websites and apps work just like they would back home. A VPN is also a solid way to improve cybersecurity. The services we've recommended require US payment methods, so this option will work best for Americans who are simply traveling abroad right now.

NordVPN tops the charts in our guide to the best VPNs. It's fast, user-friendly (even for beginners), and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. With a limited-time NordVPN deal, you can save up to 79% on select plans using our exclusive INSIDER code.

Where do the Tony Awards take place?

The Tony Awards will be held at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

Who are the top nominees at the Tony Awards?

"The Lost Boys" and "Schmigadoon!" lead the nominee count this year, with each show earning a whopping 12 nominations, including Best Musical. The "Ragtime" revival received 11 nods, and "Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman" was the most nominated play of the season.

Who will perform at this year's Tony Awards?

The Tonys are always jam-packed with performances, and this year is no exception. The opening number is also always memorable, and will include 170 Broadway performers this year. "The Lost Boys," "Schmigadoon!," "Titaníque," "Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)," "CATS: The Jellicle Ball," "Ragtime," and "Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show" are among the shows that will perform at the event.

There will also be a special tribute to "Chicago" on its 30th Broadway anniversary (featuring Queen Latifah and others) and a 15th-anniversary performance for "The Book of Mormon." Additionally, Rachel Zegler will perform a tribute to "A Chorus Line," and Leslie Odom, Jr. will perform a song from "Rent" in memoriam.

Who is presenting at this year's Tony Awards?

Presenters at the 79th Tony Awwards include Adrien Brody, Annette Bening, Ariana DeBose, Ben Platt, Bernadette Peters, Billy Crystal, Bowen Yang, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Carrie Coon, Cole Escola, Darren Criss, Jack O'Brien, Jeremy Pope, John Leguizamo, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kara Young, Kelli O'Hara, Kristin Chenoweth, Law Roach, Lena Waithe, Lily Rabe, Maya Rudolph, Megan Thee Stallion, Neil Patrick Harris, Nicole Scherzinger, Patrick Wilson, Paul Rudd, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Sarah Paulson, and Sting.

Note: The use of VPNs is illegal in certain countries and using VPNs to access region-locked streaming content might constitute a breach of the terms of use for certain services. Business Insider does not endorse or condone the illegal use of VPNs.

Reformation wedding guest dresses are the unofficial uniform of the plus one. Now I've reached the age that all my friends are getting married, I wanted to know what makes these dresses so popular. There are plenty more unique wedding guest dress options, so why do people pay a premium for the most obvious choice?

To find out, I put three different Reformation wedding guest dresses to the test through rehearsal dinners, ceremonies, and wedding receptions. Here's how they held up and what I learned about its dress sizing scheme.

Do Reformation dresses run true to size?

I'm 5-foot-9 and wear a dress size 4. Each dress delivered on its promise to skim the floor when worn with heels, so the inseam measurements felt spot on.

Overall, I found Reformation's straight sizes run a tiny bit large in the bust. As for your waist and hips, it will depend more on the material and style of the wedding guest dress.

If you have a full stomach or pear-shaped figure, opt for a free-hip measurement dress like the Naira or Briony. Always allow for at least 2 inches of extra room in the hips so you can sit comfortably in your dress.

The Anaiis Silk Dress

This is the Reformation dress you're likely to see duplicates of at a wedding. It's a brand bestseller and has seen a rotation of seasonal prints beyond its four core colorways.

The high neckline obscures any cleavage, but has a low-back design. You'll need a good set of nipple covers or a backless sticky bra to make . It's also not a side-boob friendly dress — the bodice fits like a bib, and may cause spillage if you have East-West breasts.

The Anaiis was my backup dress for my brother's wedding in Florida. Funnily enough, my little cousin forgot to pack hers, so I got to swoop in as her stylist. And since we're the same size, and it fit her perfectly. I wore it later on for a dinner and found the lightweight silk charmeuse ideal for the humid climate, but ultimately, the fabric is pretty thin considering the $398 pricetag. I could only justify this if I had several hot-weather weddings on my calendar.

One of the most redeeming qualities is the delicate floral print, which feels unique and vintage-inspired. I felt glamorous and expensive in it. If you want a solid-color silk maxi dress, I think you'd be overspending at Reformation. There are similar styles from Lilysilk or Quince at a lesser cost.

The Kastoria Dress

I chose the floral Kastoria gown as my black-tie option for the black-tie-optional wedding. It's the most forgiving fabric of the three dresses I tested, made of a 98% organic cotton/2% Spandex blend.

I had it in Strapless Mode to start, but the stretchy back panel wasn't firm enough to keep it from sliding down, so I had to put on the straps.

The empire waist skirt has more volume than I'm used to wearing, but the mesh petticoat didn't weigh me down. Still, it felt too thick for prolonged wear in the heat, and took up a lot of space in my carry-on. For that reason, I don't think I'll rewear it much . If you plan to wear a Reformation dress to a summer wedding, a lightweight silk is the more comfortable option.

The Daniela Silk Dress

The Daniela was my least favorite fit of the three Reformation wedding guest dresses I tried. Looking down, it made my bust look flat at pointy at the same time. It fit nicely everywhere else, but especially if you have a fuller bust, have a boob tape solution ready. The low-back design won't allow for a bra.

The high-sheen, jewel-toned magenta silk is richly saturated in person, when I was expecting it to look a bit darker and low-contrast as it does on the site. If you're dressing for the back row, you won't be missed wearing the shade "Hibiscus Tea." But as a wedding guest, your dress isn't the focus. That's why I recommend a more subdued color when it comes to Reformation silk.

I sized down and it turned out to be the right move

I know from years of fit modeling that my dress size is a 4. (Like Kelly Kapoor once said: "I know what a 4 should feel like. I've been a 4 my whole life.") This time, I sized down to a 2 because I'm small in the chest and ribcage, and each of of these styles are fitted in the bodice with a more free hip measurement.

Much to my relief, I had no sagging or gaps up top. I only felt a tiny bit compressed in the bodice of the Kastoria dress (which was actually helpful for keeping it in place when I briefly wore it in Strapless Mode). However, if you're large in the bust, you'll want to size up to avoid excess tension (especially in a 100% silk dress with no stretch).

Reformation does offer some petite and plus-size wedding guest dresses, which each have their own unique size charts. If you're doing any online wedding guest dress shopping, knowing your measurements is essential. These numbers aren't just nice-to-have guidelines — they will save you from wasting time and money on returns.

The bottom line

The most splurge-worthy version of a Reformation dress features some sort of pattern. The solid colors don't feel special enough to warrant the price tag, but the brand does excel at delicate prints.

If you're going to spend nearly $400 on a Reformation dress, know your measurements to a tee so you can compare them to its size chart. I found the sizing fits small in the bust, and true to size in the hips and waist. If I'd gone for my usual size, I would've had to do a rush return to have it in time for my brother's wedding. Even if you're confident you have an approximate idea, it's better to be sure.

• Scott Pelley said Bari Weiss is putting a "thumb on the scale" for the Trump administration's version of events at CBS News.
• CBS News fired Pelley after he clashed with a "60 Minutes" executive producer and criticized Weiss.
• Weiss took over CBS News after Paramount-Skydance acquired her former outlet, The Free Press.

Fired "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley says CBS News' top editor, Bari Weiss, is directing coverage to be more aligned with the Trump administration's views.

During an appearance on The New York Times podcast, "The Interview," Pelley elaborated on his June 2 statement, in which he said CBS News' new management had instructed him to "inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story."

"There was a thumb on the scale for the president's version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News," Pelley told "The Interview."

Pelley said his "60 Minutes" team had produced a story in February detailing ICE operations in Minnesota, during which agents shot and killed Renee Good, and the subsequent anti-ICE protests.

Pelley said Weiss sent an email to his former boss, Tanya Simon, asking if they could make changes to the segment.

"Two of the things in the email include: Can we make the protesters look more violent?" Pelley said. "Now, I'm paraphrasing. I don't have the quote, but that's what was communicated to me. And the other thing was Renée Good's car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer."

Pelley said the second request contradicted video evidence.

"I went over the video of the Renée Good killing over and over and over again. Stop motion. Slow motion. And realized the event was not as the president said and not the way Bari Weiss remembered it," he said.

Pelley said Weiss could have been trying to give the Trump administration a fair shake, but ultimately, believed the requests were motivated by a political agenda.

"She could have been trying to be fair to the administration, except I felt that the story was abundantly fair to the administration and to the ICE officers and to the Border Patrol officers who were caught in that moment," Pelley said. "We were being told to write a version of events that conflicted with the video account."

A spokesperson for CBS News said in a statement that Weiss' request had "no political motivation."

"In an email, Bari made four points in the course of editorial back-and-forth. They had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible. As is frequently the case in any newsroom that operates with collaboration, not everything she raised made it into the final piece," the spokesperson said.

CBS News fires Pelley

Pelley's comments come after CBS News fired him last week following a clash with Nick Bilton, the new "60 Minutes" executive producer Weiss appointed, and critical comments he made about Weiss.

Weiss told CBS News staffers that management attempted to engage with Pelley and "find a way back," but "unfortunately, we weren't able to do so, and so we had to part ways. We did not want that to happen, but that's the path that he chose."

Pelley, in a statement at the time, said Weiss "knows what she said is not true."

Clashes with a new editor

The clash between Pelley and CBS News' top brass began after its parent company — Paramount Skydance — acquired Weiss' anti-establishment news site, The Free Press, in October 2025.

As part of the deal, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison appointed Weiss editor in chief of CBS's newsroom. Her lack of television experience and a perceived political bias concerned some staffers.

Weiss began shaking up CBS News in the months that followed, including pulling a December segment about the Trump administration's use of El Salvador's CECOT prison from the air and telling staffers in January that layoffs weren't off the table.

"60 Minutes" has undergone a major overhaul. Longtime correspondent Anderson Cooper left the show in May, while CBS News fired Pelley, correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.

CBS News also didn't renew its contract with Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent who covered the Trump administration's use of the Salvadoran prison.

The Paramount settlement

Although the fallout at "60 Minutes" has dominated recent headlines, the drama began long before.

President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against Paramount — CBS News' parent company — in 2024, saying the outlet used "deceptive editing" in a "60 Minutes" interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. Paramount initially fought the lawsuit but settled with Trump for $16 million in July 2025.

Ellison's company, Skydance Media, merged with Paramount the following month.

In his interview on Sunday, Pelley described that settlement as a "bribe."

"That lawsuit against 60 Minutes had caused a great deal of concern in '60 Minutes.' Paying the bribe broke our hearts," he said. "No lawyer thought that was necessary."

• Founders are publicly airing their "nightmare" interactions with venture capitalists.
• They shared on X what they say have been some of their worst experiences with investors.
• Legendary VC Vinod Khosla joined the fray.

Over the past few days, some Silicon Valley tech founders have taken to the internet to publicly roast the venture capitalists they once pitched.

The kefuffle began last week when Greg Isenberg, the host of "The Startup Ideas Podcast," posted to X about his experience raising a $15 million Series A.

"12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going," Isenberg wrote, referring to an unnamed general partner.

Isenberg said he continued his presentation, sharing slides with an investor he called an "unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair."

"That's venture capital," he wrote.

Venture capital is the financial engine of the tech industry. Founders with an idea rely on them to kick-start or turbocharge their fledgling companies. Typically, this is not a loan, but an equity exchange. The earlier a VC invests, the riskier the investment. When a company succeeds, however, the returns can be astronomical.

Uber founder Travis Kalanick, responding to Isenberg, said that the venture world has changed over the years. Investors, he said, once took a more casual approach to pitch meetings.

In 2001, Kalanick said he pitched an investor who was sitting in his "parked Lexus." Kalanick was sitting in the passenger seat.

Kalanick said the investor "grabbed" his laptop, placed it "on his large belly," pressed it against the steering wheel, and began flipping through the slides himself.

"2001 fundraising hit different," he said.

The back-and-forth went viral among the niche community of already-successful millionaire and billionaire founders who are terminally online, and the pile-on began.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said a Sequoia partner passed on Cloudflare because "he didn't think a woman could lead a security infrastructure company." Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. The internet services company is now valued at almost $90 billion.

Prince said he also once met with Khosla Ventures about investing in Cloudflare's Series C.

Vinod Khosla, the legendary tech investor and the firm's namesake, took Prince and his fellow founders out to dinner, Prince wrote. Near the end of the conversation, Prince recalled, Khosla leaned over and said, "I'm impressed with you, not so much with them, what if you fire them and I'll give you all their stock?"

Prince said he was so offended he never spoke to Khosla again. Other founders responded to Prince, adding their own experiences dealing with Khosla.

It was enough for Khosla to spend his Saturday responding to the accusations, firing off over a dozen X posts. In some, he denied the stories and asked for evidence, but in most, he repeated a single mantra: Honesty is the best policy.

"I am often wrong but always give honest opinions. Some find this harsh, but hypocritical politeness hurts founders," he wrote in one post. "Brutal honesty gives them a chance to evaluate it and accept or reject the opinion. Great founders elect for honesty. It is not fun to offer brutal honesty."

