Amazon Prime Day is now in its third day, and the four-day sale is still serving up some excellent TV discounts. I've spent more than a decade reviewing TVs, so I know which deals are actually worth your money and which ones are better left behind. The best Prime Day TV deals include big savings on some of my favorite OLED, Mini LED, and QLED displays from Samsung, TCL, LG, Hisense, Roku, Sony, and Amazon.

Many of the best discounts are on 2025 models, but I'm also seeing a few 2026 TVs get their first meaningful price cuts. One of the strongest deals right now is on the 65-inch Samsung S90F, which has dropped to a record low of $1,198. It's my pick for the best TV overall thanks to its superb contrast, wide viewing angles, and rich color performance. For shoppers looking to go extra large for movies, sports, or gaming, the 98-inch TCL QM7K is another highlight at an all-time low of $1,898.

I'll keep refreshing this guide as Prime Day continues, since prices and stock can change quickly. Some TV deals have already sold out, while others have gotten even better since the sale began. For more discounts beyond TVs, check out our Prime Day deals hub, where our expert deal hunters are tracking the best Amazon savings across every category.

The best Prime Day Samsung TV deals

Several of the best Samsung TVs have dropped to record-low prices for Prime Day. The S90F OLED is my top pick for shoppers who care most about picture quality, especially now that it's down to a new all-time low. Samsung's newer S90H is also seeing its first meaningful discount of the year. It costs more than the S90F and doesn't quite match its color performance, but its glare-free screen does a much better job cutting down reflections. For anyone who wants a TV that looks just as good when it's off, Samsung's Frame TVs remain a great choice, with a gallery-style design that helps them blend into a room like wall art.

The best Prime Day TCL TV deals

The best TCL TVs are already a great value year-round, but these Prime Day deals make them an even better buy. The extra-large 98-inch QM7K is a standout at an all-time low price of $1,898. The QM7K's brightness and contrast rival many pricier QLED models from Samsung, LG, and Sony. Prime Day is also your first chance to save big on TCL's brand-new QM8L SQD TV. This 2026 model is similar to the QM8K, but it offers an impressive boost in color performance. Though the cheaper QM8K is the better value buy, at these deal prices, the QM8L is an enticing option for enthusiasts. You can learn more in my TCL QM8L TV review.

The best Prime Day LG TV deals

LG makes some of the best OLED TVs I've reviewed, and Prime Day is bringing worthwhile discounts on several of its top sets, including the midrange C5. The newer C6H has also returned to its lowest price since launching this spring. Available in 77- and 83-inch sizes, the C6H delivers a noticeably brighter picture than the C5, making it a strong option for shoppers who want a bigger, more premium OLED. For more details, check out my LG C6H TV review and guide to the best LG TVs.

The best Prime Day Hisense TV deals

Hisense remains one of the best-value brands, with TVs that go toe-to-toe with TCL while often costing much less than premium models from Sony and Samsung. The U8QG is a great example. It's among the brightest TVs available, but it's priced well below many dimmer high-end sets. Just note that the 65- and 85-inch models use a different panel than the rest of the lineup, offering stronger contrast but more limited viewing angles. For more recommendations, see my guide to the best Hisense TVs.

The best Prime Day Roku TV deals

Roku is best known for its simple, user-friendly streaming devices, but the company also sells its own smart TVs with the same easy-to-navigate interface built in. The Roku Plus Series is one of my favorite budget-friendly picks, earning a spot in my guide to the best budget TVs for its straightforward smart platform and solid QLED picture quality. For Prime Day, both the 55- and 65-inch sizes have returned to their lowest prices yet. For more picks, see my guide to the best Roku TVs.

The best Prime Day Sony TV deals

Sony TVs aren't cheap, but they continue to stand out for their excellent image accuracy and top-tier processing. For Prime Day, several of the brand's top QLED models are on sale, including the Bravia 9, a high-end Mini LED TV that delivers a bright, refined picture. For a closer look at how Sony's current lineup compares, check out my guide to the best Sony TVs.

The best Prime Day Amazon Ember and Fire TV deals

Amazon makes its own lineup of smart TVs powered by the Fire TV platform. TCL and Hisense typically deliver stronger picture quality for the price, but Amazon's sets can still be solid budget buys when discounts are steep enough. The 50-inch Omni QLED is the top deal right now, since it's one of the few TVs in this size range with local dimming to improve contrast. For Prime Day, it's back down to an all-time low of $250. For more details on Amazon's lineup, see my Fire TV guide.

Prime Day TV FAQs

What type of TV should you buy?

TV shopping can be confusing since there are several display types to choose from, including LED, OLED, QLED, Mini LED, and RGB LED. Each technology has its own strengths, so the right pick depends on your budget, room setup, and viewing habits. Here's a simple breakdown:

• OLED TVs: OLEDs, including QD-OLED and tandem OLED models, offer the best overall picture quality, with perfect black levels, pixel-level contrast, and wide viewing angles. They're ideal for movie fans, but they cost more (especially in larger sizes), aren't as bright as top QLEDs, and carry a small risk of burn-in. You can learn more in our OLED vs. QLED comparison.
• QLED TVs: QLED TVs use quantum dots to deliver bright images and vibrant color. They're great for rooms with ambient light, come in many sizes and price points, and don't pose a burn-in risk. However, they can't match OLED contrast or viewing angles, and performance is best on models with Mini LED local dimming.
• LED TVs: Basic LED TVs are the cheapest choice and work well for casual viewing or getting a large screen on a budget. But they lack premium features like quantum dots, and usually lack local dimming and wide color support, so picture quality is limited.
• RGB LED TVs: Also called Micro RGB, RGB Mini LED, or True RGB, these TVs use separate red, green, and blue LEDs to deliver an expanded color range. The tech is promising, but options are limited, and OLED remains better for contrast. You can learn more in our RGB LED vs. Mini LED comparison.

How do I know if a TV deal is worthwhile?

I've been covering Prime Day events since the first sale in 2015, and I've been testing TVs for over a decade. I also keep track of TV prices year-round, so I know how much popular models typically sell for. When I recommend the best Prime Day TV deals, I also use price trackers to review historical deal data, ensuring the current discount is actually worthwhile.

When shopping Prime Day deals, you'll often see a product's list price crossed out and replaced by a deal price. However, this "list price" can be deceptive. In many cases, the list price Amazon shows is a TV's full retail price, but that doesn't mean it's the price the TV has been selling for recently. You can learn more about vetting discounts in our guide to tracking Prime Day deals.

Should you buy a 2025 or 2026 TV?

For most shoppers, a discounted 2025 TV offers the best value on Prime Day. Generally speaking, new 2026 TVs only offer modest upgrades but currently cost a lot more than last year's models. That said, certain 2026 TVs deliver bigger improvements that could be worth the extra money if you're an enthusiast who wants the latest panel technology. With that in mind, I've singled out a few particularly noteworthy 2026 TV models in this roundup.

What size TV is best?

The ideal TV size depends on your room, seating distance, and budget. Big-screen TVs larger than 65 inches can make movie nights, live sports, and gaming sessions feel more immersive, but don't let screen size be the only thing that sways you. A cheap TV with a huge display will often fall short in contrast, color, and brightness compared to a smaller, high-end model. As you compare Prime Day TV deals, pay close attention to the panel type, picture-quality features, and design perks, rather than just picking the largest screen at the lowest price.

Is Prime Day a good time to buy a TV?

Yes, Prime Day is a great time to purchase a new TV, as select models are reaching record-low or near-all-time-low prices. While there are a few dud deals out there, I spend my days tracking prices and testing TVs, so I'm careful to only recommend truly good deals on quality televisions.

Shopping for more discounts today? Check out our roundup of all of the best Prime Day deals, or browse Amazon's website for the full selection.

Nick Jones is a former US Marine Raider who served in MARSOC, the Marine Corps' elite special operations unit.

After starting his career as an infantry mortarman and scout sniper, Jones went on to complete the rigorous Marine Raiders training and deployed multiple times to Iraq and Jordan. In 2020, Jones was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions during a chaotic firefight with Islamic State fighters in northern Iraq in which he repeatedly charged into enemy fire to rescue wounded teammates despite being shot in the leg himself.

Jones speaks with Business Insider about Marine Raiders selection, advanced infantry tactics, and operating alongside allied forces. He goes into detail about the intense realities of close-quarters combat and the firefight that led to his Navy Cross. Jones also reveals the mental and physical toll of combat, detailing his personal struggles with trauma, injury recovery, and alcoholism.

Following his retirement from active service, Jones has dedicated his career to supporting the veteran community. He is the founder of the Talons Reach Foundation, a nonprofit based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

If you or someone you know is dealing with substance misuse or mental illness, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Helpline (1-800-662-4357) for 24/7, free, confidential treatment referral and information.

For more:
https://www.talonsreachfoundation.org/
https://www.instagram.com/itisnickjones/

• Wendy's emerged as the market's latest short-squeeze this week, with retail traders rushing in.
• Shares surged for a second day on Thursday after spiking more than 25% on Wednesday.
• JPMorgan highlighted three stocks that could be the next to get squeezed.

It's official. Wendy's stock is the newest short-squeeze.

Retail traders piled into shares of the burger chain on Wednesday, catalyzing a 25% gain that extended by another 9% on Thursday. According to data from Vanda Research, which tracks retail inflows into single stocks and ETF, Wednesday marked the second-biggest day of retail net-buying of the stock since 2012, with flows behind just Nvidia and SpaceX.

Commentary from retail traders around the internet show they see a classic setup: shares of a nostalgia-heavy consumer brand with high short interest, similar to the conditions that helped stocks like GameStop and AMC Entertainment rocket higher.

Wendy's has short interest of about 32% of float, but with shares up more than 25% since the short squeeze began, traders who didn't get in at the start may be looking for the next one.

According to JPMorgan analyst Arun Jain, data on retail buying and hedge fund short interest suggests three other stocks could be next in line.

• Smartbird: +5% year-to-date, 20% short interest
• The Campbell's Company: -20% year-to-date, 25% short interest
• Oddity Tech: -67% year-to-date, 24% short interest

Shares of Smartbird, formerly shoemaker Allbirds, have been volatile after its wild April surge sparked by the announcement that it would be pivoting to become an AI infrastructure company.

While hype from the news and 582% rally ultimately cooled down, JPMorgan's data shows that Smarbird remains a favorite among retail traders who have embraced its turnaround story, while short sellers are still betting that the gambit won't amount to much.

"The company rebranded on June 17, completing its pivot from a footwear retailer to an AI infrastructure-focused business, and increased its financing facility to $100 million from $50 million," Jan wrote. "Retail interest has picked up since April 2026, with net purchases totaling $14M, alongside rising short interest now at ~20% of float, up 12% since April 2026."

The Campbell's Company has emerged as a retail favorite in 2026 as share prices have declined, compromised by pullbacks in consumer spending and tariff-driven inflation. But like Wendy's, it seems to have resonated with the retail crowd as a nostalgic consumer brand.

• A version of this post appears in Cannes Diary, a daily pop-up newsletter covering Cannes Lions.
• Sign up for Business Insider's weekly marketing newsletter, CMO Insider.

When the sun sets on the French Riviera for the day, the Cannes Lions revelers come out to play.

The Cannes party scene has become the proxy battleground for influence, budgets, and status.

Spotify's enormous beach structure is situated at the center of the action. The music streamer's soirées resembled a festival lineup: Mumford & Sons, Mike D, Central Cee, RAYE, Lykke Li, and John Summit.

Not to be outdone, the huge stage at the Amazon Port hosted indie rockers The xx for a Tuesday night performance.

Yahoo had lines snaking up the promenade all night long with partygoers hoping to get into the vastly oversubscribed Tiësto concert.

Throughout the week, there were dozens more intimate shindigs up and down the Croisette, and nightclub ragers that went well into the wee hours.

"The parties are for clout, to some degree, but also relationship-building," Chris Harihar, EVP at the marketing agency Mod Op, told me. "You spend time with clients, partners, and prospects, and the hope is they like you more and want to work with you more. Just don't drink too much rosé."

Zack Dugow, CEO of adtech firm The COOL Company, hosted a table at the raucous Bâoli nightclub, where the purchasing of magnums of Champagne — starting at roughly €1,000, or around $1,136, during Lions week — triggers a parade of dancers, giant sparklers, and flags. This happened several times, Business Insider can confirm.

Dugow told me that Cannes does human connection better than any other conference.

"Somewhere around midnight, and especially at 2 a.m. at Bâoli, the conversation shifts," he said. "You stop talking about work and start talking about life, family, goals, and the things that actually matter. That's when relationships become real."

The adtech company Cognitiv hosts an annual "Pink Party" on its yacht, where attendees — you guessed it — wear pink. It also held a Pride Party, in partnership with the LGBTQ+ organization Do the WeRQ and other industry partners at the 3CV Beach.

"These events are not just brand moments. They're catalysts for conversations, relationships, and impact that outlast the week itself," Cognitiv CEO Jeremy Fain told me.

"For young professionals, it's one of the best networking opportunities in the world," Fain said of the Cannes party scene. "For industry leaders, it's a rare chance to reconnect with the people shaping the future of marketing, all in one place."

And beyond the case for partying as a business strategy, there's also a simpler truth: Sometimes it's just fun to let loose.

Check out the photos from some of the best Cannes Lions 2026 parties below.

Amazon hosted indie rockers The xx for a Tuesday night concert at its Amazon Port space.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas mingled with guests at the UTA and DoorDash Executive Soirée at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on Tuesday.

The night featured a performance from the rapper Ludacris. Other A-listers in attendance included Paris Hilton, Janelle Monáe, Draymond Green, Alan Cumming, JB Smoove, and Elle Fanning,

The adtech company Cognitiv held a 'Pink Party' on its yacht on Tuesday.

iHeart Media held a World Cup watch party for the England vs. Ghana game at the iHeartCafé with podcast hosts Eva Longoria, Hoda Kotb, and Sarah Spain.

RAYE drew the crowds for Spotify's Tuesday night bash.

Wyclef Jean was the star of the Brand Innovators party Tuesday night on Rado Beach.

The COOL Company, a digital ad firm, hosted clients and friends at a Tuesday evening rager at the Bâoli Cannes club, which ran into the early hours.

French DJ legend Corrone headlined the RTL AdAlliance Party on its beach Tuesday night.

Guests mingled at the official Lions creators' party on the beach early Wednesday evening.

D-Nice was on the decks at TikTok's 'club quarantine' at the Carlton Hotel on Wednesday.

Yahoo was the talk of the town on Wednesday evening as lines snaked along the promenade for Tiësto.

Mumford & Sons were the headline act at Spotify's Wednesday beach party.

The Cannes Film Festival isn't the only fashionable event held on the southeastern coast of France.

Between June 22 and June 26, CMOs, influencers, CEOs, creative marketing professionals, and more flock to the resort city to attend the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity — also known as the Oscars of advertising.

And while at the event, many of those attendees are flaunting fashion status symbols, from designer necklaces to trendy footwear.

Business Insider is on the ground in Cannes and keeping an eye on what stylish attendees are wearing. Here's what's stood out so far.

Statement necklaces are in again.

MarketCast CEO Lana Busignani paired her statement Chanel necklace with a striped outfit and chunky glasses.

Men are wearing dress shorts and sneakers with suede touches.

Adim Isiakpona, cofounder of The People Company, paired his burnt-orange shorts and Adidas sneakers with a graphic button-down top.

Some are making statements with monochrome looks.

Nicole Weatherbee and Heather Unruh Yost, both Salesforce employees, paired bold outfits with neutral bags. Weatherbee donned a bright-orange set, and Yost chose a mint-green look.

Woven and rattan bags are everywhere.

Karin Kildow, who works for CCG Social, accessorized her neutral top and miniskirt with a woven bag.

The more colorful, the better.

Aba Blankson, the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at NAACP, wore a rainbow dress with short sleeves and exaggerated pockets.

You can't go wrong with designer sunglasses, especially from brands like Prada.

Ashley Thorpe and Hannah Diddams both wore vibrant dresses, designer sunglasses, and bold jewelry. Diddams' shades specifically came from Prada.

Men are having fun with bags, too.

Two men were spotted wearing statement crossbody bags at the festival. One sported a black Swissdigital design that featured multiple pockets, while another wore what looked like a leather Hermès piece.

Bold prints are having a moment.

Attendee Adwoa Nyame opted for stripes, which decorated her blouse, trousers, and purse.

No outfit is complete without eye-catching accessories.

Actors Jimmy Akingbola and Darren Darnborough proved that. Akingbola, who starred in "Bel-Air," paired a brown T-shirt and matching trousers with flashy gold jewelry, a baseball cap, and sunglasses.

Darnborough, who appeared in "Marshals," wore white trousers and a denim button-down, which he accessorized with a Dior neck scarf, a silver watch, and black sunglasses.

Flowing, white pants felt like an essential item.

One woman sported white linen trousers with her green top, while another paired a floral tank top with flowing linen pants.

When it comes to hats, the bigger, the better.

One attendee was spotted wearing a black-and-white summer dress, woven sandals, and a wide-brimmed hat.

• After a miscarriage, I felt anxious throughout my next pregnancy.
• My traumatic first birth changed how I experienced motherhood forever.
• Even after my rainbow baby arrived, the fear didn't disappear.

When I saw two pink lines again, I assumed I would feel relief. Instead, it still felt like I was holding my breath.

Trying to conceive became all-consuming.

Each month, I tracked everything. My temperature. My symptoms. The timing. I told myself it would give me some sense of control. It didn't. It just gave me more to analyze, more to worry about, more ways to convince myself something was wrong.

I didn't expect trying again to feel this heavy.

I knew how quickly things could change

My first pregnancy had already shown me that things don't always go the way you imagine. I had gestational diabetes, and my son was born via C-section at 37 weeks.

I didn't get to hold him. There was no golden hour, no skin-to-skin. Shortly after he was born, he was whisked away by a horde of doctors and nurses to prepare for an ambulance transfer to a hospital with a higher-level NICU.

Just a few hours after my abdomen was opened and stitched back together, my husband and a nurse helped me walk to a wheelchair so I could see him for a few minutes before his ambulance ride.

I didn't see him again in person for three days.

He had transient tachypnea of the newborn, also known as "wet lungs," and watching him struggle to breathe is something I still carry with me. When we finally brought him home five days later, I thought the hardest part was behind us. Then I was readmitted with postpartum preeclampsia. Daily blood pressure checks saved my life.

We thought we were ready to try again

When our son turned 2, we felt ready to try again. It happened faster than we imagined. Everything seemed to be going well. At 10 weeks, we found out we were having another boy.

We brought our toddler to our 14-week appointment, excited for him to hear his little brother's heartbeat.

There wasn't one.

The doctor told me it was a missed miscarriage and recommended a D&C. We went back the next day for a viability scan, holding onto a small sense of hope. By the following day, it was confirmed that our baby was gone.

I had the procedure two days later.

I don't remember much from the hospital. What I remember is trying to recover, physically and mentally, while still showing up every day for my toddler.

Getting pregnant again didn't bring relief

We started trying again as soon as I was medically cleared. I got pregnant again four months later. Looking back, it happened quickly.

At the time, it felt like the longest stretch of my life.

I questioned everything. Whether my body had failed me. Whether my C-section had caused too much scarring. Whether I was too old. Too overweight. Too something.

When I saw those two pink lines, I wasn't relieved. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

That feeling followed me into every appointment. My blood pressure was high each time, even early on. At six weeks, I started bleeding and cramping. There was enough blood that I was sure I was miscarrying again.

I was seen the same day and told it was a subchorionic hematoma, a common cause of first-trimester bleeding that often resolves on its own.

The bleeding lasted for three weeks.

I was put on progesterone supplements through the first trimester and tried to take things one day at a time, but it was hard to have faith that this pregnancy would last. When we learned the baby was a girl, I wanted to feel excited. I felt cautious instead.

I felt like I knew too much

By the second trimester, I was diagnosed with gestational hypertension and gestational diabetes. I began seeing maternal-fetal medicine specialists and had weekly nonstress tests starting at 32 weeks.

Each appointment felt like a checkpoint. Another moment where something could go wrong.

I assumed that having been through pregnancy before would make this one easier. That I would feel more confident, more prepared.

Instead, I felt like I knew too much.

I knew how quickly things could change. I knew a normal appointment could turn into something else entirely. I knew that even after bringing a baby home, things could still go wrong.

That knowledge didn't make me feel stronger. It made everything feel more fragile.

Bringing her home didn't end the fear

Trying for another baby didn't feel like moving forward. It felt like carrying everything that had already happened with me.

I still wanted this baby. That never changed. But wanting something deeply doesn't cancel out fear. If anything, it makes the fear louder.

Our rainbow baby was born at 37 weeks, just like her older brother, and needed time in the NICU. Two days after we brought her home, I was readmitted again with postpartum preeclampsia. I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the hospital, separated from my newborn and my family.

Even as I cuddle my sweet baby girl, I'm still learning how to carry both the hope and the anxiety. The excitement and the uncertainty.

This journey to motherhood doesn't look like what I pictured. But it's real. And for now, that has to be enough.

• Micron stock popped after earnings on Wednesday.
• The memory-chip maker that's been a key pillar of the AI trade crushed revenue estimates.
• It also gave a strong sales forecast for the current quarter, beating consensus views.

Micron passed the test.

After fears that a less-than-stellar report from the memory-chip maker could further derail the AI trade after Tuesday's bruising sell-off, Micron delivered on all fronts.

Shares of the company surged as much as 19% on Thursday after it reported earnings on Wednesday that crushed revenue estimates for its fiscal third quarter. Revenue came in at $41.46 billion compared to expectations for $35.7 billion. Earnings per share were $25.11 versus estimates of $20.49.

More importantly for investors, the good times are likely to keep coming. Micron said that revenue for the current quarter would be about $50 billion, blowing past Wall Street's estimates of $43.2 billion.

The memory maker has been one of the market's hottest stocks this year, up 267% through Wednesday's close. At the heart of investors' bullishness is the shortage of memory capacity driven by the next leg of the AI boom and a shift from training, which requires GPUs, to inference, which requires memory chips.

Micron's peers in the market have also soared this year, with Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate all up triple digits.

"The memory market is at an unprecedented inflexion point, with demand materially outpacing supply," IDC, a tech market intelligence firm, said in a report at the end of 2025. Since then, the crunch has only continued.

The costs have spiraled so high that other tech titans that rely on the hardware could raise prices. Apple CEO Tim Cook said this month that price hikes from the iPhone maker are "unavoidable" given soaring costs for memory capacity. Cook's comments sparked a fresh surge in the hottest memory stocks.

Whether you're traveling overseas, spend a long time commuting, or just like to have a backup plan, the Anker Nano Power Bank is our favorite. It offers excellent value, and for Prime Day, it's hard to pass up. At 30% off, it's definitely one of our team's highlights.

This isn't the kind of backup battery that feels like a chore to carry. It has a 10,000mAh capacity, an integrated display, supports up to 45W charging, and includes a retractable USB-C cable, so you don't have to remember to pack a separate cord.

Our reviewer called the Anker Nano Power Bank his go-to travel charger because it offers a useful mix of power, portability, and convenience. It usually retails for $59, but it's $42 for Prime Day, which is just a tad over its all-time low of $40 from last December. This is an especially appealing buy for anyone who wants a simple way to keep their phone, tablet, or laptop topped up on the go.

Why we love the Anker Nano Power Bank

• It's got solid capacity: The 10,000mAh battery can provide about two extra charges for an iPhone 17 Pro, according to our reviewer's testing.
• The built-in USB-C cable is a huge convenience: Since the cord retracts into the power bank, there's no loose cable to misplace, untangle, or remember to pack.
• It gives you more ways to plug in: In addition to the built-in USB-C cable, it has a USB-C port and a USB-A port for charging with other cables or powering multiple devices.
• The screen is genuinely useful: The display shows the remaining battery, how much power a connected device is drawing, and how long the power bank will take to recharge.
• It supports pass-through charging: You can recharge the power bank while it's also charging your phone, which is especially handy in a hotel room or anywhere outlets are limited.
• It's easy to pack: It isn't tiny enough for every pocket, but it fits well in bags, purses, and many jackets, making it a practical everyday travel companion.

Shopping for more discounts today? Check out our roundup of all of the best Prime Day deals, or browse Amazon's website for the full selection.

Portable power stations are the backup plan you never want to need, but will be grateful to have. Alternatively, they're a priceless utility on camping trips and off-grid excursions, letting you charge your electronics while miles from an outlet. If you haven't yet gotten one, Prime Day power station deals are an excellent opportunity to shop.

You have a lot of options to choose from, which is where our guide to the best portable power stations comes in handy. Not only have we highlighted brands and products to trust, but we also break down the basics of choosing the right one for your needs. Right now, we're seeing sales from Jackery, Anker, and more, all of which were reviewed for our guide.

Keep reading to find the best power station deals Prime Day has to offer. For other deep discounts across all shopping categories, check out our hub for the best Prime Day deals.

Prime Day portable power station deals

Jackery Explorer 1000 V2

Why we love this deal: The Jackery Explorer 1000 V2 is the portable power station we recommend to most people. It has a practical middle-of-the-road capacity for temporary power needs and delivers some of the best efficiency in our testing. The stand-alone unit is on sale for $399 (originally $799), but the better Prime Day deal to consider is the Explorer, bundled with a 200-watt solar panel, for $599, down from $1,299.

• See all the Jackery Prime Day deals.

Anker Solix F3800

Why we love this deal: The Anker Solix F3800 has a stellar battery life and was able to operate a fan, mini-fridge, and light for 20 hours during our testing, longer than most power outages are expected to last. It's hefty, but fortunately, wheels make it easier to transport. Bundle with two 200-watt solar panels for more versatility and great savings. This means the power station can generate its own energy rather than just storing it, making it all the more efficient.

• See all Anker Solix Prime Day deals

Bluetti Elite 30 V2

Why we love this deal: The Elite 30 V2 is our favorite budget model, and now it's priced under $200. If you're looking for a small and highly portable device that can keep small electronics charged, this is a great option to try if you're looking to dip your toes into what a portable power station can do.

• See all Bluetti Prime Day deals.

Anker Solix C2000 Gen 2

Why we love this deal: The Anker Solix C2000 Gen 2 offers about 2,000 Wh in a relatively compact, portable unit. Its quick recharge speed of about 80 minutes has made this our category expert's go-to model for everything from camping to power outages. If you don't need something so beefy, also consider the C1000 Gen 2, which is on sale for $ 399, weighs just 25 pounds, and can recharge in about 50 minutes.

EcoFlow Delta Pro

Why we love this deal: The EcoFlow Delta Pro is another strong option for home backup, with 3,600Wh of capacity and a full recharge time under three hours. It has a smaller footprint and weighs less than the Anker Solix F3800, though Anker performed better in our battery-efficiency testing, giving us more usable power.

• See all Ecoflow Prime Day deals.

Prime Day Portable Power Station FAQs

What size power station do I need?

Match the portable power station to how you'll actually use it. A compact model — roughly under 500Wh — is best for charging phones, laptops, cameras, lanterns, and other small electronics. A midsize model — about 500Wh to 1,500Wh — is a better fit for camping, tailgating, short power outages, CPAP machines, mini fridges, routers, fans, and multiple devices. A large model — usually 1,500Wh and up — makes more sense for longer outages, full-size refrigerators, power tools, or several larger devices at once.

What to know about buying a portable power station?

The biggest mistake is buying based only on the biggest discount or the highest capacity. A huge power station may look like the best Prime Day deal, but if you only need to charge phones, laptops, lights, or a small fan, you may be paying extra for weight and capacity you won't use.

The opposite mistake is buying the smallest, cheapest model and expecting it to handle high-draw appliances. A compact power station may be great for phones and laptops, but it can fall short fast if you need backup power for a fridge, medical device, camping appliance, or anything with a heating element.

It's important to buy the size best for your needs as many of these portable power stations are marked as not returnable due to transportation restrictions around lithium batteries.

Shopping for more discounts today? Check out our roundup of all of the best Prime Day deals, or browse Amazon for the full selection.

• Over the past year, I've tried and ranked 16 of Shake Shack's shakes.
• Three limited-edition flavors have been added to the menu for the summer.
• My favorite was cookies and cream, though I'd drink almost all of them again.

Over the course of the last year, I've embarked on a grueling mission: to taste and rank every shake on Shake Shack's menu.

Just as I was getting my appetite back, the chain announced three new summer flavors, so I knew what I had to do: It was time to revisit the shake rankings.

Shake Shack has six main milkshake flavors that are available all year, as well as three or four limited-edition flavors at any one time.

My ranking of 16 Shake Shack flavors, each made with frozen custard, includes classics such as chocolate and vanilla, as well as limited-edition shakes like the Dubai Chocolate Pistachio, which was introduced last summer and brought back this month due to popular demand.

Here's how I ranked them all, from my least favorite to my favorite.

Shake Shack did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

In last place came the strawberry shake.

A strawberry shake costs $6 at my nearest Shake Shack in New York. It's made with vanilla custard and "real strawberry," according to the website.

There are 690 calories in a 16-ounce cup, Shake Shack's standard shake size.

It was doomed from the start — I almost couldn't get past its strong strawberry fumes.

This could just be personal bias, as I would never order a strawberry shake under any circumstances, but when I took the lid off and sniffed the shake, I felt like I was sniffing a strawberry-scented candle.

After tasting a sip, I was able to appreciate that this was one of the thickest shakes I tried. But it was just too sweet for me — I could only take a couple sips before feeling like I was rapidly developing a cavity.

In 15th place was the limited-edition Campfire S'mores shake.

The Campfire S'mores shake, which was available during summer 2025, was made with vanilla frozen custard, graham crackers, "chocolate and toasted marshmallow fudge chunks," and finished off with whipped cream and s'mores crumbles, per Shake Shack's website description.

It cost $6.99 and had 1,090 calories.

You can see how many of the ingredients were sitting at the bottom, making this hard to drink.

There sure was a lot in there, but to me, this just tasted like a vanilla shake with some graham cracker bits mixed in, which was pretty unpleasant, texturally speaking.

I couldn't taste chocolate or marshmallows, two of the three key s'mores ingredients.

In my opinion, it was not worth the extra 50 cents or the extra calories.

This year's s'mores offering, the Chocolate Toasted Marshmallow S'mores shake, was a slight improvement.

This summer, instead of focusing on s'mores, the shake is more marshmallow-forward, which I really only got from the whipped cream.

This shake contains vanilla custard with a toasted marshmallow dark chocolate ganache, and is topped with whipped cream and a s'mores graham cracker crunch, which turned out to be crumbled graham crackers and little chocolate crumbles.

It costs $7.69 and has 1,110 calories.

This was more chocolate-forward than last year's marshmallow shake, but I still didn't love it.

I shouldn't have complained about not tasting the marshmallow last summer, because the first sip I took off the top was like drinking a liquified marshmallow, with some graham cracker thrown in.

Once I tasted the actual shake, though, I thought it seemed more like a black-and-white shake than a vanilla one, which was one of my issues last year.

However, this still isn't for me. Maybe I just don't want to combine s'mores and shakes?

At No. 13 was another limited-edition shake: the Dubai Chocolate Pistachio shake.

Nobody is immune to Dubai chocolate, not even Shake Shack.

Shake Shack's version of the viral snack — a chocolate bar filled with green pistachio cream and shredded phyllo pastry — is a shake that costs $10.99 and has 1,330 calories.

It's made with pistachio custard mixed with "toasted kataifi shredded phyllo" and is topped with mashed-up pistachios and kataifi.

It's encased in a crackable shell made of dark chocolate inside the cup, so it makes sense that Shake Shack recommends it be best enjoyed cold.

I barely tasted any chocolate, and the shredded phyllo made this hard to drink, as well.

To me, this didn't taste like chocolate at all, since the chocolate was completely frozen and didn't mix with the pistachio custard.

The pistachio custard itself was delicious, but the phyllo mixed in felt strange to drink … almost as if paper had been added to my shake.

Since this was a more expensive shake, I can't rank it any higher. But Shake Shack should definitely add a pistachio flavor to its lineup — I would drink it plain.

Shake Shack didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider regarding its Dubai chocolate recipe or pricing.

My least favorite of the holiday shakes was the Christmas Cookie shake.

I visited Shake Shack's Innovation Kitchen in December 2025 to try out the new holiday flavors, so I didn't pay for this one, but per the chain's website, it retailed at $6.99 and had 840 calories.

It was made with sugar-cookie custard and topped with whipped cream and red and green sprinkles.

Apparently, this is a fan favorite, but it was too sweet for my taste.

Nick Wuest, Shake Shack's senior manager of culinary innovation, said the Christmas Cookie shake has stayed on the menu year after year due to demand, and when Shake Shack tinkered with the recipe, fans let them know they want it left untouched.

I'll give them this: It certainly tasted like a sugar cookie in shake form. However, as just a mild lover of sugar cookies, this was too sweet for me, although I was impressed at how accurate the flavor was.

In 11th place was the vanilla-and-chocolate shake.

This is exactly what it sounds like: vanilla and chocolate custard mixed together. It has 770 calories and costs $6.

This tasted like chocolate with a hint of vanilla, but not in a good way.

Maybe it's because the chocolate was so overpowering compared to the vanilla, which can be more subtle, but this just tasted like a watered-down chocolate shake to me.

The chocolate shake was just slightly above that at No. 10.

This is just frozen chocolate custard. It's $6 and 750 calories.

This was a flavorful chocolate shake, but I wasn't overly impressed.

As a chocolate ice cream lover, I thought this was sure to place high. Instead, this chocolate shake was somewhat middling for me. I thought it had an artificial aftertaste, and I couldn't take more than a couple of sips, something that never happens to me with chocolate ice cream.

But some chocolate is better than no chocolate, hence its spot at No. 9.

Next, the limited-edition Banana Pudding shake.

The Banana Pudding shake, another limited-time shake that was on the menu until the end of summer 2025, used banana custard made with "real banana," per Shake Shack, and was mixed with vanilla wafer cookies. It was also topped with "vanilla wafer cookie crumble."

It was priced at $6.99 and had 1,010 calories.

It was delicious, but the smell knocked it down a few spots in the ranking.

Banana-flavored anything can be divisive — remember how mad some people would get on Halloween if they got banana Laffy Taffy? — but I thought this was great.

It tasted like real bananas, the cookie crumble on top was good, and the cookies only added flavor, rather than a crumb-like texture in the shake.

Ranking a vanilla shake somewhere in the middle seems right.

The Shake Shack site writes that its vanilla shakes are made with "real vanilla" in the vanilla custard. One shake contains 680 calories and costs $6.

It was the creamiest shake I tried.

This was easily the creamiest, thickest shake I tried. Can you go wrong with a vanilla shake? It's sweet, doesn't have a strong aftertaste, and was the only one that actually felt like I was quenching any type of thirst.

However, it's kind of bland, as many vanilla things are. So I can't put it any higher.

This summer's best new flavor is the Key Lime Pie shake.

The third and final new shake for this summer is the Key Lime Pie shake, which is made with vanilla custard spun with Key-lime pie curd and graham cracker crunch. It's then topped with whipped cream and more graham crackers.

It's $7.69 and 1,020 calories.

This would've been a perfect shake, if not for the aftertaste.

I love Key-lime pie, so I was excited to try this. Even just taking off the lid and taking an exploratory sniff, I knew that Shake Shack had done a good job. It smelled like summer.

I was further rewarded when I took a sip and tasted a liquified Key-lime pie. Maybe that doesn't sound appetizing, but it was delicious.

However, after taking a couple of sips, I couldn't ignore the artificial aftertaste, which prevents me from putting this any higher.

I liked the crackable Peppermint Bark Chocolate shake better than the Dubai Chocolate one.

Another holiday offering, the Peppermint Bark Chocolate shake ($9.99, 1,320 calories) contained chocolate custard infused with mint chocolate fudge, encased in a crackable peppermint white chocolate shell.

It was topped with whipped cream and little pieces of peppermint candy.

This tasted like winter to me.