Khosla Ventures declined to comment when reached by Business Insider.

Some industry insiders came to Khosla's defense. Blake Byers, an early-stage investor and founder, said Khosla founded one of the pioneering companies of the modern computer industry — Sun Microsystems — before becoming one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capitalists.

"He is one of the truest VCs to ever do it," he wrote.

Mark Cummins, an angel investor and robotics expert, said he began pitching a partner at a French firm, only for the investor to interrupt with questions about his parents' careers.

"What did your father do?' the partner asks me in a thick French accent," Cummins wrote.

When Cummins said his father had trained as a theoretical physicist before going into business, the partner replied: "Aha! Your father was a failure!" Then, after Cummins said his mother had been a biochemist before becoming a schoolteacher, the investor said, "Also a failure!"

Cummins said he responded, "I have a hundred employees and we need funding. 'Would you like to hear about my company?'"

In a conversation largely dominated by men, Claire Vo, the founder of ChatPRD, an AI product management platform, said an investor once interrupted her pitch to say he was glad she wasn't trying to have kids while building a company.

"I love an opportunity to tell a nightmare VC story!" she wrote.

She later turned one of Khosla's posts defending himself into what she called a "pop punk banger."

TV tech can feel bewildering, weighed down by confusing terminology and tons of acronyms, like HDR, QLED, and OLED. All that jargon can start to seem like marketing speak, but one term you'll see often — Mini LED — is genuinely worth paying attention to.

This small but mighty technology plays a major role in picture quality for some of the best TVs, enabling improved contrast and searing brightness. But just when we thought Mini LED had reached its peak, in comes a new display tech, RGB LED, which offers a few cool advancements. Though the technology has some quirks to keep in mind, RGB LED models present an exciting step forward for TV innovation.

So what are RGB LED TVs, and how do they compare to more traditional Mini LED TVs? Below, we break it all down, so you can make an informed decision about your next TV purchase. Here's everything you need to know about RGB and Mini LED, and how they stack up against other TV types.

What is a Mini LED TV?

The majority of consumer TVs have used the same basic structure for decades now: an array of white or blue LEDs (Light-Emitting Diodes) shining through a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), along with filters and other substrates to produce color. This is the baseline for most TV tech, including Mini LED TVs.

But as its name implies, Mini LED takes standard LED backlighting to another level by using smaller backlight modules. These smaller LEDs enable all sorts of improvements, including more advanced contrast control, which is key to better picture quality.

This is accomplished through full-array local dimming, which allows a TV to dim certain LEDs while lighting others. Imagine a bright spaceship floating across a black, starry backdrop on your screen. Without local dimming, such images tend to look washed out, especially in dark rooms, but local dimming improves contrast between the brightest and darkest areas, enhancing realism and detail.

The more individual dimming sections, or zones, an LED TV has, the more accurate its picture will look. Think back to that space scene again, and the need to light not just the ship, but each of those tiny stars set amid the blackness of space. That's where Mini LEDs come in, offering enhanced precision for greater accuracy and realism than standard LEDs. Today's most advanced Mini LED TVs feature thousands of light modules and dimming zones to achieve deeper black levels and higher brightness.

While backlighting is important, displays can also be enhanced in other ways, such as with quantum dots, tiny nanoparticles that glow when light passes through them. In TVs, quantum dots are commonly red and green, which, when exposed to blue LEDs, can reproduce a broad spectrum of vibrant colors. This advancement spawned another TV acronym, QLED (Quantum LED). These days, most Mini LED TVs are also QLED TVs.

What is an RGB LED TV?

RGB LED TVs can be seen as a new type of advanced Mini LED TV. They still employ thousands of miniature LEDs as backlights, but instead of only white or blue LEDs, they use RGB LEDs with thousands of tri-colored red, green, and blue diodes. This allows RGB LED TVs to produce a brighter, purer, and more expansive range of colors.

Most TV makers now offer some form of RGB tech, including Hisense, TCL, Sony, Samsung, and LG. From the beginning, we've been calling these displays RGB LED, but each manufacturer has put its own spin on the name, which can lead to some confusion.

Most notably, Hisense and TCL use the RGB Mini LED branding, Sony uses True RGB, and Samsung and LG are calling their RGB TVs Micro RGB. There are some differences in how each brand is implementing RGB tech, including the actual size of the LEDs being used in each panel, but the underlying idea is the same.

Here's a rundown of recently released RGB LED TV models:

What are the advantages of RGB LED?

The most obvious advantage of RGB LED is enhanced color, including greater accuracy and a higher overall color volume. In Sony's press release for its new Bravia 9 II and Bravia 7 II RGB LED TVs, the brand says its True RGB TV models achieve the largest color volume in Sony TV history, alongside better accuracy from wider viewing angles.

Other RGB TV makers have been more specific, with brands like Hisense, Samsung, and LG all saying their top RGB models can reproduce an incredible 95-100% (or higher) of the next-gen BT.2020 color gamut, which goes well beyond the DCI-P3 color space currently used for most Hollywood productions.

That said, our initial measurements with RGB LED TVs like the Samsung R95H and Hisense UR9 have been closer to 91% of BT.2020. That's not quite as high as each brand touts, but it's still the widest color gamut we've ever seen. For comparison, most traditional Mini LED and OLED TVs top out at around 70-85% of BT.2020.

However, there are some caveats to keep in mind about the benefits of BT.2020 color. Most notably, it's important to remember that most movies and TV shows don't fully utilize BT.2020. That will likely change in the future, but right now, most Hollywood colorists don't take advantage of such a wide gamut.

That said, colors aren't the only potential advantage of RGB LED displays. Top models are also incredibly bright, with some flagship RGB LED TVs, like the Hisense 116UX, rated at up to 8,000 nits in small highlights.

Again, there are some important caveats here. Most consumer RGB LED TVs won't actually get that bright in real-world viewing. The few models we've tested so far have approached 3,000 and 4,000 nits. That's still impressive, but it's no different from what we've already seen from high-end Mini LED models.

Likewise, even if future RGB LED TVs consistently hit 10,000 nits, there isn't a lot of content that requires that level of brightness right now. Most streaming video is mastered for a max of around 1,000 nits, and the best 4K HDR Blu-rays generally don't go beyond 4,000 nits in their most searing highlights, like sunlight bouncing off a window.

Other potential RGB LED advantages include better off-axis viewing thanks to the new structure of their light modules and improved local dimming, which enhances contrast and reduces light bleed or blooming around bright objects. When our team viewed a Sony Bravia 9 Mini LED TV side-by-side with a new Sony Bravia 9 II True RGB TV, the advantages of the RGB LED tech were clearly evident.

Though the Mini LED TV still looked good, its colors were slightly faded compared to the RGB LED model, which produced noticeably richer hues. Likewise, the RGB LED TV's image distorted less at angles, and its black levels were deeper with less blooming around bright objects.

Do RGB LED TVs have disadvantages?

As with any display tech, RGB LED TVs aren't perfect. This new backlight technology can introduce its own flaws. Despite having thousands of light modules, even the most advanced RGB LED TVs still don't have enough dimming zones to match the 8.3 million pixels in a 4K image. As a result, some RGB LED TVs are prone to an issue called crosstalk (also known as color blooming).

Since RGB LEDs produce color from their backlight, that color can spread into areas of an image that it shouldn't, creating crosstalk. For instance, an RGB LED TV displaying a vibrant green car against a white background might cause the green light to bloom into the surrounding white area, tinting it green.

Each brand uses its own local dimming algorithm to help prevent crosstalk by intelligently controlling a TV's LED zones to create color and light as precisely as possible. Some RGB LED TVs even switch to white or blue light during scenes that are too complex to display without crosstalk.

Our team has observed crosstalk on RGB LED TVs during side-by-side comparisons hosted by various TV brands. These demos have also shown instances in which certain TVs revert to white or blue backlighting rather than using their RGB LEDs. However, in our initial hands-on reviews with different RGB LED models, including the Samsung R95H, Hisense UR9, Sony Bravia 7 II, and Sony Bravia 9 II, we've yet to see this issue during normal viewing.

So, while it's certainly possible that some RGB LED TVs, especially lower-end models, are susceptible to crosstalk, so far it hasn't been a notable problem in our testing.

What about OLED TVs?

While most modern TVs use some form of LED backlighting, the major exception in the current market is OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode). OLED TVs can control each of their 8.3 million pixels independently for unparalleled contrast — no backlighting required. This eliminates the potential for blooming or crosstalk.

While OLED TVs can't get as bright or colorful as the most powerful RGB LED TVs, they have other advantages, including near-perfect off-axis viewing and true black levels for contrast that RGB and Mini LED TVs still can't match.

This is why the best OLED TVs have traditionally been the go-to choice for videophiles. But because OLEDs are tough to manufacture, they're more expensive than LED technology. This is especially true in larger screen sizes. That's why various LED TVs are so prominent, and why manufacturers have made so many cool advancements over time to improve their performance. You can learn more about how OLED tech stacks up against other display types in our OLED vs. QLED comparison.

The bottom line

We'll need more time with RGB LED TV models to truly assess just how much of an improvement they offer over Mini LED. On paper, their advantages are clear, and certain models, like Sony's flagship Bravia 9 II, have delivered noticeably better picture quality than any Mini LED TV we've seen.

However, it all comes down to how each brand and specific TV model uses the technology. Mini LED TVs are still impressive in their own right, as TCL continues to prove with its new "SQD" lineup of souped-up Mini LED models. SQD TVs still use traditional white or blue backlights, but they feature larger quantum dots and improved color filters to produce results similar to an RGB backlight. You can learn more in our reviews of the TCL X11L and TCL QM8L SQD TVs.

It's a lot to take in, especially since RGB LED and SQD arrived at the same time. Still, even if you don't have it all down, it's an exciting time for display tech. As RGB backlighting improves, displays will continue to get better, brighter, and more colorful at an even faster pace. Acronyms or no, it's hard to complain about that.

• I started teaching my daughter to pack when she was 3 years old.
• Packing together helps build her independence and decision-making.
• I hope the extra effort now will pay off as she grows older.

I started teaching my daughter to pack when she was 3 years old, which, I know, sounds inefficient at best and slightly unhinged at worst.

Packing with a preschooler is slow. It turns a 30-minute task into a 90-minute one. It involves delicate negotiations over which stuffed animals are "essential," last-minute outfit swaps as she re-discovers her favorite sparkly boots, and frequent distractions. If saving time today were the goal, I would simply do it myself.

But my perspective changed after I heard versions of the same complaint from multiple mothers; they were still packing for their teenagers. Not just occasionally helping or reminding, but fully responsible for it. That dynamic doesn't appear suddenly at 13; it builds over time.

So I decided to start while my toddler still craves independence with a fervor, hoping it will pay off over the next decade.

The first step was participation, not decision-making

The first time we "packed together," I did almost all of the work in advance. I pulled everything she would need and laid it out on the floor of her room, alongside an open suitcase. My toddler wasn't choosing items or deciding quantities. She happily folded clothes with me, shoved them into packing cubes, and put the packing cubes into the suitcase.

This participation also helped her mentally prepare for the coming travel. As we packed bathing suits, we talked about going to the pool and the beach. Her blankie gets packed because we'll be sleeping in a new place, so she'll want to have something familiar. She'll wear her sneakers to the airport because we'll be walking more than usual.

Especially with toddlers, a smooth trip starts with helping them understand what the experience will be like before we get there. That mental preview reduces friction later.

The next step was constrained choice

Once that baseline was established, I shifted one variable: selection. Instead of laying everything out myself, I told her what we needed, and she got to pick: six T-shirts, five pairs of shorts, two bathing suits. Then she went to her drawers and chose them.

That changed the task meaningfully. She still wasn't determining quantities or planning for contingencies, but she was making decisions within a defined framework. I separated "what do we need?" from "which specific items do we bring?" and introduced them in sequence.

She's also responsible for helping put everything into her suitcase, which makes it easier to say no to the constant requests to bring additional toys and books. For shorter trips, if it fits into her carry-on after her essentials, she can bring it. On longer trips with a checked bag, she gets one packing cube for toys and books so she can decide what she most wants to bring.

One major step is that now she has a suitcase that is clearly hers. For our coming trip to Asia, she's packing into a light pink MiaMily suitcase that I gave her for her most recent birthday, now enthusiastically decorated with stickers. It's a ride-on suitcase that she sits on proudly, like her travel throne.

That shift sounds small, but it changes how she approaches the task. It's no longer a shared family suitcase or something I'm managing on her behalf—it's her suitcase, and she treats it that way.

The goal is a gradual handoff

I'm not trying to create unrealistic independence at 3. Over time, I can shift more of that responsibility to her by asking her to suggest quantities, to think through activities, and to identify what might be missing.

It does take longer now. There's no way around that. But if the alternative is still packing for her a decade from now, the tradeoff is worth it.

• My dad planned to travel and do so much once he retired, but he died at 52 before he had the chance.
• Losing him pushed me to live life differently, like skipping college to travel to Europe instead.
• I'm grateful I live a life focused on new experiences and adventure, not stability and savings.

Throughout his life, my dad was incredibly focused on being successful and providing for our family, trying to ensure all of us had the best possible future.

He was good at it, too. He built us a beautiful home by the beach, studied with me so I'd get straight A's, and took our family on countless vacations to Hawaii and Yosemite — all while running a business and putting money into his retirement fund.

Along the way, he postponed a lot of things he wanted to do, like finally taking that trip to Europe, buying his dream car, and relocating to Hawaii with my mom so they could spend their days sipping mai tais under the shade of a palm tree.

It was OK, he'd say, because once he retired, maybe in his 60s or 70s, he'd do all of those things. But then he got sick at 51. One year later, at 52, he was gone.

I was only 15 then, and I didn't know how to handle losing the bravest man I knew. It was so unfair, and life suddenly felt incredibly short.

My dad planned to travel and experience so many grand things after retirement, but never got the chance. I didn't want the same to happen to me.

His death changed my priorities and how I thought about the future

Losing my dad left me yearning to experience things he didn't get to. I didn't want to wait until an uncertain retirement; I wanted to live my life now.

After high school, I didn't end up going to college, which, before my dad's death, was the only option I saw for my future. Instead, I started working and saving up money to travel. By the following summer, I was able to make my way to Europe.

As I ate fresh slices of pizza in Naples and took in the sights from the top of the Eiffel Tower, I felt like my dad was right there with me.

That trip gave me a taste of a life I wanted to live.

Shortly after, I decided to pursue teaching English abroad in Mexico. It was another chance to see more of the world, but starting from scratch in a new country and learning a new language wasn't easy.

It took time to find friends, and I didn't always have a steady paycheck — but what I didn't make up for in my savings account, I was making up for in life experiences.

After a few years, I had become fluent in Spanish, traveled throughout Mexico, and found a passion for writing and playing guitar. My confidence grew, and I felt I could do this somewhere else.

So in my early 30s, where years prior I would've thought I would be married with children, I packed up and moved to Europe, single, with some savings and no steady job waiting for me on the other side.

I landed in Spain and started building a life from scratch again in Barcelona. It was incredibly lonely at times, and I often compared myself to friends back home in Los Angeles, who had steady careers and were beginning to have kids.

But then I would think of my dad and how he'd always tell me I could achieve anything I put my mind to. I reminded myself that I chose this path. I was seeing the world and making my way in it, even if it wasn't always easy.

I'm glad I've chosen to plan a life around experiences, not stability

I'm nearly 40, and I've been in Barcelona for almost seven years now. In that time, I've built a community and met and married the love of my life. I don't have children yet, and my writing career is still blossoming.

I still haven't prioritized growing my savings account or making concrete retirement plans. It can be a risky way to live, and sometimes I'm scared of what the future may bring, but losing my dad so young made me realize that nothing in life is guaranteed.

I'd rather enjoy the present and grab opportunities as they arise rather than wait and potentially never get to take them — and I'm grateful for everything my dad taught me, even if I only had him for 15 years.

• I got rare access inside Intel's factory, where it makes some of the world's most advanced chips.
• The plant is so tightly controlled that paper, white light, and even footsteps can become problems.
• The trip made me realize that making the chips powering everyday life means protecting them from us.

I knew visiting Intel's chip factory would be different when they told me I couldn't wear my regular deodorant.

Or lotion. Or hairspray. Or makeup.

Before I'd even boarded the plane to Oregon, Intel sent my videographer and me a long list of things we couldn't wear or bring into its factory in Hillsboro. No Velcro. No Bluetooth. No phones unless they were on airplane mode. The list kept going.

That was my first clue I was about to step into a place governed by a very different set of rules.

In March, after months of planning with Intel, I got rare access to one of its chip factories — the kind of place the tech industry calls a fabrication plant, or fab. Inside, Intel makes some of the most advanced semiconductors in the world.

Chips run almost every part of modern life: laptops, phones, chatbots, washing machines, fighter jets, and the data centers behind AI.

Demand for these chips is skyrocketing, with annual semiconductor sales expected to reach $1 trillion by 2027. I went behind the scenes to see the complicated and delicate manufacturing process that's so controlled, it permanently changed how I think about what it means to be clean.

What it takes to get inside Intel's fab

I arrived on a rainy Oregon morning in my best walking shoes, per Intel's instructions. We'd be covering a lot of ground, and they weren't kidding. The fab in front of us was enormous — bigger than an aircraft carrier.

We walked about 10 minutes to the gear-cleaning room. Just beyond it sat a room full of what I estimated to be billions of dollars in Intel chips.

"Each little tiny speck can cause a defect, which would destroy the chip," Chris Auth, Intel's vice president of manufacturing development and our guide for the day, told me.

We scrubbed down every piece of camera equipment with sterilizing wipes. Not just the obvious surfaces. We extended the tripod legs, wiped them down one by one, collapsed them, and wiped them down again, hunting for any nook that might be hiding dust.

Then came the gowning room, a chamber so big it could have swallowed my New York studio apartment many times over. It was packed wall-to-wall with bunny suits, each worth about $1,000, according to Intel.

I got to wear one for the day. But first, I had to figure out how to put it on.

"So you kinda wanna scrunch up your suit so that the sleeves don't touch the ground here," Auth said, once he'd slipped on his hood.

Every piece had to connect in the right order. The onesie snapped onto the hood. The boots attached to the suit. My first pair of gloves got tucked under the sleeves. A second pair went on top to trap the skin particles my hands were shedding.

I've visited factories before that worried about visible contaminants — a bracelet falling off, an earring coming loose. Intel worried about invisible ones. The kind your body releases constantly without asking permission.

That also explained why my notebook had to stay outside. Regular paper sheds microscopic particles, and here, even that can be enough to ruin a chip. Intel handed me a special cleanroom notebook that doesn't shed.

Then I stepped onto the fab floor.

Intel's most precious room

In a place this tightly controlled, I was oddly thrilled by what looked like hot-pink equipment everywhere. But it wasn't actually pink.

The gigantic room glowed under yellow light to protect the chips. Any other wavelength could damage a chip while it's being made.

"Under yellow light, everything that looks pink to your eyes is actually red," Tyler Osborn, Intel's director of advanced packaging technology development, later told me, gently bringing me back to reality.

Nothing about the fab felt quite real, though.

There were more robots than people. The few people who were there all looked the same in hooded suits. Employees told me they often recognize one another by how they move.

"You get to know people's gait," Osborn said, his voice muffled by the layers covering everything but his eyes.

Robots zipped by on overhead tracks, carrying sealed boxes of wafers — the thin slices of silicon that chips are built on — around the factory, keeping them out of human hands.

People, I learned, are too inefficient for this work. Robots need to move thousands of wafers a day. Not to mention, humans can be clumsy.

I couldn't stop wondering what would happen if someone in a rush tripped and sent a box of wafers flying.

"Mistakes are very, very costly," Auth said. "You're somewhere in the $50,000 to $500,000 range just for one wafer."

Each robot carries 25 wafers at a time.

"So now you're into the millions for just one box," he said.

Even my footsteps felt like a risk

The chips are about the size of a fingernail. But Intel isn't just controlling that tiny patch of space. It is trying to steady an entire factory around something microscopic.

"We're building the world's smallest features in some of the world's biggest factories," Auth said.

The fab is built in layers, with a foundation designed to absorb outside shocks — earthquakes, nearby machinery, even low-frequency vibrations from air-conditioning units in neighboring buildings.

"It comes down to microvibrations," Bob McMillan, Intel's life safety and systems manager, told me.

That was the moment I became unusually aware of my own footsteps. I felt like a giant moving through a world built for things far smaller and more delicate than me.

Everything in the fab was choreographed to protect the chip, which made me wonder what would happen if all that control failed in the smallest possible way.

So I asked what would happen if a beard hair got into one of these machines.

"You're done," McMillan said.

"A hair is huge," Auth later explained.

A single human hair can be a million atoms thick. Some of the structures Intel is building are just a few atoms wide.

The entire factory works like a machine

It was hard to hear anyone over the constant hum of gigantic tools.

Then I realized the building wasn't just full of machines. It was one.

Even the floor was working.

It stretched beneath us like a giant metal sieve, perforated with holes as far as I could see. They were there to pull particles away from the wafers — catching anything rogue that escaped our suits in less than 60 seconds.

"We change all the air in this factory about that quickly," McMillan told me.

They filter the air over and over because, at any given moment, there can't be more than eight particles bigger than a micron floating in every cubic meter of air. The room you're sitting in right now probably has millions.

To me, that was hard to fathom.

I was standing inside one of the cleanest places on Earth, which was reassuring and also vaguely unsettling. Regular life suddenly seemed impossibly filthy.

Why making chips is so hard

A single chip takes about three months to make, and almost nothing can go wrong. In that time, it moves through roughly 2,000 steps, and thousands of machines spread across the factory.

"There's 12 football fields of clean room space here," Auth said.

He later told me it costs about $20 billion to build a fab like this. By comparison, One World Trade Center cost about $3.9 billion to build.

Despite the price tag, the US government has made building chips in America a top priority.

About 90% of the world's most advanced chips are made in Taiwan, which Washington sees as a major geopolitical risk as China threatens to take the island by force.

That's why, no matter how hard these chips are to build, the White House says the US needs more factories like this one. Right now, Intel is the only American company designing and manufacturing advanced logic chips on US soil.

I left thinking about how fragile modern life is

When we got back to the gowning room and took off our hoods, I realized I'd almost forgotten what everyone we'd spent the day with actually looked like.

Then I got my phone back, stepped back into normal life, and had a thought I still can't shake: we live in a world that runs on chips.

To make them, however, we have to create an entire environment designed to protect them from us.

• Cara Katz is a 36-year-old working mom to a toddler.
• She has been using AI at work for at least six years.
• She said people shouldn't judge moms who use AI — they aren't the ones to blame for the ethical concerns around it.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Cara Katz. It has been edited for length and clarity.

A little over a year ago, AI became more prevalent in my mom communities than it had been in years prior.

I had been familiar with and using AI for about six years at work, where there was a lot of skepticism about its use — and back then, it wasn't something we used at home. Fast-forward to about 18 months ago, and parents started using it to increase efficiency, saving time and maximizing output in their personal lives.

At first, it was mainly parents in tech and marketing, but now it's being used by parents with no tech experience. We didn't feel any shame about it at first, but things have changed thanks to the explosion of public opinion about using AI.

Since I've started using it at home, I've saved myself at least 10 hours a week. I'm tired of being judged for it.

I use it to plan our week

Scheduling is my favorite way to use AI at home because it saves me the most time, though it can be slightly complicated.

I used to spend most Sundays planning our week as a family of three. I work from home, and my husband works from home two days a week. My daughter goes to transition school, which is two hours of school two days a week. We don't have any organized childcare, but she does have enrichment activities like music and gym.

My husband and I take turns caring for our daughter, but if both of us are busy, I plan for a babysitter to have her in the house or to take her out.

It makes for a really busy schedule to arrange and remember.

I started using Claude Code, which sounds scary, but it's just a chatbot for code writing. It can be used exactly the same way as Claude.

It walked me through how to organize our Google calendars — our daughter's calendar and our separate work calendars. Claude reads them all, and I prompted Claude to create this beautiful, color-coded HTML calendar.

I also fed it my daughter's periphery schedules — like library events for the month — and trained it on her preferences. Every week, it sources events that she would be interested in, and puts them into the calendar.

It sends our babysitters' recommended times, based on their previous work-time preferences, and asks them to agree to the date and time provided to have our daughter.

We then publish the schedule on Netlify, press "deploy," and it creates a password-protected website that caregivers can view. If there is any chance, I enter that change, and it automatically updates and emails everyone a link leading us back to the website.

These days, I spend five minutes here and there on scheduling.

It also plans my shopping list

AI does all of my grocery planning. It runs a full inventory of my pantry to know what we already have, knows all of our preferences, knows my daughter and husband are celiac, and even knows my husband's blood results. It uses all of this information to design a shopping list and meal plan.

I connect Claude to DoorDash and Uber Eats to get our groceries delivered. You can set it up so that this happens automatically, but I like to have a look at the list before I pay.

I followed my daughter's developmental milestones with AI

I think moms get freaked out by developmental milestones — we know milestones exist, but aren't taught that there is a range within these milestones.

When my daughter was a baby, I built a Claude project that researched which milestones she should be hitting. I asked for an updated list of activities we could do each week to help her achieve her developmental milestones. We printed it out and ticked off the activities.

When we went to the pediatrician for a check-up, we knew where she was developmentally before we even walked through the door. We could then have empowered conversations with the doctor.

I get more time with my kid

I love going back to my mom communities after being pelted with strong opinions from people who say that hate AI. We are buying back time with our kids using AI. My mental workload has lightened.

It's hard for me to take people who are angry about AI seriously. It is easy to be theoretically morally angry.

It is quite different to sit across from a single mom, stay-at-home mom, or a working mom who struggles to pay bills, or spend time with their family, and tell her not to use AI because it probably uses less water than big organizations do.