Shake Shack's second foray into the crackable shake space was, in my opinion, an improvement on the first. It was much easier to crack and pull out pieces of the shell.

My main critique of the Dubai Chocolate shake was that I didn't really taste any chocolate. Since this was a chocolate shake infused with mint fudge, there was no missing either flavor.

Of course, not everyone likes mint chocolate, but if you find yourself grabbing a peppermint mocha every day of December, I'd give this a whirl next holiday season.

In fifth place came the limited-edition Oreo Cookie Funnel Cake flavor.

The Oreo Cookie Funnel Cake shake, another summer 2025 option, was made with vanilla custard and "Oreo Cookies and funnel cake crunch" spun into the custard. It was topped with whipped cream and Oreo crumbles.

It had 1,140 calories — the second most of all the shakes I tried — and cost $6.99.

This, somehow, tasted exactly like a funnel cake you'd get at a local fair.

I was curious to see how this would taste different from the regular cookies-and-cream shake, but the two couldn't have been more different.

Somehow, this just tasted exactly like a funnel cake you'd get at a carnival. It even had the sugary aftertaste, which I love: It brought me back to summer nights that I spent at my local town fair, licking powdered sugar off my fingers.

If I had to knock it, though, I didn't really taste Oreo in the shake itself, though the crumbles on top somewhat made up for it.

Next up was the coffee shake.

After a five-year hiatus, the coffee shake was reintroduced to the permanent menu in September 2025, ahead of National Coffee Day.

It costs $6 and has 700 calories, and is made with vanilla custard mixed with dark roast coffee.

This was the platonic ideal of a coffee shake.

As a self-proclaimed coffee ice cream aficionado, I was a bit nervous to try this flavor. Sometimes, coffee-flavored products can taste artificial or too sweet, but I didn't have to worry about that with this shake.

Simply put, this tasted like a frozen cup of coffee. If that sounds appealing to you, I'd recommend.

In third place came the limited-edition Sticky Toffee Pudding flavor.

This shake, another holiday flavor, had 930 calories and cost $6.99.

It's made with a vanilla custard base, a piece of sticky toffee pudding cake, and caramelized brown sugar blended together, topped with whipped cream and a toffee pudding sauce.

This was delicious.

Of the three holiday flavors, I have the least experience with sticky toffee pudding, a British dessert. I was a bit worried I wouldn't enjoy it, but my fears quickly vanished after the first sip.

To me, the molasses flavoring was like a gingerbread cookie, making it the perfect holiday treat. I also liked that I could feel the little pieces of cake mixed in, adding a textural dimension that some of the other shakes didn't have.

In second place: the black-and-white shake.

This is vanilla custard mixed with chocolate fudge sauce.

It has 770 calories and costs $6.49.

This tasted like vanilla with a hint of chocolate, in a good way.

Full disclosure: Before doing this ranking, I thought that a black-and-white shake was just chocolate and vanilla mixed together. But no! It's a vanilla shake mixed with chocolate sauce. I much preferred this.

It had more of a taste than a plain vanilla shake, but it didn't have the watered-down quality of the vanilla-and-chocolate shake, which was overwhelmed by chocolate. This tasted like a hot fudge sundae.

I highly recommend.

And in first place — certainly not to my own surprise — was the cookies-and-cream shake.

The cookies-and-cream shake ($6.49 and 850 calories) is made with vanilla custard and spun with "chocolate cookie crumbles."

This was, to put it plainly, so good.

In almost any scenario, I am ordering a cookies-and-cream shake. It's been my go-to for years … but that just means that the Shake Shack shake had to live up to my high standards. And it did.

This tasted like drinking a mashed-up Oreo, which is all I ever want from a cookies-and-cream shake. It was creamy, not too sweet, and the texture of the cookie crumbles wasn't off-putting in any way. It had just the right amount of crumbs.

I'd be fine with getting any of the top eight shakes, but cookies and cream will forever be my No. 1 choice.

• Apple raised prices for some Mac and iPad models on Thursday by as much as $300.
• There were no increases to iPhone prices.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook had earlier warned of price increases due to the memory chip shortage.

Tim Cook warned that Apple price rises were coming — and now we know just how much more expensive it is to buy a Mac or iPad.

Apple increased prices for Mac computers by as much as 20%, while iPads are now up to to 25% more expensive, according to the company's updated Online Store.

The cost of its iPhones remained unchanged.

The Thursday price jump means the entry-level MacBook Neo now costs $699, up from $599. A beefier 14-inch MacBook Pro now starts at $1,999 — a $300 increase over its previous $1,699 price tag. The iPad Pro went up by $200 to $1,199.

Earlier this month, Cook warned that price rises were coming due to a shortage of memory chips, saying "price increases are unavoidable."

"We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable," the Apple CEO told The Wall Street Journal in a statement at the time.

Tech companies have been ramping up purchases of the components for their AI buildouts, which has in turn driven up prices for the chips used in many consumer electronics.

That's led to broad price increases for laptops, desktop PCs, smartphones, and gaming consoles like the PS5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch 2.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

• I've loved visiting Martha's Vineyard for the past few years, but it can get crowded and expensive.
• These days, I prefer heading to Rockport, Massachusetts, a cute seaside town with similar vibes.
• It has a walkable downtown, similar natural beauty, nice beaches, and a vibrant art scene.

I've spent more than two decades visiting Martha's Vineyard, even though I live in another popular New England destination: Newport, Rhode Island.

The island attracts everyone from famous musicians like Carly Simon to A-listers including the Obamas and Oprah Winfrey, all lured by its natural beauty, stunning beaches, and coastal charm. But during the height of summer, its allure can mean long waits at popular restaurants, pricey ride shares, and very expensive lodging.

A few years ago, I discovered Rockport, Massachusetts, for the first time, and it immediately reminded me of the Vineyard. I've been visiting ever since.

The smaller coastal town is only about 40 miles northeast of Boston, and just a little over a two-hour drive from my home in Newport.

Here's what made me fall in love with it.

There are picture-perfect views around every corner

Like Martha's Vineyard, Rockport seems straight out of a postcard with jaw-dropping views, waterside restaurants, and a classic New England harbor.

It's known for its rocky coastline, working waterfront, storybook downtown, and vibrant art scene, much like the Vineyard. I love to check out the galleries I stumble upon (there are more than two dozen!) as I walk around town.

Rockport's most famous landmark, Motif No. 1, is a large red fishing shack covered in colorful buoys. Perched atop a picturesque granite wharf that jets out into the harbor, it has long been referred to as "the most painted building in America."

In the warmer months, you'll likely see plein-air painters and their canvases around town and people like me snapping photos of the shack from every angle.

Although there aren't nearly as many beaches in Rockport as there are in Martha's Vineyard, the handful the area does have are easy to reach and still offer iconic New England vibes.

A popular pick is Front Beach, and its proximity to downtown makes it easy to grab breakfast sandwiches, snacks, and ice cream between sunbathing breaks.

I get to leave my car behind and explore so much on foot

Martha's Vineyard is primarily accessed by ferry, which visitors can pay a fee to take their vehicles on.

No ferry is needed to get to Rockport. Instead, you can drive in or even take the commuter rail there directly from Boston. The ride is only about an hour, and the station is close to downtown.

Once you arrive, Rockport is a town best explored on foot.

Bearskin Neck, in the heart of the town, is dotted with weathered cedar-shingle cottages that house boutiques, mom-and-pop stores, candy shops, galleries, and plenty of spots to enjoy creamy New England clam chowder and lobster rolls.

The Ice Cream Store may not have a very creative name, but it's my favorite place to grab a cone.

The area can feel touristy and draw a crowd, so I prefer visiting earlier in the day, but it is absolutely worth exploring.

At the end of Bearskin Neck is a crescent-shaped rock jetty. I like to walk all the way to the end to watch the boats come and go.

Dock Square is also part of Rockport's pedestrian-friendly downtown and a great place to wander and grab a bite to eat. After, I peruse Main Street for a casual stroll; it's the best way to see the architectural detail on historic churches and early 19th-century houses and buildings.

About a 15-minute walk away is the Granite Pier, which offers panoramic views of Sandy Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, plus you'll see plenty of seabirds.

The pier is also where you can catch a seasonal launch boat to Thacher Island, about a mile offshore. I've saved it for my next visit, when I'll explore the island's 3 miles of trails, view historic lighthouses, and hopefully, see lots of wildlife.

I stay at cozy inns that capture small-town New England charm

Similar to Martha's Vineyard, you won't find major national hotel chains in Rockport. Instead, there are friendly inns and bed and breakfasts, which really give your stay a personal touch.

They also add to the town's authentic character. Plenty have cozy porches ideal for curling up with a good book.

Fortunately, I've found accommodations here to be much cheaper than the hotels in Martha's Vineyard.

The last time I visited, I stayed at Emerson Inn by the Sea. It's one of the oldest seaside inns north of Boston, and I loved that I was able to open all the windows in my room and be lulled to sleep by the sea air and lapping waves.

Its location gave me easy access to the Atlantic Path, a 1-½-mile footpath dating back many years.

It traces the rocky coastline, and I liked that some parts of the path required me to make my way over and under boulders. The large, flat rocks also convinced me to turn off my phone, take a seat, and just take in the quiet of the seaside.

Another morning, I grabbed my coffee and walked down to Pigeon Cove, a small harbor on the north side of Sandy Bay filled with working fishing boats.

Old and tiny fishing shacks full of equipment lined the wharf, and I was up early enough to see the crews loading up and heading out to land the day's catch.

Plus, Rockport's location on Cape Ann makes it easy to explore other quaint towns nearby

Gloucester borders Rockport and is America's oldest seaport. Full of the best local seafood, cool history, and a quaint downtown, it's worth a visit.

Similarly, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Essex, and Salem are all within a 30-minute-or-so drive of Rockport and are classic New England towns packed with personality and spirit.

Although Martha's Vineyard is a spectacular destination, Rockport offers similar coastal allure with harbor views, walkability, fewer crowds, and less expensive accommodations — no ferry required.

• JPMorgan gave its biggest clue yet as to who might succeed longtime CEO Jamie Dimon.
• Investment bank co-CEOs Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh will become the firm's new co-presidents.
• Dimon, who turned 70 in March, has been JPMorgan's boss for two decades.

JPMorgan has named two new co-presidents, the biggest hint yet as to who might replace longtime CEO Jamie Dimon.

On Thursday, the finance giant said Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh, who are currently the co-heads of JPMorgan's investment bank, would become co-presidents, effective immediately.

Alongside becoming co-presidents, Petno will become the sole CEO of the investment banking arm, while Rohrbaugh will become CEO of its commercial and community banking division.

JPMorgan directly tied the moves to succession planning, saying they were part of a "process to ensure continued exceptional leadership at the highest levels of the company."

"The changes announced today mark an important step in our Board's thoughtful process around succession planning and development of our top leaders," Dimon said in a press release, praising the men's "extraordinary leadership capabilities."

Succession questions have loomed over JPMorgan and its now 70-year-old CEO for years. The race narrowed when Daniel Pinto, Dimon's longtime lieutenant and the one many saw as most likely to take over in an emergency, announced his retirement at the end of this year.

Both Petno and Rohrbaugh have been considered as possible candidates to succeed Dimon for some time now. In a 2024 Business Insider profile, Wall Street recruiters said Rohrbaugh's background as a risk manager could make him a powerful C-Suite contender.

At the same time as Petno and Rohrbaugh's promotions, the bank announced that another former contender for the CEO job is retiring: Marianne Lake, the current head of commercial banking. She's been at the bank for more than 25 years, and Fortune named her one of the 25 most powerful women in the corporate world earlier this year. She's the latest to withdraw from the race, after chief operating officer Jennifer Piepszak said she was not interested in the top role.

Mary Erdoes, the CEO of Asset & Wealth Management, had been seen as another candidate to replace Dimon, but her role will remain unchanged, according to the bank's press release. Dimon has not set a timeline for his retirement, and said as recently as this year that he wants to stay in his job for "at least" five more years. He said, however, that it's "up to the board" how long he remains in the position, a viewpoint he's repeated often.

Dimon has been CEO since 2006 and steered the bank through the 2008 financial crisis. Two decades in, he's still working to cement his legacy as a titan not only in the financial world but in the country. Last year, he launched the Security & Resiliency Initiative to boost industries strategically important to the U.S. In March, the bank announced a sweeping "American Dream Initiative," focused on six key areas.

• Retailers such as Dollar General and Aldi plan major store expansions in the US in 2026.
• Store closures are outpacing openings so far, with over 2,000 closures announced for 2026.
• From Costco to Walmart, see what retailers have said about plans to open new stores.

While some retailers are scaling back in 2026, others are expanding their footprints across the US.

The success of discount retailers like Dollar General and Nordstrom Rack suggests that American consumers are rewarding retailers that can offer them deals over those that charge full price for groceries and apparel. Big box stores like Target and Walmart, and warehouse clubs like Costco, are also upping their investments in store remodels and openings for 2026 and beyond.

For now, 2026 store closures appear on track to outpace openings, with over 2,000 planned closures announced so far, by Business Insider's count. In 2025, store closures reached over 4,100.

While retailers like Macy's cut back on stores to focus on their digital footprint, these chains are spending money to expand their physical retail presence.

See the list of major store openings below.

Dollar General: 450 stores

On a December 4 earnings call, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos told analysts that the company plans to open 450 new stores in 2026. It's a step down from the planned 575 in 2025, but Vasos said there's no need to race to fill the vacant retail space left by competitors.

"Our competition today is really not opening a lot of stores," Vasos said on the call. "We don't feel compelled to have to rush to open a lot of stores.

Aldi: 180 stores

Aldi kicked off its 50th anniversary year with an announcement of more than 180 new stores set to open across 31 states in the US by the end of 2026.

With its expanded footprint, the grocer expects to operate nearly 2,800 stores by the year's end, bringing it closer to its goal of 3,200 locations by the end of 2028.

Starbucks: 150 to 175 coffeehouses

After closing hundreds of cafés as part of a restructuring plan last year, Starbucks plans to add 150 to 175 net new company-operated coffeehouses in the US this year. The company reiterated the plans in an April earnings call.

The coffee giant has also been renovating hundreds of locations with digital menu boards, warmer decor, and cushy seating.

Ollie's: 75 stores

Discount retailer Ollie's Bargain Outlet showed a strong performance in foot traffic and store openings 2025, and its growth appears to be continuing in 2026.

The company said on a December earnings call that it's targeting 75 new stores for fiscal year 2026.

Barnes & Noble: 60 stores

Barnes & Noble is set to open 60 new stores in 2026, and has attributed its success to its new decentralized strategy, Fox Business reported on December 23.

"Barnes & Noble is enjoying a period of tremendous growth as the strategy to hand control of each bookstore to its local booksellers has proven so successful," the company told Fox Business in a statement.

The book chain was acquired by activist firm Elliott Management in 2019, which jumped at the opportunity to turn the business around as it faced competition from online channels like Amazon. Today, Elliott is reportedly eyeing an IPO along with the new stores openings in 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Aerie and Offline: 35 stores

Loungewear and athleisure companies Aerie and Offline are set to open 35 new stores and remodel 60 locations in 2026.

In March, American Eagle Outfitters CFO Mike Mathias told analysts to expect a capital expenditure in the range of $250 million and $260 million for 2026, which will help finance the store changes.

Target: 30 stores

Target said in March that it plans to open 30 new stores this year on its way to 300 new locations by 2035.

The 2026 expansion plans include a $5 billion investment in new stores, ongoing remodels, technology, and supply chain.

"This new chapter of growth at Target is defined by clear choices and rooted in a deeper understanding of our unique lane in retail, the guests we serve, and the areas where we're distinctly positioned to win," CEO Michael Fiddelke said in a statement.

Costco: 26 stores

Costco is opening 26 net new stores in its 2026 fiscal year as part of its expansion plans, the company said on a May earnings call.

Coming US locations include warehouses in Syracuse, Utah, and Pensacola, Florida, that are set to open in June. Several other locations are set for August openings:

• Albany, New York
• Oconomowoc, Wisconsin
• Otsego, Minnesota
• Mansfield, Texas
• Celina, Texas
• Stone Mountain, Georgia
• Lee's Summit, Missouri

Walmart: 20 stores

Walmart's big plans for 2026 include remodeling about 650 stores and launching new ones. The company plans to open 20 stores in 2026 through early 2027.

The retailer said the new stores and remodels would create jobs, from construction work during development to long-term roles in retail, pharmacy, and store leadership.

Walmart's US CEO, David Guggina, said on a February earnings call that the company had opened 12 new stores and remodeled 674 stores over the previous 12 months.

BJ's Wholesale Club: 16 stores

BJ's Wholesale Club, a membership-based retailer where shoppers buy in bulk, opened 14 stores in 2025, and isn't slowing down in 2026. CEO Bob Eddy boasted about the openings and told analysts on March 5 that it plans to close out 2026 with 25 to 30 new stores, including the ones it opened last year.

"These clubs, as a whole, are delivering sales, membership, and profit that are well above expectations, and we're very excited for our continued accelerated club growth," Eddy said.

Kroger: 14 stores

Grocery chain Kroger has been clear about its intention to open new stores over the past several months. It told investors in 2025 that it expects store openings to increase by 30% this year.

So far, Kroger has confirmed plans to break ground on 14 new stores in 2026.

Nordstrom Rack: 13 stores

In a series of press releases published in 2024 and 2025, discount apparel retailer Nordstrom Rack announced plans to open at least 13 new stores across the US throughout the spring and fall of 2026.

The new locations include states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, and California.

Uniqlo: 11 stores

Japanese apparel retailer Uniqlo is expected to expand by 11 new stores in the US in 2026, according to an announcement obtained by Retail Dive in October.

The openings reportedly include two new flagship stores in Chicago and San Francisco.

"These new stores are not only a milestone of our growth, but a way of honoring the customers who welcomed us two decades ago and continue to inspire everything we do," Fuminori Adachi, Uniqulo's US CEO, said in a statement to Retail Dive.

L.L. Bean: 8 stores

Outdoor lifestyle brand L.L. Bean announced on December 9 that it has plans for a "major retail expansion in 2026," which includes the opening of eight new stores across the US. The new locations will bring the brand's total stores to 76 nationwide.