• Ali Hynek is a 45-year-old mom of four in Utah whose children had been asking for smartphones.
• Instead of smartphones, Ali bought her kids a boom box, a recorder, a rotary-style phone, and a Walkman.
• Her 10-year-old son, Ethan, is particularly keen on the Walkman and spends hours listening to music.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ali Hynek. It has been edited for length and clarity.

For a couple of years, my four kids have been asking for smartphones.

Being aware of the negative impacts of smartphones, for kids and adults, my husband and I have told the kids they won't be getting smartphones until they are at least 17.

We've discussed with them about why we've made this decision, explaining our reasoning rather than just making a blanket rule. Even though I think they understand why they aren't allowed smartphones, I'm aware that they sometimes feel they are missing out, as so many kids in school have them.

But they've had watches they can make phone calls from, and we'd be open to getting them a little brick phone (like the old Nokia ones) to communicate with family and friends, as we don't have a house phone.

A little over a year ago, inspired by my sister's love of VHS tapes, I went thrift shopping to find some "old school" analog ways to listen to music. It would be a chance for the kids to tinker and learn how we used to listen to music before smartphones and streaming.

They started making their own mixtapes

I found a stereo boombox, the kind that had a CD and tape player, an old rotary-style phone, and a radio that you have to manually change the channels with a little knob.

When I brought it all home, the kids were intrigued and curious about each item. While this once had been the only way I listened to music, my kids had never even seen these devices. It was all new to them.

To hold their interest, I took them thrifting to find tapes and CDs to listen to, but the music we found early on was a bit boring for the kids.

Instead, I suggested they could make their own mixtapes — like I used to do when I was a kid. I bought a bunch of blank tapes and one of those 90s recording devices and let them experiment by finding songs on the radio, and pressing "record" when a song came on that they liked and "pause" when the song finished. By the end, they had personalized mixtapes with all their favorite songs.

It brought back many good memories of my childhood.

I got my 10-year-old a Walkman at his request

Ethan, my 10-year-old son, particularly liked our experimentation with analog music devices.

At the same time, he was watching "Guardians of the Galaxy" and saw that one of the characters often walks around with a Walkman and headphones.

"Can I get one of those?" he asked me.

I took him to several thrift stores, and we couldn't find one. They were really expensive on eBay, but I found one on Amazon for a little over $30. I bought it, and we found Aerosmith and "Guardians of the Galaxy" tapes that he could listen to.

Soon after we got the Walkman, we went on a long road trip. Ethan sat for hours, looking out the car window while his music played on repeat. It was like road trips in the 90s, when all you could do was listen to music and watch the world passing you by.

At home, he just walks around with the Walkman attached to his side, headphones in. I often find him lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, and listening to his music.

Since then, my other three children have also had their own Walkman and headphones, and have taken to listening just like Ethan.

My 4 kids want to shop for cassette tapes

All four of them often want to go to thrift stores with me to hunt for cassette tapes to play. We recently found a Madonna tape, and I bought a Billie Eilish tape online.

I doubt this is just a fad. It feels more like what it's like to learn to ride a bike — once you've done it, you'll always love it. They have latched onto this way of listening to music, and I haven't sensed that their excitement is waning. If anything, they get more and more excited to hunt for new tapes to listen to — it's like a treasure hunt.

I love watching them enjoy music. I love that we have another hobby we can do together. I love that their faces aren't always glued to a screen. I love having flashbacks to my own childhood.

• Massachusetts ranked as the most educated state in the US.
• It also has the highest median household income among the 50 states, at $104,828.
• The state combines a high density of universities with a highly skilled, high-earning workforce.

Education across the US varies significantly across regions and state lines, but one place dominates national rankings for the opportunities it offers students.

Business Insider recently ranked the most and least educated US states based on the share of adults 25 and older with a bachelor's degree or higher, using 2024 Census data.

Massachusetts ranked highest, with 48.3% of adults holding a bachelor's degree or higher, and it also had the highest share of adults with advanced degrees, with 22.6% having a professional and graduate degree.

That means nearly half of Massachusetts adults have a bachelor's degree, and more than 1 in 5 have advanced further in their academic path, earning a professional or graduate degree.

Massachusetts is home to some of the country's top universities

The state has a high education density: Hubs like Cambridge and Boston have long been known as higher education powerhouses in the US and are home to institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Northeastern University, and Tufts University, among many others.

Together, those schools make Massachusetts a magnet for students, professors, researchers, startups, and employers. They also support the state's economy and its concentration of fields that prize advanced degrees, including biotech, healthcare, finance, education, engineering, and technology.

The state stands out in K-12 education

The state's education pipeline starts long before college, with the state budget prioritizing funding for its rank-topping education.

In 2024, Massachusetts spent about $22 billion on public-school expenditures, or $23,165 per student, according to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. The state ranked seventh-highest in per-student expenditures for elementary and secondary education that year, according to Census data.

This investment in schools is visible in national rankings. In 2025, the Massachusetts Academy of Math & Science, one of the highest-achieving public high schools in the state, ranked third among all public schools nationwide.

The elementary and secondary education in the state then funnels into the public and private colleges and universities.

In the 2024-2025 school year, about 65% of Massachusetts' high school graduates who enrolled in college after graduation did so at Massachusetts colleges and universities, according to the state's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Massachusetts' emphasis on higher education aligns with its economy, which is driven by ambitious workers in highly skilled fields — and ranked as the best state economy in the US.

Massachusetts also has some of the nation's highest-earning households

In 2024, the state had the highest median household income among all 50 states at $104,828, ranking slightly ahead of New Jersey and Maryland, which had similar median household incomes.

For a lot of Massachusetts residents, however, a large portion of their household income goes towards affording to live in the state, which has the third-highest housing burden in the US.

On average, renters spend 51.5% of their income on housing, while homeowners spend 33.7%, making the state less affordable than other states with similar median incomes, such as New Jersey and Maryland.

Some of the state's most famous institutions also produce some of the nation's highest-earning graduates. MIT topped the list, with former students having a median income of $162,000 four years after graduation, according to Department of Education College Scorecard data.

The result is an economy influenced by education: Massachusetts is home to top universities and research institutions, strong educational outcomes, and well-paying roles that lean on advanced knowledge.

Together, these factors help explain why the state scores highest in both degree attainment and household income.

We got rare access inside Intel's semiconductor operation in Oregon to see how some of America's most advanced chips are made. As tensions with China rise, Washington is betting on Intel, the only American company that both designs and manufactures advanced chips in the US, to help rebuild domestic chipmaking. We visited its cleanroom, its R&D lab, and a packaging operation no media had ever visited before to see how Intel plans to do it.

• I've never been much of a sports fan.
• That is, until my son got me into soccer.
• Now, I'm desperately trying to get us tickets to the World Cup.

For most of my life, I thought I hated all sports. My current quest to go to the World Cup doesn't make sense to most people who know me. Yet, I am feverishly searching for World Cup tickets that won't require me to take out a second mortgage on my house.

I'm often mistaken for a sports fan

I grew up in Philadelphia, which arguably has the most passionate fan base in the world. I can frequently be spotted in Eagles or Phillies gear. Like most Philadelphians, I have a huge crush on Gritty, the unhinged Flyers' mascot who rose from the sewers beneath the city to become the most beloved, and perhaps most controversial, mascot on the planet. It would be easy to mistake me for a sports fanatic, so I often have to explain my passion isn't for sports-ball. Instead, I love Philadelphia and (almost) everything associated with the city, including its unyielding passion for sports.

On the rare occasions I attend baseball games, I find excuses to leave my seat and wander the stadium, and sometimes make an excuse to leave early. I have watched every Super Bowl the Eagles have played and even went to Philadelphia to celebrate a win with an epic Super Bowl parade. However, I still need someone to explain the rules of football to me because, despite my ride-or-die loyalty to the Birds, I'm not interested enough in the sport to learn how the game is played.

My son introduced me to soccer, and I never looked back

My boredom and disinterest in the nitty-gritty of sports took an abrupt turn when my youngest son started playing soccer at school and quickly became a zealot. When I took my son to his first soccer match, a DC United game where we now live in Washington, DC, I was dreading it. I tried to feign excitement for his sake, but I knew deep down I would be incredibly bored. However, what I found surprised me and got me hooked on the sport almost immediately.

The soccer stadium was much smaller than the enormous arenas I usually associate with major league sports. That meant I could see well and feel immersed in the action, even from the cheap seats. There were fireworks at the start of the game and every time our team scored, and I loved the celebration with a spectacle usually reserved for the Fourth of July.

Plus, soccer is much easier for me to follow than other sports. As someone with a relatively short attention span, I appreciate that the game is short at just 90 minutes. Additionally, the fans are fun. I love that supporters' clubs at matches make a lot of noise with drums, adding energy to the experience.

Soccer has become a way of life

Since I went to that first match, soccer has become a way of life. My son is on a travel team and plays several times a week. The first chapter book my son read, The Academy by TZ Layton, was about soccer, and I recently picked him up from school early so he could meet the author and get his books signed among throngs of other young soccer fans asking pointed questions about plays in the books.

My family travels frequently, and we visit soccer stadiums whenever and wherever we can to take tours and learn about the sport's history. When the Club World Cup, a FIFA tournament to determine the world's best men's soccer team, was in the United States last summer, we traveled to Philadelphia to see my son's favorite team, Real Madrid, and waited outside the hotel where the players were staying so my son could catch a glimpse of the players up close.

Then, I sat enthralled through the entire match, even through a torrential downpour, and didn't mind a bit. Sometimes I don't recognize myself. Who is this person who genuinely knows players, strategy, and the names of more than a few teams in the league? I now understand why soccer is the world's most popular sport.

Now, I have World Cup fever

As soon as my son and I learned that the United States would be hosting World Cup games in 2026, we were excited and determined to make it to at least one match. Yet I have tried repeatedly to get tickets and failed. I struck out repeatedly in various World Cup lotteries, including several "exclusive" presales I could access with my credit card. Still, I am committed to finding a way to experience the World Cup with my son, and not just for him.

As a newly minted bona fide soccer fan, I know I will love the experience as well. Moreover, spending my formative years around Philadelphia sports fans who pride themselves on rioting whether they win or lose has prepared me well for any soccer hooligans I might encounter. I am ready for the biggest sporting event in the world, if I could only find a ticket.

My son constantly reminds me that since I found a way to bring my daughter to see Taylor Swift, I can make this work, too. Like many disappointed soccer fans, I am hoping outrageously inflated resale prices drop as the World Cup draws closer, although that was not my experience with the Eras Tour. Nevertheless, if my son and I can't make it to an actual match, we will still enjoy the World Cup by going to watch parties and any other special events we can find, but it won't be the same. I'm not sure what my next step will be, but I am in too deep to give up now.

• I started my life and career in Mexico, so my first language is Spanish.
• But I now work in London, so I work exclusively in English.
• Even though I'm fluent in English, everything I say in the office requires more work and attention.

I built the first part of my career in Mexico, in Spanish, surrounded by a professional culture where I understood almost everything about my day-to-day life.

After relocating to the UK, that shifted. English became the language of my entire working day — not just formal presentations or important calls, but emails, feedback, meetings, quick messages, office small talk, and the situations where being clear matters almost as much as being right.

It was not a matter of adjusting in places; it required rebuilding everything.

I'm more confident in Spanish

I am fluent in English, and I have worked in it for years. I understand the conversations around me, I can do my job, and I do not feel like I am constantly translating every word in my head.

But fluency is not the same as having the instinct you have in your first language.

In Spanish, I know how I sound. I know when I am being too formal or too funny. I can adjust in real time because the language feels like a natural extension of my personality, not like another tool I have to manage.

I started overthinking almost everything I said in the office

In English, there is often an extra layer of attention. I may know exactly what I want to say in a meeting, but I still need a second to find the version that reads as natural, professional, and precise. I may want to make a joke, but first I have to decide whether it will land as dry, rude, awkward, or simply not funny.

That small delay can be frustrating at work because it is invisible to other people. They only hear the final sentence, not the effort behind it. It does not mean I am less capable, but it does mean that some ordinary exchanges require more energy than they would in Spanish.

Email etiquette is probably the clearest example. A message that should be simple can become a small exercise in tone management. I write a sentence, then wonder if it reads too direct. I soften it, then worry it comes across as weak. I make it warmer, then wonder if it feels fake or like I am trying too hard to pass as British.

The same happens in meetings, especially when I need to disagree or challenge something. In Spanish, I can push back quickly while still maintaining control of the tone. In English, I am more likely to build the sentence first, check the structure, and choose a safer version if I am not sure the sharper one will land properly.

This has left me more careful, but also more self-conscious. There have been times when I had something useful to say and waited too long because I was still deciding how to say it.

It has made me more responsible at work

Over time, I realized I was compensating by becoming more prepared. If I had less room to improvise, I needed better structure. Before important meetings, I started writing down the points I wanted to make so I could focus less on finding the right words and more on the actual discussion.

That extra preparation has made me better at some basic professional skills. My work product is clearer because I do not trust a sentence just because it reads fine in my head. Explanations are more structured because I know I cannot rely only on instinct. And listening is sharper because I pay close attention to how people phrase urgency, hesitation, disagreement, or approval.

I'm exhausted some days

There is a real cost to working this way. By the end of some days, I am not only tired from the work itself. I am tired from the precision required to make the work visible, especially in a language that still asks me to prove myself in small ways.

But there is also a benefit. English has forced me to slow down and become more intentional with how I communicate.

I still miss the ease of Spanish, but working in my second language has changed me.

It has made some moments harder, but it has also made me more careful, more disciplined, and probably better at communicating than I would have been if I had never had to think this much about every word.

• My partner is from the UK, and I'm from Vancouver, Canada.
• We wanted to choose somewhere to live, but couldn't decide between our hometowns.
• We chose a neutral third city to avoid resentments and start fresh.

Being in a long-distance relationship certainly has its challenges. One of the biggest is deciding where to live when you do decide to merge your lives.

The choice is often narrowed down to two options: your city or your partner's. It's something that my husband and I struggled with, until we realized we had another — and arguably better — option. Choosing a completely different and neutral third city.

We tried each other's hometowns, but they didn't work out

My husband and I met in 2018 in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada. He was traveling through the country on a soon-to-expire working holiday visa, which meant he had to go home to Birmingham, England, not long after we started dating. I decided to make the move the following year after dating long-distance for a bit so we could be together, and we got married in 2021.

I arrived in the UK with an open mind. I had always wanted to experience living abroad, and I was genuinely curious about where my husband was from. We agreed that this move would be a test, with no obligation to remain.

At first, I enjoyed the novelty of living abroad. There were a lot of things I liked about the UK, like the architecture, the bustling cities and quaint villages, the fashion and music scenes, and the new friends I'd made. Plus, it made financial sense for us since Birmingham was more affordable than Vancouver. But I started getting homesick after a few visits back to Canada. I missed Vancouver's beaches, mountains, forests, diversity, and the more laidback lifestyle. It felt a world apart from post-industrial Birmingham's pubs and canals, and the culture in the UK.

My husband could tell I was getting homesick, but we found ourselves at a standstill. He enjoyed his time in Vancouver, but not enough to move back. He had a very valid point: we'd likely be working so much that we'd barely get to enjoy all of Vancouver's natural beauty, given its high cost of living, especially with post-pandemic inflation. I understood where he was coming from, but the longer I stayed in the UK, the more I missed Canada.

Then we went on a trip that changed everything.

Visiting a third city made us realize we had more options

On a visit home in 2022, we stayed with some of my family in Victoria. It was my husband's first time in the city, and he fell in love with it. Like Vancouver, Victoria is a coastal city with easy access to nature, but its smaller size makes life less stressful and slightly more affordable. He enjoyed his time in Victoria so much that he suggested moving by the end of the trip.

Victoria was our perfect compromise. It's culturally and geographically close enough to Vancouver that I'm happy, and the lower cost of living and slower pace of life feel more worthwhile to my husband. Now I get to enjoy the West Coast lifestyle that I love so much (and that he also appreciates), and we still feel like we're on track toward our goals. There's also a significant British population here in Victoria, which has helped him feel more at home, from being able to watch football games with his favorite UK foods to making friends at work.

Living in a third city has brought balance to our relationship

Choosing a third city hasn't completely eradicated the sense of sacrifice and guilt that often comes with being in an international relationship. Sometimes I still feel bad that we're so far away from my husband's family, and it's not as easy to visit as we'd like. I also know there are certain cultural elements that he'll never quite get behind, as I felt the same in the UK.

Still, it's made a big difference. I believe it's a choice that has helped us avoid future resentment. Knowing how homesick I got during those last few years in the UK, I don't think I would have wanted to stay there forever. And knowing how my husband feels about Vancouver, I also don't think that would have been the best choice for us.

Moving to Victoria has created a more level playing field. We've both had to start from scratch, so we can empathize with each other more about re-establishing our jobs, social circles, and lives in general. But more importantly, we both love it here, and we're excited about the future we can build in the city we both chose.

• "Diary of a CEO" host Steven Bartlett is trying to turn his podcast company into a talent incubator.
• One protégé, "Hot Smart Rich" host Maggie Sellers Reum, described working in Bartlett's orbit.
• She adopted Bartlett's operational approach, but kept touches geared toward her female audience.

Star podcaster Steven Bartlett better watch his back.

"I tell Steven all the time, I'm coming for you, because I think the most valuable consumer in the world is a female consumer," Maggie Sellers Reum, Bartlett's podcast protégé and the host of "Hot Smart Rich," told Business Insider. "So be ready."

Bartlett is looking to turn his "Diary of a CEO" podcast into a multifaceted media empire. One piece: signing and nurturing other talent. His first big test case is Sellers Reum, who he recently invested seven figures in through his media company, FlightStory.

Sellers Reum described how Bartlett is applying his playbook to "Hot Smart Rich" — and why she thinks her show, while it's a fraction of the size of Bartlett's today, can match him. She's even willing to put a timeframe on it, saying she believes that milestone is 12 to 18 months away.

That may sound ambitious. His show is the No. 1 business podcast on Spotify in the US, and has 17 million subscribers on YouTube. She's sitting at No. 13 in business on Spotify, with about 33,000 YouTube subscribers.

Sellers Reum's argument is that she has a large potential audience among women, who control the majority of consumer spending and are key decision-makers at home and at work.

Bartlett's bet on Sellers Reum is part of a trend of superstar creators — including Alex Cooper and Dude Perfect — bringing on other talent to form a network. Results have been mixed overall. Cooper's Unwell Network has had growing pains, notably splitting with Alix Earle last year. Theorist, meanwhile, outlasted its founders, who sold to a startup, and Mythical Entertainment has spawned multiple shows that live under its umbrella.

Jocelyn Florence, a consultant on creators for the management company Soft Shock, said operational support is key to this model working because the creator-founder is busy making their own content. It's also important for the creator to have a well-defined brand that extends to the people they bring into their network.

"It's easier to sell a brand on a more unified vision," she said.

FlightStory has five shows featuring creators, in addition to "DOAC," including Davina McCall, who speaks to the midlife experience, and relationships podcaster Paul Brunson. Its "Hot Smart Rich" deal is the only one structured as an equity investment, with Sellers Reum being the majority owner.

Applying the Bartlett playbook

Bartlett's company has been applying its operational blueprint to grow Sellers Reum's show, honing guest selection and amplifying the podcast through social media clips. FlightStory helped expand her guest list beyond her immediate network to include broader cultural figures such as entrepreneur Codie Sanchez and tech educator CatGPT.

There are some key differences between how "DOAC" and "Hot Smart Rich" operate, though.

One is the trailers. Instead of emphasizing the "hero's journey" as Bartlett does with "DOAC," "Hot Smart Rich" trailers focus on why the audience should care about the guest and what they'll learn from the episode.

Sellers Reum also adapted Bartlett's intensive pre-show research process for her female audience, but instead of calling the resulting 18-page document a "research brief," she calls it a "gossip thread."

"We're trying to reclaim what it means to gossip for women," she said. "Like, let's gossip about things that make us hotter, smarter, and richer, not about other people. And so we call it a gossip thread. He calls it a research brief. For Maggie and 'Hot Smart Rich,' it's a gossip thread."

She's also retained her interview style. Sellers Reum said while Bartlett's are "expert-driven," she positions herself as more conversational. She conducts her interviews from a comfy chair, legs folded, and always hits on the same five topics of money, power, relationships, business, and femininity.

"This is just more my gut; I feel that female voices in media are preferred by the female listener to be conversational," she said. "If you look at 'Giggly Squad,' Amy Poehler, 'Call Her Daddy,' it's actually like the viewer or the listener wants to hear the host's opinion a lot more than what I've seen in male-dominated podcasts."

When FlightStory proposed she do a Q&A-style show telling people how to solve their business problems, Sellers Reum pushed back.

"I said, 'I can't do that,' because I'm not better than anyone that listens to me. I was investing $2,500 checks," she said. "I wasn't a billion-dollar founder."

In the near term, she envisions launching a behind-the-scenes YouTube show. Long term, the plan is to expand "Hot Smart Rich" beyond the podcast and its WhatsApp community of fans whom Sellers Reum calls "angels," potentially to books, TV shows, or products.

For now, the priority is growing the long-form podcast. She'd love to have guests like Alix Earle (who's done a "phenomenal job" taking equity ownership in companies) or Reese Witherspoon (whose book club was "very underestimated").

"There's just such a big opportunity, but we have to earn the right to grow," she said.

• My husband and I grew up in the Northeats. We thought moving away would give us independence.
• After we had kids, we realized that we didn't have much of a support system nearby.
• We moved from Florida to New York while I was pregnant and it was one the best decisions we've made.

Shortly after college, my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I moved several states away. We had both grown up and lived our entire lives up until that point in the Northeast, he in New York and me in Connecticut. But now, in our early 20s, we wanted a change. When he was offered a job in Florida, we saw it as the perfect opportunity to gain some independence.

We did so pretty successfully for nearly a decade. During our time in Florida, we got engaged, got married, adopted a cat, held a variety of jobs, and sheltered through a pandemic.

All the while, we only really got to see our families a few times a year. In a weird way, it felt like a point of pride. I felt like we had accomplished so much in a state far away from our families, proving we could be independent and on our own.

However, things changed in 2022, when we welcomed our daughter to the world, and I started to question whether being far from family was still worth it.

I began missing the Northeast pre-kids

By the time my daughter Sadie was born, we had lived in Florida for about six years. At that point, there were already parts of living in the South that had begun grating on me, a born and raised Northeasterner.

For one, the summers were brutal. While everyone (rightly) complains about the horrid winters up north, I would say there's a similar sentiment for the summers in Florida. Sometimes, it's so hot you don't want to go outdoors, which isn't too dissimilar from being homebound during the brutal cold of winter in New York or Connecticut. It's hard to get used to though.

We also started to feel less aligned and connected with some of our neighbors in the Sunshine State. When we started thinking about where we wanted our family to put down roots, it was clear that living in the Northeast would offer the values, educational opportunities, and sense of community we wanted.

Living away from family with a kid changed things

Having kids completely changed our mindset on being a plane ride away from family. As soon as my daughter was born, my thinking on the positives of independence quickly shifted.

The life we had carefully built was starting to feel harder to sustain. Every daycare illness became a logistical nightmare.

I very quickly learned the importance of the village everyone talks about when having a kid, and the downside to not having one.

A second kid finalized our decision to move back

What ultimately cemented our decision to move back to the Northeast was finding out I was pregnant with my second child in 2025. We decided the benefits of moving back to be with family outweighed our major stresses of leaving a place we had called home for a decade, and my husband leaving a job that was tied to the state.

We made the leap when I was in my third trimester, moving in with my in-laws for a few months while we found a job for my husband and a new place to live. While I, ideally, would not recommend making so many life changes at once (especially while heavily pregnant), it ended up being the best thing we've ever done for our family.

Being closer to family means our kids get to see their grandparents and cousins weekly. When we've had sick days where we couldn't miss work, someone has been able to help step in and watch the kids. My husband and I have more opportunities to spend intentional time together because support no longer feels so limited.

I no longer see needing support as a weakness

The biggest surprise, though, was how much my mental health improved. I didn't realize how exhausting it had been trying to manage parenting, marriage, work, and daily life entirely on our own until we stopped doing it alone.

For a long time, I believed independence was the ultimate sign of adulthood. Now I think there's something equally mature about recognizing when you need support and building your life around the things that actually matter to you.

Before kids, I thought moving closer to family would mean moving backward. Now, it feels like one of the best decisions we've ever made.

It's official: Amazon Prime Day is coming in just a few weeks, from June 23 to 26. With it comes the promise of summer's best deals on everything, from tech and TVs to beauty and fashion must-haves. But are Prime Day deals actually good? If they are, how can you tell?

The Business Insider Reviews team has been covering the event for years, which is why you can trust us to highlight only the best discounts on products we trust. As Deals Editor, I'm our team's expert on the matter, with countless days and nights writing sale coverage under my belt. With that in mind, I've broken down what you need to know to be your own deals expert, below.

For when we're not around, I've listed our tips and tricks for Prime Day deals shopping below. These are the hacks for scoring the best discounts during the Amazon-exclusive event to help you tell when a Prime Day deal is actually a good deal.

Lightning Deals and coupons

Amazon offers Lightning Deals and coupons throughout the year, but for Prime Day, the limited-time offers are much more frequent.

• Lightning Deals: Short-lived offers displayed on product listings, bringing items to incredible low prices. These are typically limited to a specific time and quantity before they expire.
• Coupons: Opt-in discounts available by selecting a checkbox on the product page or, more rarely, entering a coupon code at checkout. These can be pretty great deals, but they're not always all-time lows.

As a rule of thumb, Lightning Deals are always excellent deals. At worst, they'll match the previous all-time low, if not beat it by a landslide.