"We continue to see physical retail as an essential part of our growth strategy," said Greg Elder, L.L.Bean chief retail officer. "Our 2026 expansion reflects our commitment to reaching more people who share our love for the outdoors."

Benihana: 2 locations

The One Group Hospitality, which acquired the Japanese restaurant chain Benihana in 2024, announced an agreement on December 29 that secured it the development rights to 10 Benihana or Benihana Express locations.

The deal is expected to see two Benihana locations open in 2026 with the remaining locations to open over the next seven years.

• After my divorce, I felt a loss of community.
• I decided to try Bumble BFF and make a real effort to build connections.
• Real friendship goes beyond surface-level activities, and that connection isn't built over an app.

After I wrote about moving to the suburbs near Columbia, Maryland, for love — and the nostalgia that hit when I missed living in my hometown, Nashville, after that relationship ended — people began reaching out.

They sent kind messages and suggestions for how I could get more involved locally. One reader even invited me to visit her church, which I happily accepted. The gesture was generous, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I hadn't found my people.

I had built a life in Maryland over more than a decade, but it was centered on a relationship. When I got divorced, many things remained — the townhouse, the neighborhood walks — but the sense of belonging didn't.

After my divorce, I tried dating, but I learned that it was more important to focus on building community after neglecting to do so for years. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that romance wouldn't create the support system I needed.

So I did something different. I downloaded a friendship app.

I downloaded a friendship app

Creating a profile for friendship felt like a familiar exercise. With a background in marketing and copywriting, I approached it the way I would destination writing by describing what a day with me might look like. I uploaded photos that captured highlights from my life: a sunny day on a boat, a beach getaway.

Then I started swiping.

At first, I kept things simple with coffee, walks, and low expectations.

One woman and I traded travel stories. Another invited me to go rock climbing, which I hadn't done since college. Saying yes to these friend dates reminded me of who I used to be, and who I still could be. Still, neither connection developed beyond that first outing.

My calendar began filling quickly as I continued to meet more people, but activity alone wasn't the same thing as connection. Some conversations also never moved beyond the app; many of the women I connected with lived 20 to 30 miles away, and those matches rarely turned into in-person meetups for logistical reasons.

I decided to adjust my approach.

I invited people to work events, and it created deeper connections

At the time, I worked in event marketing for a local hotel that hosted live music, seasonal gatherings, and community events designed to bring people together. Instead of simply promoting those experiences, I started inviting my matches.

It changed everything.

My job created a built-in setting for connection. What began as casual invitations to events I was already attending gradually turned into actual friendships. It taught me that connection can grow more naturally when you're inviting people into a life you're already living. Before long, I was sharing other plans and seeing who wanted to join.

The friendships that lasted weren't formed during a single meetup. They grew through seeing each other repeatedly.

There were small but vivid moments of joy, like going to rock concerts or salsa dancing with new friends. One night, I went dancing in Baltimore with someone I'd originally connected with through one of my after-work meetups in the suburbs. Going into the city together meant sharing the drive and navigating parking. It was a small thing, but it reminded me that friendship isn't built only through fun. Sometimes it's built through the logistics of showing up together.

One of the most impactful moments was when a friend came through for me shortly after we met, as I navigated a dating situation. During a long conversation, she gently encouraged me to maintain firmer boundaries. I remember wondering whether I would have had the capacity to show up that way for someone else. Seeing her do it for me made me realize I did.

Friendship became my priority

At some point, I realized I didn't need to keep swiping to build a community around myself; I just needed to nurture the support system that was already forming around me. Instead of focusing on meeting more people, I started investing more deeply in the relationships already taking shape.

Creating deep friendship requires showing up for each other, and in the early days after my divorce, I hadn't been ready for that. Over time, these new friendships helped me realize that I was. Columbia began to feel less like the place I had moved to for someone else and more like a place that belonged to me.

At times, the city can still feel quiet. However, now I know I have people to call for a walk, a concert, or dinner. Making these friendships didn't happen all at once. It happened one conversation, one invitation, and one friendship at a time.

• Michael Burry of "The Big Short" says he has a Lululemon shopping bag framed on his firm's wall.
• He said the bag, featuring an "Atlas Shrugged" quote, was one of many "own goals" for Lululemon.
• The investor said Lululemon stock looks incredibly cheap and should rebound strongly over time.

Michael Burry isn't afraid to be controversial.

He was ridiculed by Wall Street and castigated by clients for betting against the mid-2000s housing boom, but his contrarian wager paid off when the bubble burst.

Since then, he's come out strongly against many speculative market trends, from meme stocks and SPACs to crypto and NFTs. He's also shorted Tesla and Palantir, leading to clashes with CEOs Elon Musk and Alex Karp, and has warned the AI boom will end badly.

The investor of "The Big Short" fame gave a fresh example of his love for controversy in a Substack post on Wednesday.

He recalled that in 2011, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson slapped "Who is JOHN GALT" on the athleisure brand's reusable shopping bags.

Emblazoning Lululemon bags with the opening line of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was an alienating move, Burry said. The book is beloved by many conservatives and libertarians, while Lululemon's core demographic is young, progressive, yoga-loving women.

Burry swiftly secured one of the questionable bags. "Because my habit is to poke bears, I framed it, and it hangs in my conference room to this day," he wrote.

"Yoga and Ayn Rand," he continued. "They do not belong together in the same sentence let alone a tight proper noun phrase."

Burry listed the bag's design as one of numerous "own goals" by Lululemon that have turned off customers, squeezed margins, and pulled down its stock price from over $400 to under $120 in the past 18 months.

The investor turned writer, who counts Lululemon among his personal holdings, also blamed the company's woes on new taxes and tariffs, product misfires, and a "management vacuum."

Burry made the case that Lululemon is out of fashion in the AI era. But he drew a parallel to Ross Stores falling out of favor during the dot-com bubble, only for its stock to compound at nearly 21% a year for more than 25 years — double the S&P's return excluding dividends.

Lululemon shares rose nearly 4% on Wednesday to $113. Burry said in his Substack post that at the time of writing, they were trading at around $105 a share or 2.5 times tangible book value, or the value of Lululemon's physical and financial assets. That was the lowest multiple since the first quarter of 2009, he noted, describing that fact as "incredible."

"I see a spring-loaded franchise, weighed down mostly by temporary factors," Burry wrote.

"I should expect a roughly 18% CAGR over a 15 year holding period if all my assumptions are correct," he added.

Burry framed a Lululemon bag on his firm's wall because he enjoyed how contentious its message was. Now he may be courting controversy himself by championing an apparel stock that's faced a raft of issues and halved in value over the past 12 months.

• "Talladega Nights" director Adam McKay looked back at making the movie in honor of its 20th anniversary.
• He revealed behind-the-scenes secrets, like which famous scenes were improvised.
• McKay also addressed where he stands with his creative partner Will Ferrell after their public breakup.

Adam McKay remembers the moment he realized his 2006 comedy "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" would be a hit.

It was the movie's opening weekend in Los Angeles, and the director and his co-writer and star, Will Ferrell, were driving around the city sneaking into sold-out showings when they encountered comedy royalty in the audience.

"We're standing in the back, everyone was laughing, and we hear someone go, 'Hey!' We look over, and it's Adam Sandler sitting in the back with one of his kids on his lap, and he gives us a thumbs up," McKay told Business Insider.

"What other person at that level does that? Opening weekend in a packed theater. Zero competitiveness — truly happy for us. It's a moment from making that movie that I'll never forget."

"Talladega Nights" — which follows the cocky NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby (Ferrell), as he battles his demons and his ego after he's beaten by French driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen) — became a surprise hit at the box office, earning over $160 million worldwide. It also made a comedy star out of John C. Reilly, who paired so well with Ferrell that the two would team up again on McKay's next movie, 2008's "Step Brothers."

In the twenty years since its release, "Talladega Nights" has enjoyed a place in the pop-culture pantheon: Several of the movie's lines have become catchphrases, from "Shake and bake!" to "If you're not first, you're last," and NASCAR drivers have done their own homages to Ricky Bobby. Now, in honor of the movie's upcoming 20th anniversary, Sony is re-releasing "Talladega Nights" in theaters nationwide on June 28, June 30, and July 1.

Below, Business Insider chats with McKay about about the one thing NASCAR didn't want in the movie, allowing Sacha Baron Cohen in the edit room, and whether he thinks he'll ever work with his former creative partner Will Ferrell again.

On Ricky Bobby's origins and the one thing NASCAR didn't want in the movie

Business Insider: How did this all start? Is it accurate to say that the "Talladega Nights" idea didn't really take hold until Will Ferrell called you with the Ricky Bobby name and the character's voice?

Adam McKay: Well, yeah. Phase one is we come up with the world and the large idea. With "Talladega Nights," it was, let's go into the world of NASCAR. We kick around ideas, we come up with a pitch for the movie, and one of the key elements was the name, Ricky Bobby. Will started to do the voice, and we started to come up with the story. The idea that he had an absent dad who was only there long enough to give him a couple messed-up life lessons that he followed to a T — that became the pitch. 

Since the movie's release, the line "If you're not first, you're last" has become part of the American lexicon. How early in the game did you guys come up with that line?

That wasn't until we wrote the script. His origin story, the arc, the idea of the pit crew with some comedic actors, the idea of his wife and that McMansion race car culture, that was all from the beginning. But stuff like "If you're not first, you're last," that probably came out in the outline stage. I don't think we took that line into the pitch. 

Ferrell and I always worked well because we tended to get excited about the same things and neither one of us was precious if the other one felt really excited by something. I always say we never had one single creative argument working on any script we did together. The second the name Ricky Bobby was thrown out, we were like, that's it.

Same with "If you're not first, you're last." I remember we were laughing about that because it's a very American mentality. Now, did Ferrell and I know that that mentality would get bigger and bigger over the years? Absolutely not. But we were seeing it back then, and it felt ridiculous. 

How important was it to get NASCAR to buy in on what you and Will wanted to do?

NASCAR's buy-in was critical to the movie. The good news was our approach to the movie was always that the racing has to be kick-ass and real. We wanted it to look great. So it was nice that we had Oliver Wood as the DP — we have the guy who shot "The Bourne Identity"! Fortunately, the NASCAR people that we were dealing with totally got the fun of this movie. Even though we were in this period of flag-waving patriotism, they knew that we weren't looking to eviscerate the NASCAR community.

They only had one note on the entire script. Originally, the way that Ricky Bobby first got behind the wheel was he was on the pit crew and their driver had died behind the wheel during a race, but no one realized it. He was leaning on the wheel in such a way that the car was still going around the track, just at a slow speed.

NASCAR was like, "Don't do that, because one of the negative jokes about NASCAR is all the drivers have to do is just turn left the whole race." Honestly, we didn't think of it that way, but that was the only thing NASCAR wanted us to change.

Pretty quickly, we were like, let's just give the team a terrible driver, and he gets hungry in the middle of the race, and that led to giving me a role. [Laughs.] 

On realizing John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell were a match made in comedy heaven

John C. Reilly originally was going to play Champ Kind in "Anchorman," but left before filming started to go do Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator," right? 

That is correct. John had done a read-through for "Anchorman" and killed it. Then he called us and said, "I'm so sorry, I have to do this other movie." And we were like, "What's the other movie?" And he said, "Martin Scorsese is doing the Howard Hughes story." And Ferrell and I laughed and were like, "Ask him if there's a day part for us."

There were zero hard feelings. We already knew John was funny, but we saw him be big-time funny in that read-through. So from the start, we wanted him as Ricky Bobby's buddy for "Talladega Nights." Then, during the shooting, we realized he's a great improviser. 

Was there a moment while making "Talladega Nights" that you realized John and Will really worked well together? 

Without question, the prayer scene at Ricky Bobby's house. Because for that, we were improvising like crazy. 

How is a scene like that written on the page, and then how does it evolve with improv?

It's fully written. Like, the "baby Jesus" line was scripted. But my approach has always been, "We're here, I got the good take of the scripted version, we're good on time, what is the harm in trying stuff?" That started with "Anchorman." By the time we were doing "Talladega Nights," we had built time for improv into the schedule.

After we do the scripted takes, then I'll throw out some suggestions for lines from behind the camera. Oftentimes, Ferrell will take the suggestion, modify it a little bit, or sometimes just do it word for word, then that will get him going. And Reilly just did not miss a beat and fell right into it.

I knew he really fit the way we like to work when we did the single shots of the kids at the dinner table. We would just feed them lines, Ferrell and I. And the kids were great — we would have them say these crazy, mean things to the grandfather. Reilly just started throwing in lines for them, and I realized, this is a match made in heaven. At that point, I think Ferrell and I started saying, "We gotta do more with this guy." 

On letting Sacha Baron Cohen into the edit room and that kissing scene

Is it true that the first time you and Will met Sacha Baron Cohen was at Garry Shandling's house playing basketball?

That is true. There was this somewhat famous basketball game that would go on at Garry's house for years and years. It was just a fun game, and there were a lot of stand-up comics, comedic actors, friends. Sacha would show up, and I was like, how is this British-slash-Israeli guy playing basketball? And he wasn't bad. He had a nice turnaround jump shot, so we started calling him "Big Ben."

Sacha is a very charming guy when you hang out and talk to him. He was hot at that point with Ali G. We had seen the videos of him doing it in the UK. We had already come up with this French character, and we had seen Sacha do accents. So our manager was either representing or about to represent Sacha, and he suggested him for the role, and it felt right. But then it turned into this long game of he's in, no, he's out, no, he's in. It started driving us crazy, so finally we said, he's out, we have to go to someone else. And, of course, that's when Sacha was officially in.

He's certainly a guy who likes to improvise, but I think he was a little taken aback by how open we were. I remember when we did a very early screening, he was not happy with the way his stuff had been cut. And I told him, "Sacha, it's an early cut, it's only going to get better."

But he's very obsessive, and he kept texting me about it. So I said, "I'll tell you what, come by the edit room, I'll give you one of our assistant editors, you can go through every daily and find every joke you think should have been in the cut." But I told him the one thing is, if I really don't like a joke, I truly think it's bad, I won't use it.

So he came in for two whole days, and he came back with 16 new jokes. In the end, we ended up finding six really good, funny moments, and I put them in the movie. He couldn't believe I did that. 

You did impressive action in-camera for "Anchorman," but you really leveled up with "Talladega Nights." Did making sure the racing looked good keep you up at night?

The truth is, it was really fun. We storyboarded and had incredible stunt people. The only thing I did learn was for the big crash scene at the end of the movie, the key stuntman banged his helmet and was dazed; he got a low-grade concussion. After seeing the footage and finding out about the guy, I asked if he was taken to the hospital. They were like, "Hell no, he's at the bar celebrating." 

We shot during live races. Those crowds you see are at a real race at the Charlotte Speedway. So whenever there was a caution flag and the race was stopped, NASCAR gave us a spot in the pits, so we would all rush on the track, and those are the actors improvising during a live race. That's, to this day, one of the craziest filmmaking experiences I've ever had. 

Did Will and Sacha kiss in front of the crowd?

The kiss was improvised. Sacha came to me and said, "We have to kiss, right?" And I was like, "You know, two guys kissing, we like silly comedy, but is it a little hacky?" And he said, "But, I'm a gay French experimental artist and Ricky Bobby is American South," and I said, "You know what? Let's shoot it." So we were on the track, but that was not a live crowd there when we did it. The kiss wasn't scripted, but when we put it in the cut, I knew it hit perfectly.

I believe there were some walkouts in theaters because of that shot, and maybe there were some NASCAR folks who weren't happy with that, but overall, NASCAR has totally embraced the movie. I know the drivers love the movie. I think a driver wrapped his car with the cougar head. And once there was a wreck, and the driver started running to the finish line. 

On what happened with a 'Talladega Nights' sequel, and if he'll ever work with Will Ferrell again

One of the joys of looking back on this movie is also indulging in the "25th anniversary" commentary track you and Will did. It's like listening to a comedy album. How did you two decide to do a commentary track without ever talking about the movie?

Young people probably don't know how big commentary tracks were back then. They were awesome. I remember the one for "Three Kings" and it was super fascinating. It was your favorite directors talking about what they did.

But we knew with us, if you're a cinephile, you're not going to listen to the commentary track to our movies. So from "Anchorman" on, Ferrell and I said, let's just play it for comedy. So, going in, we decided we are going to do the whole thing like it's 25 years after we made the movie. We improvised it all.

Did you ever seriously consider doing a sequel?

Yes. But not as seriously as "Step Brothers." For "Step Brothers," we had a whole treatment written and worked out.

We did have an idea for "Talladega Nights." It was that Ricky Bobby was going to hook up with an F1 team, and he was going to race in Denmark or the Netherlands and feel like he's in a communist country because they have nationalized healthcare. So, along with struggling with how fast those F1 cars go, he would have clashed with far-left-leaning Europe compared to America.

The only reason we didn't do it was it's a lot of work to shoot race car stuff. The reason we went and did "Step Brothers" next was we felt like, can we just go do comedy in a house? We were tired after "Talladega Nights." It never got to the point where we wrote a treatment. Whereas with the "Step Brothers" sequel, we were almost going to do it. 

Your creative breakup with Will Ferrell was well-publicized. Do you think you'll ever work with him again?

I totally have been open to the idea. We always got along great, we were tremendous creative partners. The only thing that caused acrimony between us was when we decided to end our production company, Gary Sanchez. And I know it was reported one way or the other, but that was really it.

It's a shame because we had a great creative partnership. I think both of us underestimated the complications that go with not just having a company, but a very successful company. We had it for a long time and did a lot of cool projects. And Ferrell said it publicly, he was never someone who wanted to produce, so he was always half in and half out, but then he would love it and be proud of the company, but by the end, he wanted to move on. It had become too much extra work; it was never his passion. I was really the one who wanted to produce, but a movie star's life is very different than a writer-director's life. So we split up.

But life goes on. We had a great run. I certainly have no hard feelings and, who knows, we'll see what happens. 

[Ed note: Ferrell did not respond to a request for comment.]

You've got five years until the real 25th anniversary of "Talladega Nights." Imagine if you two got in a room for a real commentary track.