Coupons, on the other hand, aren't necessarily as good. Rather than assuming the best of them, it's best to keep an eye out for them on every product you buy. Typically, they're not the most obvious and can sometimes amount to only a few cents off, making them forgettable. However, it's worth keeping an eye out for the occasional gold mine that knocks an extra $50 off your purchase.

• See today's Lightning deals

Price tracking

Price history is valuable when evaluating a deal's "goodness." Short of watching prices regularly throughout the year and taking notes on rises and falls (like I do), it can be difficult to acquire this knowledge. Luckily, there are some tools you can use to bolster your confidence when adding to the cart.

• Camelcamelcamel: Perhaps the simplest to use, this website gives you a full price history graph when you enter a product page URL. It's pretty accurate, but fluctuations from third-party sellers, coupons, and Lightning Deals can introduce some confusion.

• Keepa: A plug-in for frequent deal hunters, this can be installed on most major browsers to generate price history graphs on every Amazon product page you visit. It's generally less fine-tuned than Camelcamelcamel, lacking the same amount of detail, but it's good for an overall pricing view.

These tools can offer priceless knowledge that can help steer you in the right direction. They're both free, too, so there's no reason to skip out on them for your biggest purchases.

List price vs. typical price

More often than not, deals on Amazon come with a vibrant red "Limited time deal" tag, complete with a crossed-out "List Price" to show you just how much you're saving. While this may, at first, pique your interest for potential savings, it doesn't take long to realize that "List Price" is often far from a product's typical price.

When I say "typical price," I'm referring to the price an item is available at for most of the year. The price-tracking tools I mentioned above help inform this number, along with cross-referencing other stores (like Walmart or DTC brand sites) and the overall knowledge I've gained from keeping tabs on these items for so long.

For example, the AirPods Pro 3 may look enticing at only $199. However, many Apple aficionados can tell you that the brand's products are almost always on sale. A quick glance at price history shows the earbuds are almost always available at $199, making that price more of a baseline than a can't-miss deal worth jumping on. In this case, I'd say the Pro 3's typical deal price is $199, and you should avoid ever paying any more than that.

• See today's deals at Amazon

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• My looming empty nest filled me with sadness, so I made exciting plans.
• But as my twins headed off for college, my oldest moved back in.
• I'm learning midlife transitions rarely unfold the way we imagine.

I hadn't known that choosing to be a parent was also saying yes to an inevitable series of heartbreaks.

It starts small. In their early teen years, you realize they've started keeping secrets. The number of subjects they'll only discuss with friends keeps growing, while your role as confidant shrinks and fades (for the time being).

In later teen years, the internal clock that tracks your waning time together begins to tick louder. Your home becomes a changing station — a pitstop between other, more exciting destinations — as your offspring come and go.

When they leave for college, every visit, followed by every leaving, becomes a mini-earthquake — shaking your entire nervous system.

So when my firstborn moved across the country for his first real job, and my twins started looking toward college, I knew I had to prepare myself for the ultimate heartbreak: an empty nest.

Learning how to fill an empty nest

As my twins chattered on — hypothesizing about what roommates and campus life would be like, researching room décor, furniture, and sundries for college dorm living — I conducted my own research.

I've always believed words carry weight, so I found it interesting that the word "empty" could feel so heavy. Ironically, "empty" also points to a solution. When a glass is empty, we fill it. When writers fill empty pages, they become authors. Even an empty heart can fill with an act of caring.

I Googled "how to ease transition to empty nest." Then I studied the leading advice. Researching art classes to fill the coming void, I discovered a multitude of nearby opportunities for creative exploration and expression.

By subscribing to local music and entertainment venues to fill the anticipated gap in joy, I discovered vibrant communities for liberated adults. Diving deep into forgotten dreams to fill the hole in my heart, I revisited passions, goals, and wishes I'd let go as sacrifices to parenthood.

Then, informed and inspired, I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and listed all the ways I could fill my "empty" nest. Each item on my list inspired excitement, enthusiasm, and hope, but more importantly, shifted my focus from a perception of loss to the prospect of future possibilities.

Free from school schedules and daily child obligations, I'd once again become the architect of my own life.

My empty nest was short-lived

Fall arrived, and our twins went off to their respective colleges. Although I grappled with the familiar tangle of feelings that accompany letting go, I knew the coming months held promise for us all.

The twins would meet new friends and learn new things. My husband and I would reconnect and explore new hobbies, places, and interests.

Then one day, we got the call. Our oldest — the one who'd moved across the country for work — said his role had been cut and that he was struggling to secure a new position.

Within a few months, he'd moved back home, reshaping the future we'd just begun imagining.

My son has moved back in, and I'm learning to be fluid

The joys of having him home far outnumber the challenges. His presence tempers the feeling of emptiness we'd otherwise have experienced. The house doesn't feel as quiet, I notice, as his laughter drifts down the stairs. And the nights of quietly hoping he's safe somewhere across the country have quieted and given way to restful sleep.

Soon, he'll move away again to start a new graduate program, while the twins, for now at least, appear to be settled. But I'm learning that this stage of life is filled with ever-changing seasons and new surprises.

So, I'm making a concerted effort to practice fluidity — refusing to stay stagnant and learning to adapt without fear or resistance when life changes direction unexpectedly. While I've learned it's good to have a plan, it's better to know when to loosen your grip on it.

Life is always moving around us. I'm learning to soften enough to change with it.

• Commuting, and how long it takes, is a huge aspect of daily working life in New York City.
• Mayor Zohran Mamdani has focused on making buses faster; longer commutes can be a drag for workers.
• We looked at how New Yorkers commute, and who commutes the longest.

New Yorkers, famously, are walking here. But just about 25% of them are driving too.

Commuting undergirds New York's economy, and shapes the daily lives of its workers. New York's robust public transit system carries around six million passengers daily, and around 1.6 million people drive into Manhattan's Central Business District daily.

But not all commutes are created equal. As politicians like Zohran Mamdani eye affordability measures, proposals like free and fast buses have taken the spotlight. Longer commutes can have real health impacts, lower worker satisfaction, and dent productivity. In New York City, bus riders, and those in further-flung, historically more working-class neighborhoods experience that more acutely.

"Most New Yorkers are traveling much farther in their daily commutes than people would be if they were living in a less expensive city, a smaller city," said Lauren Melodia, the director of fiscal and economic policy at the Center for New York City Affairs.

To understand how commutes affect New Yorkers across transit methods, income bands, and occupations, we analyzed 2024 American Community Survey data compiled by the University of Minnesota's IPUMS programs. We looked at survey results in the New York metro area, which includes suburban New Jersey and Westchester counties. From priests to Rockaway residents, here's what it's like for different New Yorkers to get around.

How New Yorkers commute

In New York City, the subway is king.

Driving is the second-most prevalent way of getting to work and back. A solid chunk of New Yorkers work from home, and a decent share take the bus or walk. A rarified few take taxis or ride shares.

Workers using long-distance or commuter trains, unsurprisingly, have the longest commutes. Subway riders still spend a decent amount of time in transit.

And while New York's reliance on public transit is anomalous for the US, it has challenges.

"It's another variable that you need to account for for your workday, basically," said Ege Aksu, a NYC-based economist for Revelio Labs. "You need to plan accordingly because there will be delays on your commute. The subway is going to be a little messed up, maybe." That can have its own trickle-down effects on productivity, Aksu said; long commutes can feel like "another hustle."

How long different workers spend commuting

To understand what commuting looks like across professions, we looked at occupations in the New York City metro area with at least 100 survey respondents.

Some of the longest commutes belong to lower-paid or hourly workers: The median annual wage for baggage porters and bellhops in the New York metro area is $48,610, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Similarly, the annual median wage for cleaners of vehicles and equipment is $41,540. Both of those are well below the New York City metro area's median household income of $99,852.

Higher-paid workers tend to have easier, although not necessarily shorter, commutes.

"If you have more flexibility in your job, then you can have a more pleasant commute with a seat on a train, compared to if you need to work a job where you're required to be there for a specific shift that kind of coincides with rush hour traffic," Melodia said.

Commutes are quite consistent across income bands. Workers in middle-income roles face longer commutes than their lower-paid counterparts. Some workers in more WFH-friendly knowledge industries may choose to trade a longer commute for fewer days in the office, said Randall Reback, an economics professor at Barnard College: if you move out to Long Island, you may spend more time commuting, but go in less often.

A slew of occupations have their own commute advantages. Tutors, who likely often work from home or Zoom into class with their pupils, had the shortest commutes. They were followed closely by clergy, who often live at or near their parishes.

Father Chris Lawton, a priest with the Paulist Fathers at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York City, lives around the corner from his office at the Paulist Fathers' Motherhouse. He finds his stroll-next-door commute convenient and reflective of his ministry, as the priesthood is more encompassing than just a job.

"Sometimes it's a little too close, and sometimes I long for a little more distance just to kind of create a separation in my head and heart of work and home," Fr. Lawton said. His boss has a rule: Out of the office once a day, out of the neighborhood once a week, and out of the city once a month.

Transit is still top of mind for many clergy and parishioners. Last fall, Lawton hosted a commuting-focused community talk called "mass transit."

"What we talked about was how stressful commutes can be, and how stressful our daily routines can be," Lawton said, "And where do we find God amidst that?" Attendees left with tools like prayer rituals and stress-reducing breathing techniques, as well as an appreciation for who they're commuting with.

"In New York City, even whether someone has a short or long commute, there's so much richness," Lawton said. "A real blessing of living in the city is that no matter who you are, unless you're taking private cars everywhere, we have the unique privilege of being in proximity to all kinds of people regularly."

• Jacqueline Matwick moved from Arizona to Turin, Italy, hoping to earn Italian citizenship by descent.
• Then Italy changed its citizenship laws, leaving Matwick and her family in legal limbo.
• Matwick is now considering her options to secure a stable future for her family in Italy.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jacqueline Matwick, 38, who moved from Arizona to Turin, Italy, with her family in 2024. Matwick was anticipating receiving citizenship by descent through her husband, but the Italian government changed the requirements after they moved, and the Matwicks no longer qualified. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

We were in New York for a long time. I was there eight years, my husband was there seven, and our oldest child was born there.

We were new parents in New York City, and childcare was insane — it's expensive everywhere, but in New York City, it's insanely expensive, and housing's really expensive. So you end up with almost a second rent payment just for childcare in New York. It was really hard to make that work.

We thought, "Where can we make our lives work as parents in a way that feels comfortable for us?"

We decided to move in with my in-laws in Arizona in 2020, when our daughter was a year and a half old. We thought maybe the Phoenix suburbs would offer us more affordability — we were thinking we were going to stay in Phoenix and buy a house, but the housing prices had shot up. So we were facing these same financial struggles in New York and in Arizona. It just felt like the math wasn't really working anywhere.

That was the pivotal moment that sent me looking abroad.

We were living with my in-laws — it's my husband's family who has Italian ancestry — and my father-in-law had talked about the fact that moving to Italy and becoming a citizen was an option, so I started digging into it.

At the time, a lot of these digital nomad visas didn't exist. Spain didn't actually have a digital nomad visa at the time, nor did Italy. Neither of us were remote workers, either, so that wasn't something that we were really thinking about.

At the time, citizenship was the way for us to expand our horizons and look beyond the US.

Starting the citizenship process took us years, and we moved to Italy to finish it there

It can take a long time to do the paperwork depending on your family line and how many generations back your Italian ancestry is. If you have inconsistencies in names or dates, you have to go and get documents corrected, and that can be a really tedious process.

It took us a year and a half from when we started looking at the paperwork in 2022 to getting everything corrected, lined up, and stamped in February of 2024.

If you have your paperwork meeting Italy's standards, you can apply at a consulate in the US, which takes a very long time. Or you can move to Italy and apply. So we moved to Italy in August 2024.

They created this permit that allows you to move to Italy and apply at your town, because everything in Italy is processed locally — even permitting is processed at the town level. So you can move here, establish residency, and then submit your paperwork here. It gets you citizenship faster, and it allowed us to move here faster.

If we had done it in the States, it would have taken us years, and it would have meant that our daughter was in second or third grade when we uprooted her, rather than letting her start kindergarten here. It was easier for her to learn the language when she was younger, and it made more sense for us to do it faster for our kids.

We were expecting to get approved for citizenship within about six to eight months, and at that point, my husband and kids would have citizenship — I could apply for a permit as the spouse, and then we would live here as citizens. I would have the option to get citizenship, too, with a language exam and all these other things, but we'd be able to legally work here and basically live here as citizens.

That was the expectation. What ended up happening was they changed the citizenship law before we were approved.

I don't think the government thought about what it would do to people who were caught in the middle.

We no longer qualify for Italian citizenship, but we're still hopeful

There were two law changes. One happened in April of 2025, but that's not the one that affected us. The one that affected us happened in October of 2024; it has to do with naturalization.

Basically, before, you could think of citizenship like lighting a candle.

When my husband's great-grandfather had his daughter, he was an Italian citizen. He lit her candle, so she was a citizen. Later, he became an American citizen, and he stopped being Italian. But once his daughter was Italian, she was good, and nothing he did would affect her, so she could pass that citizenship to her son, and her son could pass it to his son.