[Laughs.] Or we have five years until Brennan or Dale from "Step Brothers" becomes president. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Sony will re-release "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" in theaters nationwide on June 28, June 30, and July 1.

• NATO forces are increasingly acquiring naval drones after seeing Ukraine use them successfully against Russia.
• But a Ukrainian commander said the way that these countries are developing them makes him uneasy.
• The commander attributed Ukraine's successful products to its extensive combat experience.

UKRAINE — NATO militaries are increasingly developing new naval drone fleets after observing their success in Ukraine, a commander in Kyiv's military intelligence agency told Business Insider, but some of their designs have left him feeling "uneasy."

Ukraine has used naval drones to devastate Russia's Black Sea Fleet, damaging and destroying its warships and forcing Moscow to relocate the bulk of operations from the occupied Crimean peninsula to the other side of the region.

NATO countries have been closely watching this asymmetrical campaign waged by Ukraine and have set out to equip their forces with naval drones that could deliver similar effects in combat alongside traditional warships.

"There is, of course, a common NATO security doctrine," said Ninth, a commander with Ukraine's GUR intelligence agency who oversees a naval drone unit. He asked to be identified by his call sign for security reasons.

"What gives me satisfaction," he said in a recent interview, "is seeing other countries adopting elements of Ukraine's experience and practical lessons learned in combat."

"Many are now revising their doctrines to recognize the necessity of equipping their fleets" with naval drones, he said. "However, as someone who works directly with these systems in combat, I often find myself uneasy when I learn about the technical requirements some countries are issuing to their shipbuilders and defense companies."

Ukrainian naval drones have years of operational experience built into them, and their designs are constantly modified to reflect the changing security situation in the Black Sea.

At the start of Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukrainian naval drones were built to speed into a target and explode on impact. Now, they're armed with machine guns, surface-to-air missiles, and other weapons, making them more dynamic platforms.

NATO naval drones aren't built on the same kind of combat experiences. European nations have used them for maritime security patrols. The US Navy has often done the same, using them for surveillance purposes in the Middle East, though earlier this month, one carried out a first-of-its-kind rescue mission after Iran shot down an American helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz.

NATO has been incorporating naval drones into maritime exercises, but complex combat operations are very different.

Ninth declined to specify exactly where NATO's naval drones were lacking, though he said the issues primarily concern the design, system behavior, and electronics, among other attributes.

"Many European shipyards tasked with developing these systems simply lack this experience," the GUR commander said. "They respond to the specifications provided by NATO countries, but they do not fully understand the realities of combat conditions because they have never encountered them firsthand."

NATO doesn't face the same wartime pressures that Kyiv does; however, Ukrainian officials and conflict experts have routinely said that the Western military alliance needs to more urgently prepare for a modern battlefield.

They are not warships, but designing a naval drone is a challenge. Ninth said that they must be able to operate in rough sea states, meaning they need the correct weight distributions and structural calculations. And hull construction and materials aren't the only considerations.

Ninth said a naval drone's "true value" is in its electronics; vessels must be able to communicate. If operators lose their signal, the boats need to feature some autonomous functions, such as the ability to cruise on autopilot, use artificial intelligence to avoid obstacles, and make decisions independently about target selection.

The GUR commander attributed Ukraine's naval drone prowess to the combat experience it has accumulated over the years, striking Russian warships and ports across the Black Sea.

"We should never forget that one working day for our engineers and programmers equals roughly 10 working days for specialists in countries that are not at war," Ninth said. "When we make changes, we do not validate them hypothetically. We validate them in combat. Within hours."

Armed conflict doesn't adhere to typical office schedules; rather, it is a round-the-clock affair, Ninth said. "We understand the enemy's tactics and constantly adapt our own methods accordingly," he added. "Whenever we identify a weakness, we immediately mobilize to eliminate it."

"That," he said, "is the pace at which wartime innovation takes place."

• Europe is in the midst of a heat wave, sparking an age-old question from US posters on social media.
• The question: Why is air conditioning so much less common in Europe than in the US?
• Europe's architecture and high energy costs limit the widespread adoption of AC.

Europe is really, really hot right now.

Across much of the continent, temperatures have surged to levels once considered exceptional. France recently saw its hottest day since records began, with highs of 108 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the country.

The UK and Spain have also experienced their hottest June days on record. Open a weather map of Europe, and vast swaths of the continent glow deep red, as though a fiery inferno is burning the continent alive.

While temperatures in Europe are not dramatically different from those experienced in many parts of the United States, Australia, or Asia, there is one crucial difference: relief from the heat is far harder to find.

According to the International Energy Agency, only around 20% of European households have air conditioning, compared with roughly 90% in the United States and Japan. During a heat wave, millions of Europeans simply endure the heat rather than relax in the blissful, artificial chill.

For many Americans, this is almost impossible to understand. If you've been on social media in recent days, you'll likely have seen endless posts from US users about Europe's lack of AC.

Patrick Collison, CEO of payments firm Stripe, garnered 19 million views and thousands of comments on X when he shared a screenshot of Claude's response to his question about why air conditioning is scarcer in Europe.

Even the world's richest man, Elon Musk, weighed in, calling Collison's post a "banger" before describing Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who insisted on installing air conditioning in the country's public-sector offices, as a "genius."

While many on social media can't get their heads around the relative lack of AC in Europe, some argued that Europeans are just being stubborn.

In reality, the reasons behind this aversion lie in a combination of economics, architecture, history, and perhaps a little stubbornness.

A changing climate

Until recently, much of Europe did not need air conditioning. In large parts of northern Europe, summer was largely confined to July and August, with average temperatures below 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Buildings were designed to retain heat through long winters rather than shed it during heatwaves.

The climate is changing rapidly. Last year, the World Meteorological Organization found that Europe is now warming at more than twice the global average, making extreme summer temperatures increasingly routine rather than exceptional.

Adoption of air conditioning continues to lag

Part of the reason for this is cost. According to Bruegel, a European think tank, average EU industrial electricity prices were roughly 2.5 times higher than in the US in 2024.

Running an air conditioning unit through a prolonged heat wave can add a noticeable amount to a household's energy bill. For many families, suffering through a few weeks of discomfort has historically seemed more rational than investing thousands of euros in a cooling system that might only be needed occasionally.

Retrofitting is another obstacle

US suburbs were largely built during the era of widespread air conditioning, meaning central AC systems could be incorporated into homes from the start. Europe's housing stock is much older, and millions of people live in homes that were built before AC existed.

Installing modern cooling systems often requires expensive renovations, landlord approval, or compliance with historic preservation rules that restrict building modifications.

Then there is culture

In much of Europe, air conditioning has often been viewed as unnecessary and wasteful. In France, the debate centers on the belief that widespread adoption of air conditioning would only worsen the climate crisis that is causing these heatwaves in the first place.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing political party La France Insoumise, said last Friday, "We must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere; that would only make things worse." An IPSOS poll found that 78% of French respondents considered AC to be 'environmentally unfriendly'.

While Americans tend to treat climate control as an unquestioned feature of modern life, Europeans have traditionally viewed it as something hotels, office buildings, and tourists use.

Whether that attitude survives another decade of record-breaking summers remains to be seen.

The American mind may not be able to comprehend Europe's aversion to AC, but Europe seems to be discovering that the climate that made that aversion possible is disappearing.

• Hormones like cortisol and testosterone are having a moment, as people try to optimize their health.
• Dr. Saira Hameed, an endocrinologist, said simple healthy habits support hormone health.
• Her advice includes trying to wake up at the same time each day and eating enough fiber.

Dr. Saira Hameed, an endocrinologist who's been in the game for 20 years, has been getting more questions about hormones than usual.

"Hormones are having a bit of a moment right now," Hameed told the Intelligence Squared podcast on June 10. "Some hormones have become like rock stars: cortisol, testosterone, GLP-1."

But with their raised profile has come a lot of misinformation, Hameed said.

The body produces hormones, which are secreted into the bloodstream by endocrine glands, such as the thyroid and pancreas, as well as tissues. They tell our cells, tissues, and organs when to stop or start certain processes. Hameed said that we have around 50, but scientists will likely discover more in the future.

"Hormones control really every aspect of day-to-day life, from your energy to your stress to your sex drive to your thirst to how hungry you feel," Hameed said.

Asked what would constitute an endocrinologist-approved lifestyle by the interviewer Dr. Güneş Taylor, Hameed said you don't need to do anything fancy to have a functioning endocrine system.

"There's nothing here that, I don't know, would get you clicks or get you followers or whatever," Hameed said.

She shared a checklist of habits that included managing stress as much as possible, getting enough sleep, and "trying to wake up roughly the same time every day." Hameed recommended doing some form of movement and spending some time outside daily.

She also advised eating enough protein and fiber, as well as doing "a little bit of intermittent fasting if you can."

Her advice chimes with the general consensus among health experts of all fields that prioritizing basic healthy habits is the best starting point for protecting our health.

"It's kind of like the age old wisdom," Hameed said.

• Kospi surges over 5% as Samsung and SK Hynix lead another sharp rally in chip stocks.
• SK Hynix jumped to close 13% higher amid $29.4 billion US listing plans.
• Optimism from Korea helped pull US futures higher, with the Nasdaq set to climb 2% at the open.

South Korea's benchmark Kospi index surged over 5% in on Thursday, extending a global tech stock rebound after a sell-off rattled markets around the world earlier this week.

The rally was led by heavyweight chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, as investors returned to battered semiconductor stocks after two days of volatility.

Samsung Electronics shares closed 5.3% higher, while SK Hynix ended 13% up. The gains came after SK Hynix filed for a blockbuster Nasdaq listing that could raise as much as 45.45 trillion won, or $29.4 billion.

Optimism from the Kospi spread to US premarket trading, with futures for the tech-focused Nasdaq index pointing to a more than 2% gain at the open.

Sentiment was buoyed after memory-chip maker Micron topped Wall Street's revenue estimates and issued upbeat guidance, reinforcing optimism about AI-related demand. Micron's stock jumped 16% in premarket trading, pulling other chipmakers higher. Qualcomm's stock was 10% higher in premarket, while AMD was up 4%.

Other markets in Asia were broadly higher as well, with Japan's Nikkei closing 4.6% higher and China's CSI 300 gaining nearly 2%. European indexes were also up in morning trade, though gains were more muted.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index fell to a one-year low after Anthropic accused Chinese tech giant Alibaba of exploiting its advanced AI models.

Thursday's gains in the Kospi followed a 3.3% rebound on Wednesday, after the benchmark recovered from Tuesday's nearly 10% plunge, its steepest one-day decline in months.

The sell-off earlier this week spilled into global markets, dragging down US semiconductor stocks as investors questioned lofty valuations across the AI trade and rotated into more defensive sectors.

South Korea has been one of the world's best-performing stock markets this year, fueled by a surge in semiconductor and AI-related shares. The strong rally has left the market more susceptible to sharp pullbacks.

Despite the violent swings, analysts remain constructive on long-term AI-related chip demand, viewing the recent volatility as a correction after an extraordinary rally rather than the end of the sector's run.

The pullback earlier this week "seems more like a cooldown phase during a bull run than a genuine downturn," according to a Wednesday note from KB Securities analyst Euntaek Lee.

Still, Lee warned that volatility could persist as the market remains vulnerable to further corrections after its extended rally. He said current conditions do not point to a bubble.

• Sazabi raised $8 million to expand its AI observability platform for engineering teams.
• CEO Sherwood Callaway said the platform uses one key data point teams need: logs.
• Sazabi's seed round was led by J2 Ventures, Village Global, and Y Combinator.

Sazabi has raised $8 million to expand its AI observability platform.

The San Francisco-based startup says its monitoring, debugging, and incident response platform is designed for fast-moving engineering teams at startups using AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code.

Founder and CEO Sherwood Callaway, a former Brex engineer, said he noticed that existing platforms were overwhelming software engineers with unnecessary dashboards and datasets. He realized the only thing that was really necessary was log data — a digital back box that keeps a time-stamped record of actions and errors within an application.

"Whenever there was a problem in production, I would reach for a log stream," said Callaway, a second-time founder "So it first occurred to me that was interesting, that this is the sort of type of data that felt most intuitive to me."

The startup was part of Y Combinator's spring 2026 batch and came out of stealth in mid-March. Its $8 million seed round was led by J2 Ventures, Village Global, and Y Combinator, with participation from over 60 angel investors who work at companies like Cursor, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Replit.

The company competes with legacy observability platforms like Datadog and Grafana.

"We sometimes joke internally that the company is called Operation Waterloo," Callaway said. "This is because Datadog is a French company, and so we want to beat Datadog. That's our core mission."

The platform's pricing starts with a free tier, followed by a credit-based system that depends on the amount of tokens Sazabi is using and the amount of logs a customer sends.

The company plans to use the cash to support its team of eight employees and grow its engineering and go-to-market operations. It has paying customers as part of a closed alpha round and plans to launch to the public this summer.

"We have a clear and unique product vision, but we don't have the luxury of time," Callaway said. "We need to deploy capital and execute on it as quickly as possible."

Check out the pitch deck Sazabi used to secure the fresh funding:

• The president and CEO of the Livestrong Foundation emphasizes improving your quality of life.
• She follows a few daily habits to stay healthy, which she hopes will reduce her cancer risk.
• Stone flosses a few times a day and puts her phone away at night for better quality sleep.

Suzanne Stone spends her days thinking about cancer — not just the disease itself, but what happens after a diagnosis.

As president and CEO of the Livestrong Foundation, she is constantly speaking with patients grappling with existential questions: "How do I tell my family? Can I go back to work? What is my insurance going to cover?"

The experience has shape how Stone thinks about her own health. At 56, Stone gets annual mammograms and examines her family history to understand her risk of colon, breast, and lung cancer.

She also follows some daily habits that, based on the latest research, she hopes will help reduce her cancer risk and improve her overall health.

Staying on top of her dental health

Stone takes her dental health seriously — flossing twice a day and using alcohol-free mouthwashes.

"It's just another way to make sure that every system is working as best it can," Stone said.

While there's no proof that flossing reduces cancer risk, one 2026 report found a link between poor oral hygiene and elevated risks of developing various cancers. Some researchers believe that chronic inflammation, changes in the oral microbiome, and immune dysregulation may help explain this link.

She follows a mostly vegetarian diet

Stone, who's been a vegetarian for about 15 years, tries to limit ultraprocessed foods, which are linked to higher risks of developing cancer. Including more plants and fiber in your diet is also linked to lower cancer risk.

"If you looked in my refrigerator right now, you would open it and see it's almost empty," she said. Part of that is because she travels a lot. But even when she's home, she does it deliberately so she can always opt for the freshest produce.

Stone often buys fresh vegetables, nuts, hummus, baked potatoes, and salads. She usually makes her own salad dressing, with oil and vinegar, but if she has a salad kit, she only uses about half of the dressing if it's cream-based.

"I just don't drown my salad in dressing," she said, which can contain additives when store-bought.

She also tries to listen to her body and eat based on how hungry she really is and what she's really craving — whether yogurt or chocolate — to avoid preemptively stocking up on and overeating processed snacks. "I find that when I give it what it's asking for, it feels great," she said.

Strength training and cardio keep her in shape

Regular exercise is linked to greater longevity, including a reduction in cancer risk.

It can also improve your quality of life if you do get diagnosed. One 2025 study led by the American Cancer Society found that engaging in regular moderate-to-vigorous physical activity increased patients' survival rates for various cancers.

Stone works out three or four times a week, opting for a blend of cardio, balance, and strength workouts, the latter of which also supports healthy aging post-menopause, when women start to lose muscle mass. She varies her activities, from 30-minute brisk walks and swims to Barre classes and paddleboarding.

She also listens to her body and doesn't overexert herself so that she can stay consistent. "At 56, I can't do the same workouts I was doing at 26 or even 46," such as the sprint triathlons she did a decade ago.

Putting her phone on 'do not disturb' at night

Quality sleep is another common longevity hack.

To improve her sleep hygiene, she sets her iPhone to "Do Not Disturb" from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. every day. While she still uses her phone as an alarm, she said the setting helps her remember to stay off it. She also usually turns off the TV around 9 p.m. and tries to read in bed instead.

The routine has helped her avoid reaching for her phone when she wakes up in the middle of the night. Instead, she sometimes finds that she rises before her alarm.

"That's my favorite thing, when my body wakes up because I'm rested," she said. To her, all these habits — sleep, exercise, diet, dental health — compound over time. "All of it is really one big package that I have to be really focused on to make sure that I'm staying healthy," she said.

• AI's social scene is shifting from big conferences to intimate, curated events.
• "Taste" has become tech's buzziest word, with curation now seen as key to AI founders' status.
• New events mimic nightclub launches with grainy photos and exclusive RSVPs.

If "taste" is the buzzword in the AI world right now, then IRL events have become the best way to demonstrate it.

As AI becomes more competitive and taste — the idea of having superior aesthetic judgment — emerges as a key differentiator, AI companies and young founders are hosting intimate, curated gatherings — often dinner parties — to cultivate cool and build real-world communities.

Many of these curated events follow a similar blueprint: a promo that looks like an A24 film poster and grainy, film-like photos that make it feel more like a 90s-era house party than a tech founders' event.

"I think trusted (human) curation is so important now, even more than ever," said Michelle Fang, who leads Stripe Startups, a program offering financial support and resources to early-stage, venture-backed companies, and has a weekly newsletter that rounds up in-person tech events in San Francisco.

Fang said that when she first started the newsletter in 2023, she posted an average of 20 to 30 in-person events a week. That number has now risen to 70 to 80 a week.

"There's been a noticeable shift in both the frequency and types of events happening in SF, especially over the past year," she said.

AI has accelerated this trend dramatically, she said, as the AI boom brings an influx of talent who want to establish their community in the city.

While some of the events Fang has listed are traditional building workshops and hackathons, others include Pilates classes, peptide tasting parties — the latest self-optimization craze — and "intentionally curated" dinners.

It's a vibe shift from the large happy hours and networking events that defined post-pandemic tech socializing, said Fang. These smaller events don't require a big budget or venue, and with the speed of AI growth, people want to make sense of new concepts and the changes happening in real time, she said.

'Taste is a new core skill'

The taste conversation kicked off earlier this year when Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham wrote in a post on X that, as AI democratizes building, "taste will become even more important."

Two days later, OpenAI President Greg Brockman cemented the catchphrase on X, writing that "Taste is a new core skill." Since then, it's led the tech world to hyperfocus on AI companies and founders who are winning the taste battle.

Alongside the taste discourse, being offline has become a status symbol. Having the ability to de-digitalize is seen as a luxury and a way to connect with people more authentically, with in-person events being a means to achieve this, especially for those whose working lives already revolve around AI.

An event "only for hot people and nerds" in Bangalore, which appeared to be in collaboration with the early-stage Bangalore-based consumer tech company Faff, made the rounds on X earlier this month. The vibe is artfully arranged cheese boards, trendy cocktail menus (with AI puns), and grainy photos.

Ami Yoshimura, the 23-year-old cofounder of Verci, a members club and coworking space in New York, hosts events such as rooftop parties and multi-day retreats for founders and creatives. "Relationships, aesthetics, and telling a story" have become crucial ways to stand out in the hyper-competitive AI industry, he said.

Small parties, big bucks

It's not just San Francisco that is seeing this event boom.

Katia Ameri, a partner at A16z who spearheads Tech Week in San Francisco, LA, and New York City, wrote on X last month that New York was so far the largest Tech Week in history by events and attendees. The LA and San Francisco equivalents are coming up later this year.

Eliza Wu, cofounder of Corner, a social mapping app that describes itself as "Google but social," wrote in a post on X that there were over 600 RSVPs for a panel she was hosting at New York Tech Week.

Leading AI companies are also taking note. In April, Anthropic posted a brand events lead role in San Francisco, with a salary of up to $400,000.

There are four open marketing events positions at Anthropic, while OpenAI has two open positions for events, commanding over $200,000 salaries with options to gain equity too.

Andrew Yeung, an ex-Google and Meta product lead turned event host and angel investor, wrote on X in response to the job advert that it shows Anthropic understands that "they need to create visceral, unforgettable IRL experiences that make complex technology feel accessible and human."

"The massive opportunity now is offline, analog, in-person," he said.

But while the taste that goes into hosting a party is human, we are living in an AI world — and as with your job applications, an AI screener might still be standing between you and an invitation.

Wu, the cofounder who hosted a New York Tech Week event with 600 RSVPs, said she turned to Claude to winnow down her guest list.

She said she prompted the chatbot to scan through potential attendees' social posts to identify "markers of excellence" and to suss out the "quality of their thoughts."

With the help of Claude, only 300 people made the cut.

• Wendy's stock went on a tear after an online campaign to "save" the struggling restaurant chain.
• Conditions were ripe for a short squeeze reminiscent of the great GameStop saga of 2021.
• Detailed below are the factors that led to Wendy's biggest share spike since the COVID era.

"We need to save Wendy's."

It was the rallying cry that rang out across the internet — specifically Reddit — on Wednesday.

The movement gathered steam quickly. Wendy's shot to the top of the trending page for Stocktwits. It also was the top-mentioned stock on WallStreetBets, according to data from SwaggyStocks, handily overtaking Micron (ahead of earnings) and newly IPOed SpaceX. The volume of shares that changed hands — more than 200 million — was 23 times the average, with trading halted at one point.

As the movement gathered steam, Wendy's stock followed suit, spiking on the attention and fervid buying. Shares climbed as much as 42% before finishing the day up 26%. It was the biggest increase since the peak COVID era of March 2020.

With that, a new meme stock was minted. Welcome to the club, Wendy's.

But let's take a step back. How does this keep happening? The market is wise to the meme-stock effect, yet new ones continue to pop up.

Wendy's benefited from a familiar cocktail of factors:

The stock has been struggling

Don't let Wednesday's rally fool you. Even including that, Wendy's shares are still down 70% over the past three years. An inflation-driven consumer pullback has hit the company, which has closed thousands of restaurants.

Short interest is elevated

When a stock has been in a prolonged descent, without much sign of life, short-sellers tend to swirl. That was the case with Wendy's. Short interest in the stock has climbed from about 7 million shares three years ago to more than 50 million now, according to Bloomberg data.

When short interest is high, conditions are ripe for a squeeze. That happens when short-sellers are forced to close positions as a stock rises, pushing shares even higher.

People crave nostalgia

"We need to save Wendy's" really says it all. The retail traders who backed the company were entering an unofficial club — one that fondly remembers Wendy's more dominant days, when their junior bacon cheeseburgers and spicy chicken sandwiches were in hotter demand.

Nothing says meme stock like a formerly beloved brand that looks past its prime.

There's been recent news

Retail traders love to piggyback off seemingly innocuous corporate announcements and use them as a reason to buy. In the case of Wendy's, on Tuesday the company appointed a new CFO and chief strategy officer, who formerly held the same positions at Potbelly.

Wall Street isn't particularly excited by the appointment or the company overall. A majority of analysts still have a "hold" rating on the stock.

But that hasn't deterred the retail community. After all, when have institutional views held them back before?

• While shopping with my mom, I found what I thought was a great outfit that looked good on me.
• My mom felt differently, and her comment has stuck with me for years.
• Now I'm a parent, and that memory has shaped how I speak to my own kids.

I'm 42, and I can still hear my mother's voice. "Isn't that skirt a little tight?" she said to me.

More than two decades have passed, but those six words remain lodged in my memory. I can still picture exactly where I was standing when she said them. The moment stands out in my memory like a photograph. Everything else from that day has faded around the edges, but that exchange remains sharp and unmistakable. I don't remember what I ate that day, what music was playing in the car, or much of the rest of the afternoon. What I remember is how quickly my excitement disappeared and how those words became the lens through which I saw myself.

More than 20 years later, that moment still lingers, not because of what was said, but because of what it taught me about the power of a mother's words.

My memory is clear

I was 16 years old, and it was the Saturday before Easter. Like many teenage girls, I was painfully aware of my body. I scrutinized every perceived flaw in the mirror and compared myself to everyone around me. Confidence felt elusive, and most days I walked through the world convinced I didn't quite measure up.

But that day was different.

After hours of searching at the mall, I found the perfect Easter outfit. The sleeveless lavender top with its boat neckline felt sophisticated and grown-up. It paired so nicely with a plaid skirt in soft shades of blue and purple — the kind that seemed to be in every store in the early 2000s. For the first time in a long while, I felt pretty. More importantly, I felt comfortable in my own skin.

I couldn't wait to show my mom. I remember carrying my shopping bags through the front door, eager for her reaction. I hurried to my room, changed into the outfit, and walked back out, beaming with pride. Standing in front of her, I waited for her to notice how happy I looked. Instead, she glanced at me and asked, "Isn't that skirt a little tight?'"

That was it. No, "You look nice." No, "I can tell you love it." No acknowledgment of how excited I was. Just one question that immediately shifted my attention from how I felt to how I looked.

That day shaped me

Over the years, I've realized that childhood isn't made up only of big moments. It's built from thousands of small interactions that quietly shape how we see ourselves. Parents rarely realize which words will stick and which will fade away. A passing remark, spoken without much thought, can become part of a child's inner voice for decades.

I don't believe my mother intended to hurt me. In fact, I doubt she gave the comment much thought at all. Becoming a parent has taught me just how easily an offhand remark can slip into an otherwise ordinary moment. Parenting is a constant balancing act of responsibilities, distractions, and worries. We are often answering questions, solving problems, and thinking three steps ahead. In the midst of it all, we don't always stop to consider how our words might land. Yet what feels insignificant to us can leave a lasting impression on a child.

Children are listening when we think they aren't. They are assigning meaning to our words. They are deciding who they are based, in part, on what they hear from us.

I'm trying to be aware of my words

As a mother of six, I now find myself pausing in moments that once would have passed unnoticed. I know firsthand how easily a single comment can outlive the day it was spoken.

When one of my children proudly shows me a drawing, a new haircut, or an outfit they picked out themselves, I try to notice their excitement before anything else. Even when I have concerns or suggestions, I remind myself that there may be a better time to share them. The moment they are standing in front of me, looking for connection and affirmation, may not be that time.

I often think about that teenage girl standing in her dream Easter outfit, hoping her mother would see what she saw. What she needed wasn't fashion advice. She needed to feel seen.

If there's one lesson that moment taught me, it's that our words have a remarkable ability to become someone else's inner voice. As parents, we may never know which comments our children will carry into adulthood. Long after they forget what we bought them, where we took them, or what we accomplished for them, they will still remember how we made them feel. I still do.

• A teenager who starred in a hit Netflix show was diagnosed with breast cancer in college.
• A side effect of her treatment was early menopause, and she shared the same symptoms as her mom.
• She's cancer-free but still managing the side effects, like brain fog and hot flashes, five years later.

Miranda McKeon had just finished her first year of college and was home for summer vacation when she first noticed something was wrong.

"I felt a lump on my right breast, which was definitely not there before. That immediately put a pit in my stomach," she told Business Insider.

It was her only symptom. She otherwise felt fine, eager to move ahead with plans to major in communications and build on her early acting career, which included a role in the hit Netflix show "Anne with an E."

To be safe, McKeon booked the earliest available doctor's appointment, about a week later. Tests came back positive for breast cancer: stage three, hormone positive, invasive ductal carcinoma.

It's the most common type of breast cancer, but it's typically diagnosed in women who are 55 or older.

"None of the doctors I was being treated by had ever seen anyone come in at my age. My diagnosis was literally one in a million," McKeon said.

That was in 2021. Five years later, McKeon is dealing with the lingering effects of the diagnosis, including early menopause as a result of her treatment.

She's 24, about half the age when menopause symptoms typically start, and commiserating over hot flashes and night sweats with her mom.

"I think it's so surreal in all of the ways no one in their life ever expects to be in that position," she said.

She also faces a tough decision: whether to keep taking the hormone-suppressing drugs for up to five more years to reduce the risk of cancer, and how to manage menopause symptoms while grappling with her future as a young adult.

Chemo in college

After her diagnosis, McKeon had to make quick decisions about her future.

While her peers were stressing about exams, campus parties, and dates, she faced major treatments: an expensive IVF procedure to preserve her ability to have children, then multiple rounds of chemotherapy, surgeries, and radiation.

Rather than postponing her studies at the University of Southern California, she worked to stay on track by taking a slightly lighter courseload during treatment.

The symptoms, difficult for any patient, were particularly agonizing for a college student. McKeon said losing her hair felt like a nightmare, and she struggled to justify resting and taking care of herself while watching her peers' busy social schedules.

"I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with my life, and all of those uncertainties — feeling like an adult, but not quite yet feeling like an adult — are mirrored and amplified by this medical setting," she said.

Managing menopause symptoms as a 20-something

Like many young cancer patients, McKeon also struggled to cope with care and community support designed for much older people. Most of the patients around her were in their 30s at the earliest.

Then she found an unlikely peer: her mother.

As part of her treatment, McKeon underwent medically induced menopause that triggered her estrogen levels to drop dramatically, part of the strategy to fight cancer cells fueled by the hormone.

As a result, she started feeling hot flashes, brain fog, insomnia, and night sweats.

At the same time, her mom, Jill, was experiencing the same symptoms.

McKeon said it was a double-edged sword. While the pair share a close bond, not even camaraderie could change the fact that it felt so unnatural at her age.

For instance, McKeon would complain about having a hot flash, and her mom would chime in to say she was having one, too.

"There's nothing more humbling," she said. "I was like, 'Mom, enough. I don't want to relate to you going through this.' I think she's also a little bit heartbroken that I'm going through the same thing as her."

Finding meaning as a cancer survivor

McKeon said she's still working to make sense of her cancer journey and the lingering health effects, but she's found comfort in helping others and sharing on social media. Originally from New Jersey, she's now based in New York City, working on projects like her women's health podcast Pink 365, which discusses issues such as fertility, hormones, cancer, and more.

She said she receives messages multiple times a day from people all around the world wanting her advice on different types of cancer.

McKeon does her best to help without becoming a personal hotline, and said her priority now is finding ways to use her platform for the greater good, partnering with organizations like women's health startup BeSound, which offers ultrasound screening for breast cancer.

At the same time, she doesn't want to erase the painful parts of her experience, the sense of losing a piece of herself, a version of her future uninterupted by cancer.

"Sometimes the easiest way to move through things is to just sit in it for a little bit and let it really feel awful instead of trying to make the best of it," McKeon said. "Sometimes you just have to allow yourself to grieve, as uncomfortable as that is."

• Two leaders on JPMorgan's $1.5 trillion security initiative share why the work is uniquely challenging.
• Transactions often involve more stakeholders and complex structures than traditional banking deals.
• In some instances, the lean team is looking for "unicorn talent."

Vasudha Saxena is the woman running the "engine room" of what she described as a "startup like none other." The startup she's referring to actually sits within the walls of the nation's biggest bank.

Saxena is responsible for the strategy behind one of JPMorgan's biggest bets: a decadelong plan to direct $1.5 trillion toward industries viewed as strategically important to the US, from defense and critical minerals to artificial intelligence and energy infrastructure.

Since the bank launched the Security and Resiliency Initiative in October, Saxena told Business Insider the work is harder than most dealmaking — and some of the most challenging work she's done in her 25-year career.

The group's mandate is to execute deals that fulfill the lofty goal of strengthening the country's security, which often means navigating labyrinthine supply chains or persistent labor shortages. On top of that, they're coordinating between the government and private industries.

Eight months in, SRI has only grown its ambitions and announced last week that it's bringing its efforts to Canada, after expanding to Europe in April. The team is still hiring months after Jamie Dimon put out the initial broad call for talent, but anyone who applies has their work cut out for them.

Globally, it has financed at least $150 billion and invested more than $2 billion in equity so far. Through the team, for example, JPMorgan served as a financial advisor to Dominion Energy on its $125 billion merger with NextEra Energy, and as an administrative agent and joint lead arranger for energy startup VoltaGrid for a $3 billion facility, according to its website.

Uniquely complicated deals

After JPMorgan led a public-private partnership in July between MP Materials, a rare-earth mining company, and the US military department, executives asked Saxena, then the head of strategy for global banking, to join discussions about where they might execute similar deals.

Those conversations gave shape to SRI, which has built a skilled team to tackle its unique mandate.

Traditional investment banking deals include two parties: the buyer and seller. SRI transactions almost always include at least three parties, and often closer to five or eight — there could be the company, the government, and private sector players.

"They have a lot more complexity," Saxena said. Many projects require bespoke financial structures to make them commercially viable, including off-take agreements, where future customers commit to certain purchases down the line.

Mark Marengo supports SRI's aerospace and defense coverage and has advised multiple companies on their deals with the Department of War, and said this administration is taking a "more proactive" approach to public-private partnerships.

"That is just very different than what we've seen in the past," Marengo, who has worked at JPMorgan for more than 30 years, said of how complicated some of the deals are.

While mission-driven, the new team is still a commercially minded, for-profit effort — it is, after all, part of the nation's biggest bank.

"The idea of SRI is not to make bad loans or make bad investments. It is meant to meet our commercial returns," Marengo said, adding that public-private partnerships where the client, government, and JPMorgan are all willing to extend themselves more than they would ordinarily have largely been successful in reaching that goal.

Saxena said it's important that the group's deals trade well, since commercial success will draw more interest and capital.

'Unicorn talent'

When JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced the initiative, he called on anyone interested in joining the team to "just give us a call."

The phone, so to speak, has been ringing.

Saxena said there's been a surge of interest and that they've hired industry experts with backgrounds in banking, government, and consulting. A few have experience related to the CHIPS Act, a 2022 law aimed at boosting semiconductor manufacturing. Having people with diverse expertise is helpful, Marengo said, when industry-specific questions come up in client conversations.

By June, just over 25 people worked on SRI, hired from both within and outside the bank. As recently as June 22, at least eight roles on the team were posted on JPMorgan's website.

"These are hard jobs to do," Saxena said of positions on the team overall. "In some places, we are looking for absolutely unicorn talent, and we've been very lucky to find many of them."

• Financial details published this month by researcher and journalist Ed Zitron reveal steep losses at OpenAI.
• Investing pros say the details are worrying as the AI giant prepares to go public.
• Others shared concerns about compute spending and partnerships with competitors.

Researcher and independent journalist Ed Zitron went viral this month for a post on OpenAI's finances showing massive spending and steep losses at the AI giant.

The ChatGPT maker is preparing for an IPO, and investors are eager for a peak at the financials ahead of what's expected to be a historic offering. A report based on audited financial information viewed by Zitron published on June 15 showed that losses surged from $5 billion in 2024 to almost $39 billion in 2025 as the company went on a spending spree to pull ahead in the AI race.

"The financial condition of OpenAI is deeply concerning," Zitron wrote. "$38.53 billion in losses are astronomical, and far higher than most believed it would be. Losses also appear to be mounting year-over-year at a dramatic rate, and I'm not sure how this company finds a way toward any kind of sustainability or profitability."

What the market pros are saying

Others have also voiced concerns about the AI maker's path to profitability. Former Fidelity fund manager George Noble described it as a "cautionary tale" in the wider AI trade, while others have wondered if surging AI compute costs will be an obstacle on the path to profitability.

But fears about OpenAI's future were in the air again following Zitron's report, coupled with the fact that OpenAI recently announced that it is considering slashing prices to better compete for customers.

Equity analyst Ross Hendricks of Porter & Company, described OpenAI situation as a "dumpster fire" in a post on X responding to Zitron's findings.

"The business sells a dollar worth of compute for $0.30 and is still considering slashing prices to avoid bleeding market share to Anthropic," he wrote.

Shivaram Rajgopal, a professor of accounting at Columbia Business School, told Business Insider that based on history, the numbers for OpenAI are unusual, particularly the fact that the company's costs ran at roughly 260% of revenue, historically much higher than that of other tech leaders when they went public.

"What makes OpenAI's situation particularly striking is that $13 billion in revenue is not a small startup," he said. "No modern tech firm of this revenue size has operated with this cost structure. Roughly 9% of that revenue came from just two strategic partners: SoftBank ($867M) and Microsoft ($303M), which raises legitimate questions about how much is arm's-length commercial demand versus captive partner spending."

Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, said that after reading Zitron's report, he thinks investors should be focused not on OpenAI's operating loss, but on another statistic.

"The most important line is the R&D and compute spend because OpenAI spent more than $19B on R&D and paid Microsoft more than $10B for R&D-related expenses with total expenses to Microsoft around $17B. So that tells me the core issue that OpenAI's most important input is compute and a lot of that compute is rented from a partner that's also a competitor," he said.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

• PepsiCo's APAC CEO said curiosity is the most important quality she looks for in junior workers.
• Anne Tse said other factors, such as experience, are less relevant.
• She said consulting experience is one sign that a candidate is curious.

As AI rapidly transforms the workplace, many employers are rethinking the qualities they prioritize in candidates.

Anne Tse, CEO of Asia Pacific Foods at PepsiCo, said the food and drinks company, which owns brands like Poppi and Lay's, is increasingly scanning for curiosity, especially in entry-level applicants. It's also looking for those who show adaptability and learning agility, as AI and new technologies rapidly reshape work.

"It's all about the aptitude, the speed, the agility to learn," Tse, who oversees PepsiCo's businesses across Asia Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and Greater China, told Business Insider.

Given that daily tasks are changing, coming in "with a whole package of experience" isn't as much of a priority as being able to adapt and learn quickly, she said.

Employees nowadays need to learn, unlearn, and relearn as technology evolves and the company responds to fast-changing consumer demands.

"When people are curious, they want to learn. When they're curious, they also are willing to unlearn," Tse said.

Tse said curiosity is a skill she's cultivated throughout her career.

She said one piece of advice from a mentor that has stayed with her is that workers should take ownership in shaping their roles. That mindset, she said, enables people to reinvent how work gets done at a time when careers are becoming increasingly non-linear, especially as new technologies create opportunities to reinvent jobs and ways of working.

Evaluating curiosity

Many leaders have said that soft skills are becoming increasingly important in the AI era, and LinkedIn has ranked them among the most in-demand qualities employers seek. The challenge, however, is determining how to assess those skills effectively.

It's not easy to gauge curiosity, the CEO said.

That's why the company looks beyond traditional credentials to assess for this trait, not just in junior employees but more generally as well, Tse said. She said they work closely with HR to identify how specific behaviors and traits correlate with aptitude, leadership potential, and future success.

The company also spends time discussing candidates' past experiences, exploring the decisions they made throughout their careers, and the reasoning behind those choices.

The choices a person makes in their career, "also gives a good sense of their nature," she said. For example, you can tell how someone explains their decisions, whether they took risks, or were exploratory, she said.

There are often other telltale signs of curiosity and problem-solving capabilities, such as the industry a person came from. Consulting, for example, notoriously focuses on aptitude rather than experience. Tse, who previously worked as an associate partner at McKinsey, said people in consulting develop that skillset through case interviews.

She added that workers coming from startup environments, innovation roles, cross-functional projects, or experiences working across markets may also possess these qualities.

• Kristy Layden spent over a year applying to corporate jobs before deciding to pursue nursing school.
• She wishes she had quit corporate sooner, but was afraid of making the wrong decision.
• She is planning to attend community college before applying to nursing programs.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kristy Layden, a 45-year-old based in Frisco, Texas. It's been edited for length and clarity.

"If I don't have a job in three months, that would be crazy."

That's what I remember thinking to myself when my senior management role at a major retailer was eliminated. Over a year later, I drained my 401(k) for cash and still had no offers.

When I sat with myself and was truly honest, I realized corporate wasn't something I wanted to return to. If I was having this kind of experience looking for a job, what on earth would it be like in the actual position? I wanted to help people, connect with others, and see the direct results of my work.

That's when the idea of being a nurse came up.

When I get my mind on something, I move really fast. So, I will start class later this summer at a community college. I'm concerned about starting this career in my 40s and taking on debt, but I know this is the right path.

I cashed out on anything I could get my hands on after losing my job

I started seeing LinkedIn posts from people saying they were six months into the job hunt. Then, a year in, they were losing everything. I kept digging, looking, and watching, and everyone had the same story.

My worry built over time as I couldn't find a job. I cashed in on anything I could, selling handbags, jewelry, and anything else that might have some value. Once I started running out of those things, I didn't know what to do.

I've had depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember, so my parents were concerned about me. I also live alone in a rented apartment with my cat and two dogs, so we set up weekly phone touchpoints on Sundays so my parents could actually hear what I was going through. Parents can always tell when something is up by the way you sound.

They've helped me financially by covering my doctor's appointments, but aside from that, they've listened without judgment and worked really hard to make sure I was getting the support I needed.

I stayed in corporate out of fear

I looked back at my decade in corporate, and the atmosphere of layoffs isn't something I wanted to return to.

Also, I felt like I couldn't be my authentic self in corporate, and that I had to keep quiet or leadership would see me as a threat. I feel like a lot of people in corporate only care about themselves and climbing the ladder. Finally, work-life balance just felt nonexistent.

Have you ever changed careers after being laid off? Scroll down to the comments and share your experience.

I stayed for so long out of fear that my next move might not be a smart one. Even at my age, I also worried about disappointing my parents, which is silly because they're my biggest cheerleaders.

My Botox injector inspired the idea of becoming a nurse

I have a friend who's a plastic surgeon, and I see her occasionally for Botox touchups. When I went in a few months ago, I watched how everyone in her practice worked together — the energy was electric. The plastic surgeon is a really great person, and I started looking into becoming a cosmetic nurse.

I wish I had known 20 years ago that this could have been an option for me. Nursing isn't just changing bedpans or administering medication. There are so many different options, so I started looking into it with the injector route in mind.

I'm taking prerequisite courses at a community college

I debated pursuing a BSN or an RN, but I decided on a BSN because I can potentially earn more. ChatGPT was a great resource for helping me figure out the best path.

I talked to an advisor at my local community college, who helped me figure out which classes I'd need as prerequisites before applying to BSN programs. My first two classes are this summer. I considered waiting a bit to take classes because I didn't feel ready, but my dad reminded me that I'll never feel ready. I just have to start.

I applied for financial aid, so I'll hopefully be receiving money to apply toward classes and cost-of-living expenses. I can't wait for that to all get pushed through because that'll be a huge relief.

My plan is to finish prerequisites, then apply for the University of Texas at Arlington's 15-month online nursing program.

I'm concerned about starting this path later in life; I wish I had left corporate sooner

Once I realized this was the path that I wanted to take, I was locked in and ready to go. The one thing that concerns me, though, is that I'm older now, and it'll take multiple years before I'm actually working.

The debt is going to be something I have to deal with, but I try not to get too in the weeds on that kind of stuff.

It's hard to give a blanket statement that anyone can drop job hunting and go back to school or whatever they want to do, because systemic barriers and personal situations might not make that available. However, my advice to people looking for a job is to be honest with yourself.

Don't get stuck on what you've done and the roles you've been in. Think about what excites you, even if it's something entirely new.

Do you have a story to share about navigating long-term unemployment? If so, please reach out to the reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.

• Disney underwent a major leadership change in March as CEO Bob Iger stepped down for a second time.
• Longtime parks head Josh D'Amaro took over and has already made his mark on the Mouse House.
• Here's who reports to D'Amaro and to the new creative chief, Dana Walden.

Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro has assembled a team working to win over Wall Street and brand enthusiasts.

The Mouse House's leader, who took over in March, has highlighted the importance of creating new franchises, unifying teams, and investing in video games while leaning into AI.

D'Amaro has already made his mark by unveiling a new structure that puts its gaming arm within Disney Entertainment, which contains its streaming, film, and TV businesses. This revamped division is run by Dana Walden, the company's first-ever chief creative officer, a respected content exec who previously oversaw Disney's TV unit.

D'Amaro, who'd been the Disney Experiences chairman, was chosen for the CEO seat over Walden and took over for longtime top executive Bob Iger.

Under Iger, Disney transformed into a Hollywood powerhouse by acquiring Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Disney shares quadrupled in the 2010s as Wall Street cheered the company's rising profits and its emerging streaming business. Iger retired in early 2020 as a hero, only to return less than three years later after his chosen successor flopped.

D'Amaro has big shoes to fill and a daunting path ahead, as Disney's stock is down 42% in the last five years. The company has frustrated some fans with steady price hikes at its parks, a sequel-heavy movie slate, and a series of political controversies. And less than a month after D'Amaro took over, Disney announced layoffs.

To better understand D'Amaro's strategy, it helps to know who's implementing it. Business Insider has viewed Disney's internal organizational chart, based on screenshots sent by an employee.

D'Amaro has 10 direct reports, including Walden, ESPN chair Jimmy Pitaro, and D'Amaro's successor in the Experiences division, Thomas Mazloum.

Below are full org charts showing direct reports under D'Amaro and Walden, according to Disney's records. In between the tables are notes about what some of these leaders have been working on, based on reporting from Business Insider.

Here are D'Amaro's direct reports, in alphabetical order by first name:

Mazloum has stepped into D'Amaro's former role atop Disney's parks, cruises, and products division. The former Disneyland president first joined the company in 1998, spent 15 years as an executive at Crystal Cruises, and returned to Disney in 2017. His challenge is to keep growing profits in the parks without irritating guests by raising prices too far.

Pitaro, who some considered a dark-horse candidate for Disney's top job, oversees ESPN and its transition to streaming. After being the backbone of the pay-TV bundle for years, ESPN became available as a stand-alone app for the first time last summer and added more than 2 million subscribers in its first six weeks, according to subscription data firm Antenna.

Pitaro must navigate steadily rising sports rights fees and an ever-shifting media landscape. ESPN wasn't immune from the April layoffs.

Ayaz, Disney's marketing and brand chief, had his unit hit especially hard by job cuts as the company shifted to a "unified marketing organization." This change was designed to "unlock innovation, reduce complexity, and build critical capabilities," Ayaz told employees.

Here are Walden's direct reports, in alphabetical order by first name:

As creative chief, Walden oversees Disney's film and TV slate and is in charge of helping foster the "breakthrough creative storytelling" that D'Amaro has said is a priority.

Alan Bergman, the Mouse House's film chief, is also tasked with boosting Disney's box-office magic. In his 21 years as studio president, Disney has had 28 different billion-dollar box-office hits, including smash hits like the Marvel "Avengers" series, generation-defining successes like "Moana," and Pixar grand slams like "Inside Out 2." However, some of Disney's once-bankable franchises like Star Wars and Marvel are no longer sure bets.

As part of the Disney Entertainment reshuffling, longtime TV exec Debra OConnell was elevated to the new role of chair of Disney Entertainment Television, overseeing brands such as ABC and Disney Kids & Family.

Walden has empowered Adam Smith, the Entertainment division's tech and product chief, and former Hulu president Joe Earley as co-presidents of the direct-to-consumer business. Both report to Walden and Bergman. Smith reports to Pitaro as well, since he's also ESPN's tech chief.

Smith is at the forefront of Disney's tech push, including its AI strategy. Disney is preparing to launch an AI-generated ad creation tool on Disney+, which Smith told staffers will help small businesses make ads on a budget.

Disney is also revamping its flagship streamer by further integrating Hulu, though Smith recently said the company isn't yet making Disney+ a one-stop shop for buying park tickets.

Do you work for Disney or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at jfaris@businessinsider.com or Signal at jamesfaris.01.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jennifer Purcell, the 46-year-old CEO of Avaline Wines, based in New York City. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I started my career in investment banking, then moved into distressed debt and private equity. After working in transactional finance for a while, I jumped into the startup world.

I became the VP of finance and corporate strategy at Thrive Market and was introduced through networking to Katherine Power and Cameron Diaz, who were forming a yet-to-be-launched wine brand called Avaline. Wine and wellness are both things I'm passionate about, and I respect them both so much. I joined them as CFO a few months before we launched.

About two years in, the board elevated me to run the company. That was in 2022, and I've been CEO ever since.

Here's what a day in my life is like.

6:15 a.m. — check my phone

My routine has changed a bit because I recently moved from LA to NYC. I wake up around 6:15 or 6:30 a.m., and the first thing I do is look at my phone.

We have an employee in Europe, so I often wake up to a lot of messages from them. I also check my email and my calendar to see what my day looks like.

7 a.m. — dog walk and podcasts

My dog is a lazy Shih Tzu mix, but he loves going out in the early morning when he's feeling active. I live in the Financial District, so I take him down to where the Tin Building used to be, and he has some off-leash time, visits with other dogs, and runs around for 30-45 minutes.

While we walk, I listen to podcasts to get my news. I listen to The New York Times' The Daily and NPR's Up First.

Given world events such as tariff announcements, dollar-to-euro volatility, and changes in global shipping routes and pricing, I need to understand what's happening and how it will affect our business.

8 a.m. — gym and matcha

After the walk, I go to the gym. I'll either do a private Pilates session with my trainer or take an Equinox HIIT or treadmill running class.

Next, I usually stop by Earthbar at Equinox for a Muscle Up smoothie with spinach. It's quick, filling, and keeps me energized through a packed morning. I'm also hooked on matcha. I make at least two per day — it's the only caffeine I drink.

9 a.m. — focused and creative work

I mostly work from home, though we have a coworking space in Flatiron where I try to hold in-person meetings with people in the city.

Most of the Avaline employees and the executive team are on the West Coast, so after I get ready, I get to enjoy a few hours before anyone starts pinging me. It's also the time when my brain is most active and creative.

I go through documents, decks, or financials I need to review and think about strategy, what we need to be doing, what the team is focused on now, and what we could be doing better.

12 p.m. — Zoom meetings begin

Most of my working day is spent in Zoom meetings. I have one-on-ones at least quarterly with every person at the company, so most days I have at least a couple. I love these, especially when I get to speak with the people I don't normally interact with daily.

I also meet daily with at least one member of the exec team to talk about what's going on, what they need my help with, and what blocks they're facing. And then there are external meetings with new production, new products, new markets, and distributors.

I work closely with both Katherine Power and Cameron Diaz on everything from long-term strategy to new product launches. They are incredibly hands-on. This includes tasting potential new wines, weighing in on packaging and label design, or meeting with distributors and retail partners.

For the past 18 months or so, we've had at least one empty seat on our executive team, which means I've often been running another department alongside my own job. Those early morning hours are when I make sure I'm across whatever the team needs.

It's a lot of screen time, so I try to take breaks during the day to play fetch with my dog.

2 p.m. — late lunch and self-care

Because I'm working more West Coast hours, I eat lunch late, between two and four. It's usually something grab-and-go: a salad from the fridge, a protein bar, or a smoothie.

To manage stress, I use a lot of breathing techniques. Exhales longer than inhales — everyone says it, but it's really underrated.

If I'm really stressed, I go outside and walk with the dog. Even just a 15-minute walk in the sun helps you come back with a completely different mindset: we can figure this out and make it work.

4 p.m. — doing the less fun things

My assistant books time at the end of the day for me to concentrate on the parts of my job I least enjoy, such as reviewing and signing documents and working on alcohol regulation compliance.

When they're the last things left to do at the end of the day, and I'm not feeling as creative, I find it easier to work through them.

7 p.m. — wrapping up, dinner, and wine

I try to end all meetings by 7 p.m. and make dinner most nights. I order groceries on Instacart for myself because I never know when I'll be around to cook. While I'm cooking, I'll have a glass or two of wine. My favorite Avaline wine is our Sauvignon Blanc from Bordeaux.

My boyfriend and I always make a point of sitting down properly at the dining table, without phones, and talking about our days. After that, we like to watch something on the couch with the dog that doesn't require a lot of brainpower.

At night, because of the nature of our global team, I usually end up going back to my computer a few times.

9:30 p.m. — winding down and preparing for the next day

I love reading, usually nonfiction. I'm reading Gisèle Pelicot's book "A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides" — I think she's an extraordinary woman.

The last thing I do every night is check my schedule for the next day and make sure I'm prepared. If I need to do any reading or data digging for a specific meeting, I'll either do it that evening or set myself up to do it first thing in the morning.

I go to sleep around 10 or 10:30 p.m.

I'm often on the road, which changes everything

I travel up to three weeks every month. It could be anywhere: in one month, recently, I went to Miami, Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Sonoma County, San Francisco, and Chicago.

We go to retailers, distributors, events, activations, and planning sessions with other team members. Our distributor is in Miami, and all of our grapes are grown in Europe, so I go there too.

I only pack a carry-on, and I refuse to get to the airport early. I want to get there and walk straight onto the plane. This means that I do miss flights from time to time.

I've learned not to stress over things I can't control

If I miss a flight, I immediately rebook through the airline app and figure out the next best option. I travel frequently, so having airline status gives me a bit more flexibility when plans change.

For managing jet lag, I've been asking ChatGPT to create a schedule for me: when to drink caffeine, when to try to nap, when to stay up, and when to get sunlight. I try to follow it as closely as I can.

I also practice good sleep hygiene: a very dark room, a cold environment, and no screens right before bed. I listen to a sleep story on the Calm app and put on white noise afterward. If I wake up in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep, I'll get up and read until I'm tired again.

• Several talented AI researchers have recently left Google.
• Anthropic and OpenAI are a big lure for AI talent.
• That lure is partly financial. Noam Shazeer's maneuvering shows what's possible.

If you want to see a person's eyes light up at a Silicon Valley party, just say the words "pre-IPO equity." It works.

Google's sudden AI talent losses may have less to do with dissatisfaction and more to do with a timeless Silicon Valley calculation: where the biggest equity upside lives.

Bloomberg reported Tuesday that two key Gemini researchers, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, are leaving Google for Anthropic, adding to a growing list of high-profile departures from the search giant. The moves follow recent exits by AI luminaries, including Noam Shazeer and Nobel Prize winner John Jumper.

It's tempting to frame these departures as a verdict on Google's AI strategy. That could be part of it — Google has many priorities, while Anthropic and OpenAI are razor-focused on the AI frontier. That's attractive to AI talent.

A simpler explanation may be financial, though.

For elite Silicon Valley talent, moving from a mature public company to a fast-growing startup has long been one of the most reliable paths to outsized wealth creation — especially if the startup is an IPO candidate.