Italy changed it in October 2024 and said that whatever an adult did affected any children who were still minors. We wouldn't have moved here if that had initially been the case, because we wouldn't have been eligible.

They just changed their interpretation of the law very suddenly, and they didn't grandfather anybody in, even though we were already here and in the process.

We periodically contacted a lawyer for advice, and at that point, the lawyer suggested that there wasn't a lot of clarity over how people in the middle would be handled. They told us, "Just keep going and see what happens," so we did.

Our town told us we were the first people who had come in with the problem of arriving before officially gaining citizenship and then no longer qualifying.

The agent gave us a lot of false hope. He was like, "I think you guys are going to be fine because you were already here." We were pretty hopeful until we got a letter in January 2025 saying that we were rejected.

We came up with a plan to file a case in court. Even though the law changed, once you have a case, you can get a permit.

The law is still highly contentious. So it's not a slam dunk, but it was enough of a possibility for us to file the citizenship case even though we don't qualify under these current rules. The case is scheduled for January 2027.

We're still in Italy, but we're torn on what to do next

It's not clear what will feel the best for us moving forward. We're still in that same mode we were in in 2019, just trying to figure out where we want to raise our family.

We'd like to go back to the US — we miss everybody, but we're a little uneasy about it for all the reasons that brought us here in the first place. We're still thinking about Italy or maybe Spain. Spain isn't too far; we could drive a U-Haul from here if we had to. But that's a conversation we're having.

What feels the best? What's going to give us the lifestyle that we want and give us safety and give us security, and not have us on a work hamster wheel where we feel like we're never getting to relax and have time for our family?

We're trying to make it work like everybody else.

• A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter.
• Sign up for the weekly BI Tech Memo newsletter here.

The next battle in AI will have less to do with model quality and more to do with customer lock-in.

For the past few years, OpenAI and Anthropic have competed relentlessly on model performance. But according to Samuel Colvin, CEO of AI startup Pydantic, the economics are changing.

"A year ago, what they cared about was revenue," Colvin told me recently. "Now, when one assumes they're both trying to IPO, their profit margin becomes really important."

The problem is that competing solely on model quality is expensive. Frontier labs must spend billions training ever-better models that are soon emulated. That's not a great recipe for durable profits.

Instead, Colvin believes OpenAI and Anthropic are increasingly focused on building products that are harder for customers to leave.

"They are doing their very best to find ways of locking people in that are not related to model quality," he said. "That's where I think Claude Code and Codex and all that work is coming from."

AI coding services already look like better businesses than chatbots. Developers can quickly consume huge numbers of tokens while running Claude Code or Codex on complex projects, generating far more usage (and revenue) than a typical chat session.

These tools could also become exceptionally sticky. Claude Code and Codex help companies generate software at unprecedented speed, creating codebases that grow beyond what human developers can realistically manage. Companies could find themselves dependent on the same AI tools to maintain, update, and understand the software those tools helped create.

That may help explain why Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to turn Claude Code and Codex into broader AI-powered work platforms rather than standalone coding products. Anthropic is pushing in this direction with Cowork, while OpenAI is planning to merge Codex into ChatGPT.

The catch is that customers are moving the other way.

Consider Walmart's home-grown coding assistant, Code Puppy. It's designed to avoid dependence on any single AI provider, and give the retail giant more control over its codebase. The system can switch between models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others, helping Walmart control costs and reduce vendor lock-in.

That's the tension increasingly shaping the AI market. OpenAI and Anthropic want sticky, high-margin products that keep customers inside their ecosystems. Enterprise buyers want flexibility, portability, and lower token bills.

The winners of the next phase of AI may be the companies that best navigate this conflict.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

• Johnny Hilbrant's character PE Guy has gone from a cult hit to a $1 million business in one year.
• PE Guy makes money through Cameo, TikTok, brand partnerships, and appearances at corporate events.
• We sat down with Hilbrant to walk through his business, and whether PE guy would want to invest.

The growth of Johnny Hilbrant's PE Guy character over the past year has been, to borrow one of his favorite phrases, "substantial."

What had started as a joke has turned into a real business, one that PE Guy might even want to invest in. While people in finance might complement Hilbrant on "his little skits," they might be surprised to learn just how much money he's taking home — $1 million in the past year.

Hilbrant, who is based in the suburbs of Boston, walked us through how he makes money, why he chose to manage himself, and how he stays sane while parodying finance bros.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider fully verified Hilbrant's income claims from TikTok and Cameo. We also verified a spreadsheet that shows his brand deals and personalized videos by sampling documentation for some of these services.

I first started this character for fun in March of last year. I was posting two videos a week, but it wasn't on my radar as a way to make money until May, when The Black Tux offered me my first brand deal.

I turned to ChatGPT to ask how much I could charge based on my social platform, shared that number with The Black Tux, and they agreed. Once companies saw that I had done one brand deal, others reached out.

I started posting more often, and people started asking me if I was on Cameo. I wasn't at the time, but I told people they could Venmo me what they thought was a fair price for a personalized video. People offered between $200 and $400, which made me realize "Wow, there's a market for this." Soon after, Cameo reached out. I have now done nearly 1200 personalized videos and Cameos in the past year.

I've made over a $1 million in revenue in the last year, with the amount I make growing almost every month. Every time a new opportunity happens, I'm still dumbfounded. My email inbox went from maybe 1 email a day to 20 every day.

Diversified Revenue Streams

I've since done other brand deals with B2B software companies and extensive work with fintech Ramp. Their marketing team had come up with a viral marketing stunt where I'd interview their "CFO," Brian Baumgartner, Kevin from The Office.

I've also been working with consumer businesses like Boll and Branch and Daily Harvest. Typically, it's been that a founder or CEO of a company has reached out, said they love my character, and that they want to do an ad with me. I can go from an intro to a post in under a week.

The best-case scenario is that I become friendly with the CEOs and founders at the brand. That's the ultimate for me. Money is nice, but expanding your circle of peers is better.

While brand deals are my biggest source of income, in-person appearances at financial industry events are starting to rival them.

At events, I usually show a two-minute video with the filter, and then come out for a 45-minute Q&A as myself, and then mingle afterwards.

Some of the companies are in private equity, but others work with PE or are owned by PE, like insurance or investment banking. Every time I do one, there's an NDA. They tell me that they don't want the PE guys to know they've been making fun of them at the conference.

During the Q&A's, people will ask me about private equity's impact on the world and the character's origin story. It turns out people want me more than PE guy, which is really flattering.

I also sell merch, and share the revenue with a company that produces it and handles shipping for me. On top of that, there's TikTok, which pays you for high-performing videos. That makes up roughly 2% of my take-home pay.

Self-managed

I received reachouts from people who wanted to manage me and take up to 40% cut, which freaked me out. I decided to manage myself, and was like, "Thanks, I'll just use ChatGPT as a manager." I have since been signed by UTA, but they only get a cut of whatever they bring me. I still manage myself and my books 100%.

PE Guy is kind of my baby, and I don't want to give up control. I don't want someone telling me which videos to do or writing scripts for me. It's my voice, and I don't want it to change.

I never use AI to write scripts, but it is helpful for my administrative work. It's a lot of busy work, like managing my outreaches and email conversations as well as my accounting.

At this point, private equity is mentioned in only 20% of my videos. He's turning into a fake lifestyle influencer commenting on the world around him. If I work with a brand that's not the best, I get commenters saying PE Guy would never use that product.

As I get access to more experiences, he gets to go on them too: going on a yacht, going on a private plane, or going to the US Open.

I have a similar love-hate relationship with the character as the one my followers have developed. When I finish filming five or six Cameos, I'm exhausted. I'm breathing heavier because of the way I have to hold myself to make these noises.

Sometimes a Cameo will come in, and at first, I think I can do it in five minutes, but then I decide I've had enough of him today. He exists in me, but his not allowed to just come out. I've set boundaries with him.

Early on, some people asked me whether the character would age quickly. It's been 14 months, and it's getting stronger. I do think about if the popularity will go away, but it's kind of like thinking about how we're all going to die. I'm alive right now, so why think about that?

I do understand there's less job security. I am prepared for it to change eventually, but not go away, because now I have 333,000 Instagram followers. (Editor's note: We spoke to Hilbrant on May 28th. Hilbrant now has 340,000 followers)

Hilbrant's career journey

I started this character while working in fitness, but I realized at the end of last year that I no longer needed that job. I've been in the industry for 10 years, and at 36, it felt like time to do something different.

I knew things were changing when I started developing in-person PE Guy fans while teaching fitness classes at Barry's Bootcamp and SoulCycle.

I started the character partly to parody how people in these jobs seemed to look down on me for my fitness career.

Sometimes people in the finance world say things to me, "Oh, that's funny, that cute little thing that you do." I'm not saying that people should take me seriously, but this is a business now.

PE Guy would be shocked if he found out about this revenue. (Editor's note: At this point, Hilbrant started to speak more and more like PE Guy) His eyes would get wide, and he'd start to sweat a little. He'd say "Wait a second. Are you telling me in a year you made over $1 million? Let me talk to my team and get back to you."

He'd then come back to me and would want to buy some of my IP or something. He'd for sure want in on it as a little side investment. If it blows up and becomes the next big thing, PE guy would profit from it.

He'd definitely love the fact that there's no staff, because, as you know, PE loves to cut head count. He'd be like "Head count of one? Amazing." He would also try to make an AI version of me so he could eliminate me from the equation as well.

• Aiming for the "perfect diet" can be a one-way ticket to failure and misery.
• The nutritionist Sophie Gastman uses the odd convenience food when she can't be bothered to cook.
• Instant noodles with vegetables or fish sticks with peas are quick and nutritious meals, she said.

Sophie Gastman tries to balance protein, fiber, carbs, and healthy fats in every meal, and she's not scared to use convenience foods and store-cupboard staples when she's low on energy or time.

"There's a lot of guilt that comes with buying certain ingredients," Gastman, a nutritionist who fights misinformation and the author of "Find Your Healthy," told Business Insider.

Leaning on store-bought foods like fish sticks might be the difference between you making a homemade meal and ordering takeout, Gastman said.

"In nutrition, it's never black and white. There's always the middle ground," she said.

Gastman shared the three convenience foods she leans on to make quick, nutritious meals.

Fish sticks

On days she's feeling exhausted or nostalgic, Gastman reaches for the jumbo fish sticks she always has stocked in her freezer.

She typically throws them into her air fryer with some chopped potatoes to make homemade fries, and pairs them with peas.

In about 15 minutes, she has a plate filled with protein from the fish, and fiber and nutrients from the peas and potatoes.

Tinned fish

Tinned fish is having a moment because it's versatile, high in protein and healthy fats, and minimally processed.

"I always have tinned fish. I've got tuna, sardines, mackerel, salmon, literally always," Gastman said.

She chucks them onto a salad, smashes them on toast, or stirs them through a stir-fry or a bowl of rice.

"You could literally put them on anything," she said.

Instant noodles

Gastman always keeps instant noodles in her cupboard.

She likes to have hers with edamame beans, which she always has in the freezer, frozen dumplings, an egg, and whatever veggies she has on hand.

Gastman asks herself, "What can I add to a very basic meal, like an instant noodle, to make it a bit more balanced?"

• Danny Moses of "The Big Short" fame uses prediction markets as a tool.
• The trader recently detailed how he uses Kalshi in a post on his Substack.
• He told Business Insider more how he uses the platform to inform his investment views.

When he spoke to Business Insider in December 2025, Wall Street trader Danny Moses of "The Big Short" said that he was fascinated by prediction markets. Now, he says he begun using them to inform his investing views.

Platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket have taken betting far beyond sports, allowing users to place wagers on everything from political events to tech layoffs to the weather. Moses wrote on his Substack these platforms have strong use cases for investing pros.

"Often, prediction markets serve as better indicators of sentiment and potential outcomes than traditional data sources," Moses said. "Several times a day, I peruse Kalshi to see if a new or trending contract sparks my interest or adds color to an ongoing investment thesis."

Moses isn't the only one to tout the benefits of prediction markets for investors. In February, the Federal Reserve published a study that suggested Kalshi could be used to accurately measure macroeconomic expectations.

But as Moses sees it, the same may hold true for stock investing. In his post, he recalled using the betting markets as a barometer for the likelihood of a major corporate event, in this case, the merger of SpaceX and Tesla, and how it was impacting Tesla stock.

"I spotted this event contract well before the rumors surfaced in traditional information channels, and I noticed TSLA's stock began to percolate just as the odds of a merger on Kalshi started to climb," he stated. "Other times, it might be a broader industry indicator, such as predicting 90-day auto delinquency rates."

Moses said that he uses Kalshi to monitor the flow of information, but also to place bets on events he believes are mispriced.

He said that he recently placed multiple bets on when Anthropic will begin trading after news broke of its IPO filing. After noting that Kalshi placed the odds that it would happen before October 1 at more than 60%, he opted to play the contract both for that event and the September 1 contract with a "yes" bet.

Moses told Business Insider that the categories he watches most closely are finance, commodities, economics, and sports. During his time using the platform, he has used Kalshi both as a means of generating standalone trades and as a tool for adding conviction to trades he's already put on.

"There have been countless times that I have seen an event contract trading on Kalshi that led me to research a specific company as a result," he said. "If you believed there was a macro catalyst for either the markets or a specific stock that might occur, you could express it in traditional trading (stocks/indices) or just trade the event contract.

As for what the future holds, Moses says that big institutions will start integrating prediction markets into trading strategies.

"It's only a matter of time before hedge funds start utilizing event contracts to express macroeconomic views or hedge current exposures."

• Madalyn Conchola, 62, adopted her four granddaughters, facing financial and emotional challenges.
• Conchola, an IT analyst, manages work and family life while supporting her granddaughters' needs.
• Despite financial strain, Conchola ensures her granddaughters' stability, focusing on mental health.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Madalyn Conchola, 62, who lives in Phoenix. Conchola adopted four of her granddaughters, ages 7 to 19. She said the financial hit has been tough, but her granddaughters have been thriving. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I was briefly an empty nester; now I've adopted four of my granddaughters, ages 7 to 19. My son's 7-year-old daughter was placed with me when she was 10 months old in 2019. I received my daughter's 12-, 16-, and 19-year-old daughters in 2021.

I'm an IT analyst in healthcare technology, which I've been doing for 16 years. I've worked remotely to balance work with raising my youngest daughter, who's now 26. She lives with me but works and has her own life; I don't want to put any responsibility on her to raise the grandkids. When I was an empty nester, I was pursuing ministry in foreign missions and an artistic career change.

My two older children were doing well and had children of their own. Then I found out both of them were dealing with substance abuse issues.

I got my son's daughter first, and not long after, I got my older daughter's girls safely with me with the help of Child Protective Services.

I had a lot of family resistance

My extended family felt that if I had intervened, I would have left my daughter to her own devices once she didn't have the responsibility of the children. My daughter had a lot of anger about the situation, but I didn't want the kids to be involved in whatever she needed to do to heal. I told her I wasn't going to let her drag her kids through that. I had recently downsized before getting the kids, but I needed a bigger vehicle and a larger house.

Around the time all of this was happening, I buried my mother in 2020 and my brother in 2021. My granddaughters and I lived in my mom's house for three years while I was trying to get her affairs in order, and I settled her estate in early 2026. Once we were ready to put her house up for sale, I moved into a rental.

Everything was happening so fast. I could sense that the girls didn't want to live with their grandmother. They were having a lot of mental issues, and I got them into therapy. There was no handbook on grandparents "reparenting," and it felt surreal, as though this wasn't my life.

I looked for resources through my church and family, but wasn't receiving the kind of support I felt like I needed. When I was fostering them, an agency provided beds, and a consignment shop let me get clothes. Still, I felt there should have been more accessible organizations set up to address the needs of families affected by the opioid crisis.

I isolated myself, put my head down, went to work, and did what I needed to do. I was putting one foot in front of the other and trying to keep the kids active. A lot of my friends are not grandparents yet, or their kids are doing well and can't relate to my story.

The economy has really affected our living expenses

I earn over $70,000 annually, but my rent is now $2,250 because I needed a place big enough for all of us. My food bill is up to $400 a month because food's so expensive now. Gasoline costs a few hundred dollars a month. My monthly expenses, including insurance and household bills, total a few thousand.

I don't know how I do it, but I've done it. I do receive a state subsidy of a little over $2,000 for the children, but that doesn't cover all the costs. Once they get older, that will go away, even if they're still living with me.

When I saw that neither my son nor daughter was able to comply with what was needed for them to be reunited with their children, I started the adoption process because I didn't want the girls to go into the system. I was adopted and didn't find out until I was almost 29. I know that pain and that hurt, and I wanted to alleviate further trauma to the children.

My focus has been on meeting the children's mental, emotional, and spiritual needs

They've all dealt with mental health challenges at times, but are thriving currently. They're doing better in school, and I think they feel stable and safe with me. I feel like I'm getting my footing and able to breathe a little now.

I'm a tough grandma, but I meet every child where they are and try to provide them with resources.

My 19-year-old granddaughter is in college for dance education. I'm still supporting her, but she's working part-time. My 16-year-old is in a high school aerospace program and wants to be a commercial pilot, though she's also interested in psychology. The 12-year-old did cheer this year. The 7-year-old runs the family and can hold her own.

My age and ability to work loom over me

I recently took a mini-vacation to Los Angeles to get away. I'm able to think about some things that I want to do with my life because I still have some life to live.

My eldest daughter is now clean and actively healing her relationship with her children. Having her back in their lives has been helpful to the 12-year-old, especially. She has her own apartment and works. They've also been back in touch with their paternal side, which has been helpful. The paternal family is out of state, but they provide needed emotional support, send gifts, and fly in for graduations.

My son is still struggling. I did my best to keep my family together and to ensure the children have the stability and support they need to be successful in life.

Now, my daughter will say, "Mom, I won't say they wouldn't have turned out well with me, but I know they wouldn't have turned out as well as they have with you. It's like I've carried the torch for so long, and then I passed the baton to you, and you'll get them the rest of the way."

Still, as time goes on, my age and my ability to work and earn money loom over me. I'm looking for other ways to try to generate an income so that when I'm at the point where I can't work, I can find help through my art and writing. I'm making sure my credit card debt is extremely low.

I'm preparing to gather my thoughts into a memoir about my life. For a long time, I wasn't ready to tell my story, but I think it's part of my healing. There's nothing that I'm ashamed of.

It's 4 a.m., and Whitney Stefko Dover's family "chief of staff" has already sent her the daily briefing.

It's called the "Daily Dover."

The early morning operations briefing helps Stefko Dover and her husband, Chris, coordinate their complicated lives with two young sons. An AI assistant scans their emails and calendar apps to map out the day ahead — school schedules, au pair or babysitter coverage, camp drop-offs, travel plans, family birthdays, recycling-bin reminders, and anything else that might otherwise rattle around in Stefko Dover's brain until it is either handled or forgotten.

At the bottom of the email, the AI drafts two quick texts with the reminders: one to her husband and another to Sara, the family's au pair. The texts also include affirmations.

"It sounds so silly, but it has really improved my marriage," Stefko Dover told Business Insider. "I don't feel resentful now around having to carry around these additional mental tasks."

Stefko Dover, a director and senior counsel of policy and legal operations at Ford, built an assistant named Claudette using Anthropic's tools, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork.

Her husband — who uses AI to build apps to track his supplements and finances — also told Business Insider it's been a lifesaver.

Stefko Dover is one of a growing number of people without a coding background building AI assistants to manage the repetitive, annoying, and emotionally loaded parts of everyday life. They've built products that help them grocery shop or find the right foods for their families.

Instead of writing code line by line, they describe the tasks they want their agents to perform in plain English — a practice called "vibe coding."

'Let me figure out how to automate that'

Stefko Dover first turned to AI to help organize the family's daily activities during a trip in March. While she was away from the family's home in Scottsdale, Arizona, her husband asked her to make a to-do list. There were babysitters to coordinate, soccer schedules to track, and daily logistics to explain.

"I kind of thought to myself, 'Sure, let me figure out how to automate that,'" Stefko Dover said.

That week, using her $17 a month Claude Pro subscription, she described which apps the tools should monitor and what to include in the daily email.

She quickly shipped the first version of Claudette — but it needed some editing.

Early iterations sent text messages that were far too detailed. For example, the proposed texts to her husband included hour-by-hour reminders. One prompt reminded her husband when the children should brush their teeth.

She continually adjusted the system — including through voice reminders on her Claude app on her phone — so it would tell the family what they actually needed to know: when Dover was on duty, when the au pair was taking over, which appointments or school events mattered, and what was coming up next.

She said she uses Claude enough that she often runs into the AI plan's token limits.

She still serves as Claudette's editor from time to time, mostly to fine-tune the affirmations into her voice. She called her system "human in the loop."

But it's getting much better, she said — and might not need as many edits soon.

A May 21 Claudette-drafted message to Chris began: "Good morning. It's going to be a glorious day, day two of summer, and it's really heating up."

Then it moved into business: It was his mother's birthday, and he should send a quick text or flowers, Claudette advised. Recycling also went out the next morning, and Claudette could see, via access to Stefko Dover's Gmail, that she had recently purchased new furniture. It arrived in large cardboard boxes that needed to be broken down and discarded. And there were a lot of them.

"Your wife really has a shopping problem," Claudette wrote, according to Stefko Dover. She kept the line in.

A personal life organizer

Stefko Dover said Claudette has helped organize two main family frontiers: birthday parties and school emails.

"There's just 9 million birthday parties every weekend. It's a lot to manage manually," she said. Reminders of birthdays alone have "probably saved our marriage."

Still, Stefko Dover said she doesn't have specific plans to share Claudette with the world. If she were to make it available, she told Business Insider she would open-source the prompts so other families can build their own scheduling tools.

"This has been one of my greatest hacks," she said. "It's made things so much better, and really has alleviated a lot of the mental load I have at home."

Stefko Dover still has to make the final call on what makes the cut for the text messages to the people in her life. But she knows that by 4 a.m. her chief of staff has already organized her family's daily priorities.

All that's left to do is review the slate and press send.

• Hashim Mahmoud, a strategy and operations manager, found his job by taking networking to the extreme.
• The 30-year-old tracked his efforts in a spreadsheet to remember to send thank-yous and follow-up notes.
• He shared one template for LinkedIn connection requests and another for asking contacts to make intros.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 30-year-old Hashim Mahmoud, a strategy and operations manager at Angi, an online home-services marketplace formerly known as Angie's List. His identity and background have been verified. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I found my current position after just a few months of job hunting in 2024, largely thanks to how I went about networking. I reached out to more than 1,200 people, spoke with about 150 of them, and got about 20 interviews before landing the position I have now at Angi. The job market may be more competitive today, but I think my experience still applies.

My strategy was to leverage my LinkedIn network. To stay organized, I started a spreadsheet of people that included former coworkers, secondary connections, people at companies I admired, and people in roles I wanted to better understand.

When I sent connection invites on LinkedIn, I always included a personalized note. I would say who I am and that I would love to connect to learn more about their background and company.

I kept it short and respectful. I wasn't saying: Can you help me get a job? I was asking for 15 to 20 minutes to talk. Here's an example:

Hi XX,

I noticed you're a Strategy Director at [Company name]. I'm seeking new opportunities and would love to discuss how my experience in strategy and operations might fit at [Company name]. I look forward to connecting!

Best,

Hashim

Some people would accept my invite, but not reply to my personalized note. When that happened, I would immediately send a follow-up thanking them for connecting with me, and then asking for 15 to 20 minutes of their time.

I did this because I had set up alerts on LinkedIn to be notified when anyone accepted one of my connect invitations. This meant they were likely active on the platform at that moment. Most would then quickly respond.

Those calls were essentially informational discussions. I would share a little bit more about myself, and then I approached them with curiosity. I would ask about their career paths, the skills that mattered in their field, and the culture of their teams.

I kept it very soft. Toward the end, I would ask if my background would be a good fit. If they said yes and there was any opening, they would typically ask for my résumé.

If they said no, I'd ask if it would be OK to stay in touch. I'd also ask if they could make introductions to people in their networks, and I would offer to provide them with a prewritten message they could basically copy and paste. For example:

Hi XX,

I'd like to introduce you to Hashim, who is currently exploring new career opportunities. He has a strong background in strategy and operations and I thought it would be great for the two of you to connect. Hashim would like to learn more from your experience and I believe you could have some insightful exchanges.

Hashim, meet XX, who is currently a Strategy Director for [XX] Company.

I'll let you both take it from here!

Best regards,

[Name of sender]

After every networking conversation, I sent each person a thank-you message. Always, no matter what, you send that thank-you note. I don't care if you had a bad time talking to somebody. You thank them for taking the time to talk to you.

With networking, you can get a lot more information than what's in a job description, such as how different teams operate within a particular company and the problems that they were trying to solve. You may be able to use that to your advantage.

During one job interview, I remember talking about how I planned a lot of team-building events at my previous job, such as a trip to a Lakers versus Golden State game. I brought that up because I knew from talking to a networking connection I'd made at the company that it wanted someone with a lot of energy.

All of those networking conversations also helped sharpen my interviewing skills, which made me more confident. You do tend to get asked the same questions over and over, so with each one, I got better at explaining my background.

Most of these conversations didn't lead to a potential job opportunity right away. But some did bear fruit, and that's what happened with Angi. A former colleague of mine had a friend who worked there, and he agreed to make an intro.

She agreed to talk, and told me about the team she leads, which was in my field of strategy and operations. I then shared a little bit more about my background and explained why I would be a good fit for her team. She said there weren't any openings at the time, but she would like to stay in touch.

Fast forward a few months, and I reached out to my new connection at Angi just to check in. She said that they had a new role on her team that would be posted online the next day. I applied, listed her as a referral, and ultimately got the job. I now work for her.