At Google, compensation is mostly tied to RSUs at a company that already commands a market capitalization of over $4 trillion. The upside is substantial but relatively predictable.

At Anthropic or OpenAI, the equation could be very different. Researchers who join now can receive meaningful chunks of pre-IPO equity. If those companies eventually go public — perhaps in late 2026 or 2027 — those grants could appreciate dramatically once lockup periods expire.

Shazeer offers a case study of how lucrative it can be to jump around amid an AI boom.

He left Google in 2021 to cofound Character.AI. About three years later, Google paid roughly $2.7 billion through a licensing deal that brought him back. Because Shazeer owned a sizable stake in the startup, he made hundreds of millions of dollars by selling his stake as part of the deal, according to the Wall Street Journal.

About 20 months later, he's on the move again. This time he joined OpenAI, which recently filed confidentially for an IPO. Assuming he got fresh equity as part of the switch, Shazeer has once again positioned himself for another highly lucrative liquidity event.

Top AI researchers will likely tell you the talent war is about building the future. But it's also about owning a larger piece of it.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

• Tech job openings rise 14% in 2026, showing resilience despite AI disruption fears.
• Hardware engineering roles surge 52% as AI infrastructure investments drive demand.
• Tech industry rebounds after 2022-2023 correction, with steady job demand across sectors.

The tech job market is showing signs of resilience so far this year, suggesting that AI may not destroy all white-collar work after all.

Open tech job openings at tech companies have climbed nearly 14% so far this year, according to TrueUp data provided to Business Insider.

TrueUp tracks job postings across 9,000 public tech companies, startups, and unicorns, rather than tech roles across the entire economy. This is ground zero for AI disruption because the tech industry usually adopts new technology and feels the impact first.

And the impact so far has been mixed — certainly not the dystopian job collapse predicted by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Amit Taylor, founder of TrueUp, described the current tech job market as "holding steady despite everything else happening in the tech industry."

The rebound is strongest in Hardware engineering. Open hardware engineering roles jumped 52% year-to-date, according to TrueUp.

That likely reflects the industry's heavy investment in AI infrastructure, including chips, data centers, servers, devices, and other physical systems needed to support the AI boom.

These figures challenge the popular narrative that AI is crushing demand for engineers and other tech workers.

The recovery follows a painful tech correction in 2022 and 2023, when companies cut jobs and slowed hiring after expanding too quickly during the pandemic. Now, the data shows that tech job demand is solid across much of the sector, even as companies continue to scrutinize costs and experiment with AI tools that could reshape parts of the workforce.

Software engineering job openings have not surged like the broader market, but they have still edged higher this year. TrueUp data shows software engineering openings rose just over 2% since January this year. There's been a slowdown in recent months, versus a real surge earlier in 2026, according to TrueUp data.

The stronger demand for tech talent doesn't mean every candidate has it easy. Recent graduates face more competition, especially for software jobs, because far more people have studied computer science in recent years. Tech layoffs also funnel more supply into the market.

Taylor previously told Business Insider that the jobs themselves haven't vanished, but the number of applicants chasing them has surged.

Big public tech companies also increased job postings, with open roles up 18% so far this year. But the numbers are down a smidge from earlier in 2026.

Not the crazy-strong job market of the pandemic boom, but a solidly healthy situation.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman isn't the only one borrowing inspiration from his grocery list.
• OpenAI announced that its highly anticipated advanced chip is called Jalapeño.
• Between Jalapeño, Garlic, and Nano Banana, here are some of the best AI model codenames and projects.

It may sound like a trip through the produce aisle, but leading AI companies have something much more important on their lists.

OpenAI, Meta, and Google have all relied on food-related names for their sometimes secretive plans for future AI models. OpenAI is even naming a highly anticipated advanced chip after a pepper.

Thinking with your stomach is nothing new for Silicon Valley, just look at the assortment of desserts Android assembled over the years before Google had its fill.

Here is a look at the mouthwatering and just plain goofy names AI and tech companies are using.

OpenAI: Jalapeño

When you're challenging Nvidia, the situation is bound to be spicy.

On June 24, OpenAI announced that the first advanced chip it developed with Broadcom is called "Jalapeño."

"Chips are foundational to the AI economy," OpenAI said in a statement. "Building our own expands our full-stack platform from products to models to infrastructure, and will help us scale intelligence, serve more people, and expand access to AI."

Garlic

The ChatGPT maker codenamed its new large language model "garlic," according to The Information. Garlic is separate from another LLM OpenAI is developing, codenamed "Shallotpeat."

Google: Nano Banana

Google appears to have loved a codename so much that it made it public. Google's AI image generator in Gemini is named Nano Banana Pro, which it released on November 20, 2025. Before then, Google had internally called the model nano-banana, though they had not publicly disclosed their zany choice.

Meta: Avocado

Meta codenamed its future AI frontier model "avocado", per a CNBC report. CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't stick with the food theme.

Meta SuperIntelligence Labs dubbed the publicly released model "Muse Spark."

Muse Spark was the first model released by Meta since the social networking giant spent billions overhauling its AI strategy, including a $14 billion investment in Scale AI to hire its cofounder, Alexandr Wang, to lead the division.

Past codenames branch out from fruit and veggies

The clearance section offers a wide selection of great names.

OpenAI might have one of the best all-time codenames with "strawberry," which it used to refer to its o1 model. The name was likely a play on the viral struggle of AI models to correctly identify the number of Rs in the fruit. Before Strawberry, OpenAI had a secretive project named Q*.

In 2025, Elon Musk's xAI had a sweet tooth when it codenamed an early testing version of Grok-3 "chocolate."

Mistral AI, the France-based startup, went in a completely opposite direction with "Jaguar," its codename for a testing model.

And Anthropic named its family of models Opus, Sonnett, and Hakiu, a trio of three different types of compositions. Recently, they've added Mythos and Fable, though the public release of those models has been complicated.

Members of the House Oversight Committee have discussed issuing subpoenas to people who could testify about secret settlements between some of Jeffrey Epstein's friends and his accusers, Business Insider has learned.

Some of Epstein's accusers have signed confidential pre-litigation settlements with friends of the sex offender whom they have also accused of misconduct, according to three people with direct knowledge of such settlements, including Brad Edwards, an attorney who has represented more than 200 of Epstein's accusers. These settlements include non-disclosure agreements that prohibit them from speaking publicly about their experiences, Edwards and the other people said.

The House Oversight Committee is investigating the Justice Department's handling of its Epstein investigations and is scheduled to conduct voluntary interviews with associates of Epstein in the coming weeks. Those conversations won't be under oath, and participants won't be legally compelled to answer every question.

Subpoenas could require witnesses to answer questions even if they have signed a non-disclosure agreement, though the committee would need the majority's support to issue one. A spokesperson for committee Democrats said that its members have discussed issuing the subpoenas. A spokesperson for committee Republicans, who hold the majority, said they are aware of the settlements between Epstein's accusers and his associates and declined to comment further.

It's unclear how many Epstein accusers signed pre-litigation settlements and with how many of his associates. No public records for them exist. One person told Business Insider they had direct knowledge of settlements with four of Epstein's friends who were accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women between them. The person said the women accused those men of coercing them into nonconsensual and abusive sexual encounters.

A settlement isn't necessarily an indication of wrongdoing, and it isn't uncommon for people to agree to them for expediency. While parties can use settlements to resolve civil legal claims, they do not have the power to block criminal proceedings.

The House Oversight Committee raised the issue of secret settlements in an interview with Bill Gates earlier this month. A Republican staffer asked the former Microsoft CEO if he had secured a settlement "in connection to Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, or any of their victims," according to a transcript made public Tuesday. Gates said he had not.

The existence of these settlements came into the spotlight because of a court filing by Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 for her role in grooming and recruiting girls for Epstein to sexually abuse. In December of last year, Maxwell filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus — a last-ditch attempt to get out of prison after the US Supreme Court rejected her criminal appeal. Her filing cited a 2024 podcast interview in which Edwards said that his clients could have brought lawsuits against between 10 and 15 of Epstein's friends. Some of those men signed confidential settlements with his clients over allegations of mistreatment, Edwards said.

"There are still people that I personally think should have been exposed, but not at the expense of your client's wishes," Edwards said on the "Interesting Lawyers" podcast episode, an interview that had largely flown under the radar.

Edwards said that in those cases, his clients wanted to move on rather than file a public lawsuit.

"I'm not a big fan of confidentiality, but it serves a purpose in a certain circumstance, and this was the right circumstance," he said on the podcast.

Maxwell argued in her court filing that these men "could equally be considered as co-conspirators" and that she was denied a fair trial because she would have called those men as witnesses had she known about the settlements.

In an interview with Business Insider, Edwards declined to answer questions about confidential settlements between his clients and Epstein's friends. He said that, in general, Epstein had "lent out" about 50 girls and women to about 30 men from the 1990s until his second arrest in 2019.

"Some of the men were with multiple of Epstein's victims, and some were only with one," he told Business Insider.

Epstein killed himself in jail in 2019, while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. His death made more urgent the question of who else could be held accountable for his crimes. Seven years later, Maxwell is the only other person in Epstein's sex-trafficking operation charged by the Justice Department.

After Epstein's death, the Justice Department examined who else in his orbit may have participated in his sex-trafficking operation. The Epstein files show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation identified several potential co-conspirators. Aside from Maxwell, most of the other people identified in internal FBI documents as potential co-conspirators were also victims — girls or young women who brought others to Epstein. Except for model-recruiting agent Jean-Luc Brunel, whom French authorities charged with rape and who killed himself in jail before trial, no other men in Epstein's vast network have faced criminal charges for sex crimes. When the Justice Department re-examined the Epstein investigation last year, it concluded there wasn't sufficient evidence to investigate "uncharged third parties."

Epstein frequently kept women and girls around him, hiring them as assistants and masseuses. He offered them financial benefits, job opportunities, and other ways to advance their education as part of a grooming process, according to records released by the Justice Department and testimony from his accusers.

He sometimes introduced them to his friends, and those friends sometimes sexually abused them, women have alleged in lawsuits, depositions, and interviews with prosecutors, according to court filings and records released by the Justice Department.

Edwards and another person familiar with settlements between Epstein's friends and accusers both said that Epstein would send his victims to friends after the women had been in his orbit for a long time.

He "lent out" these women to people "influential in the world economy and celebrities," one of the people familiar with the settlements said.

Some of those relationships were consensual, Edwards said in the podcast interview.

Edwards said that in some cases, clients told him, "Look, I have a relationship with this now very famous or very powerful person, and it's very good. I could call them on my cellphone right now. He never mistreated me. He didn't know what was going on."

Some misconduct accusations against Epstein's associates have played out in public, and several have reached public settlements or resolutions.

One Epstein victim, Virginia Giuffre, filed lawsuits against then-Prince Andrew in 2021 and Alan Dershowitz in 2019, alleging that Epstein directed her to have sex with both men. Both men denied the allegations and later settled the suits. As part of his settlement, the British royal agreed to make "a substantial donation" to Giuffre's charity and recognized her "as an established victim of abuse" without personally admitting wrongdoing. In Dershowitz's case, both parties said the resolution didn't involve any payments and Giuffre said she "may have made a mistake" in identifying him.

In court filings, media interviews, and a memoir written before her death last year, Giuffre named other friends of Epstein with whom she said she had sex during the time that Epstein sexually abused her. She did not sue those men.

Edwards, who represented Giuffre, said her allegations weren't unique.

"Her experiences, in terms of Epstein sending people out to a select group of his friends, were actually more typical than I think any of us realized in 2009, when Virginia first said it," Edwards told Business Insider.

Edwards also represented a model in a lawsuit against the psychiatrist and investor Henry Jarecki. The woman, who used a "Jane Doe" pseudonym, alleged that she was abused by Epstein, and that Epstein introduced her to Jarecki, who raped her and treated her as "his modern-day sex slave."

Jarecki denied the allegations. The woman withdrew the lawsuit 10 months later. In statements at the time, she said she believed Jarecki "did not mean me any harm," and Jarecki said he "never engaged in any abusive conduct with the complainant or any other person."

"Dr. Jarecki has for some time been suffering from advanced dementia and is non‑communicative," a spokesperson for his business office, Falconwood Corporation, told Business Insider. "Prior to the onset of his illness, Dr. Jarecki privately expressed deep regret over any association with Epstein."

Leon Black, the former CEO of Apollo Global Management, paid $62.5 million to the US Virgin Islands as part of a January 2023 settlement to resolve the government's legal claims "related to Jeffrey Epstein, whether known or unknown." Records released by the Justice Department show that following Epstein's death, federal and local prosecutors in Manhattan examined sexual assault allegations against Black, who sent Epstein more than $150 million for what Black has said was tax advice. Neither office brought criminal charges against Black, who has denied wrongdoing related to Epstein.

Other allegations against Epstein's associates have become public through interviews already conducted by the House Oversight Committee. Sarah Kellen, a client of Edwards who said Epstein abused her for years, told the committee in May that Philip Levine, who later became mayor of Miami Beach, sexually assaulted her while she was on a trip with Epstein. And she said Frédéric Fekkai, the celebrity hairstylist, sexually assaulted her before he introduced her to Epstein.

Committee Chairman James Comer asked the Justice Department in June to investigate Kellen's allegations against Levine and Fekkai. Chris Vlasto, a spokesperson for Levine, told Business Insider that Levine's "intimate encounter" with Kellen was consensual and her allegations of misconduct were false. Mark Herr, a spokesperson for Fekkai, previously said her allegations were "categorically false" and that Fekkai wasn't aware of Epstein's sex trafficking.

A Justice Department spokesperson told Business Insider that prosecutors previously determined "there was no prosecutable case" after interviewing Kellen. The DOJ would reevaluate if the committee sent it a formal criminal referral "with additional evidence of any federal crime," the spokesperson said.

With subpoenas, the House Oversight Committee could force people with NDAs to answer questions, said David Rapallo, a former top lawyer on the committee.

Lauren Hersh, the CEO of World Without Exploitation, an organization that has advocated on behalf of Epstein's victims before Congress, said that the committee should use subpoenas to pierce any confidentiality agreements and ensure "those who caused devastating harm are held accountable."

"Powerful people, including Jeffrey Epstein's friends, have used NDAs as a tool to silence victims," she told Business Insider.

Epstein acquaintances expected to speak to the committee in coming weeks — including Black, Dershowitz, and ex-Barclays CEO Jes Staley — would appear for transcribed interviews, not subpoenaed depositions.

As a result, they can legally decline to answer questions, said Rapallo. The terms and scope of transcribed interviews are often negotiated between lawyers for the interview subject and the committee's majority party, Rapallo said.

Dershowitz told Business Insider he plans to answer every question and welcomes a subpoena. A representative for Black declined to comment. Attorneys for Staley didn't respond.

The committee could also issue "friendly subpoenas" to Epstein's accusers, much like Congress routinely uses to protect corporate whistleblowers who have NDAs. In that case, the committee would likely need the cooperation of the victims. A spokesperson for House Oversight Democrats said the committee would let victims decide whether to appear before the committee.

Edwards, the attorney representing Epstein accusers, said that the vast majority of victims want to move on with their lives because of the media frenzy around the Epstein story.

He pointed to the ongoing British media interest following a BBC interview in January in which Edwards alleged that one of his clients, when she was a young woman, was sent by Epstein to spend a night with then-Prince Andrew at his residence, Royal Lodge, and was given a tour of Buckingham Palace. Representatives for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor didn't respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.

"The prime example is the Prince Andrew madness," Edwards said. "There were victims that would have cooperated not only civilly, but criminally, and they want nothing to do with it anymore because the British press calls me, them, everybody."

• Nvidia's rise in one market highlights a major shift in the networking industry.
• In Q1 2026, Nvidia's data center Ethernet switch sales hit $2.1 billion.
• Nvidia's Spectrum-X product integrates AI chips, driving growth with large businesses.

Nvidia's dominance in AI is moving beyond chips.

For the first time, the company became the top vendor by revenue in data center Ethernet switches — the networking gear that helps connect AI chips inside data centers, according to market research firm IDC.

This market is growing fast because cloud giants and other large businesses are pouring hundreds of billions into building out AI data centers. IDC research vice president Paul Nicholson called Nvidia's ascension "one of the most significant vendor landscape shifts IDC has tracked in enterprise networking."

In the first quarter of 2026, Nvidia generated $2.1 billion in data center Ethernet switch revenue — a 21.5% share of the market. That's up from 4% in the first quarter of 2024, said IDC senior research manager Brandon Butler.

Nvidia has pushed ahead of rivals like Arista Networks, which held a 20.7% share of the data center Ethernet switch market in the first quarter of this year. Other major players include Cisco, Huawei, and HPE.

The data center Ethernet switch market totaled $10 billion in the first quarter, according to IDC, growing 61% from a year earlier.

IDC attributed Nvidia's growth in networking revenue to its Spectrum-X product, "a tightly integrated system" that's designed to work closely with its AI chips, Butler said.

Butler said Nvidia's approach appeals to cloud giants looking to build quickly and avoid piecing together parts from multiple vendors. The trend also reflects a broader shift of companies buying networking and computing products together, IDC said.

The chip giant has increasingly highlighted networking as a major growth driver. At a shareholder meeting on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Spectrum-X is "now larger than all other Ethernet networking peers combined."

The comments echoed Nvidia's most recent earnings call in May, when chief financial officer Colette Kress said the company's broader data center networking revenue had tripled to $15 billion from the previous year.

Nvidia's networking business traces back to its 2019 acquisition of Mellanox, which gave the company a foothold in data center networking before the AI boom took off.

Nvidia's lead isn't guaranteed. Cloud giants are increasingly looking to diversify their supplier base, Butler said, while businesses may lean on existing relationships with networking providers as they ramp up their infrastructure.

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• Amazon wants to automatically capture data for warehouse roles tied to $2.8 billion in labor spend.
• The goal is to enhance warehouse staffing efficiency.
• The initiative is part of a broader push to optimize the movement of warehouse workers.

Amazon thinks one of its biggest warehouse efficiency opportunities lies in jobs that generate little operational data. A new wearable-device system could change that.

Internal documents reviewed by Business Insider show Amazon is testing a new program called Right Station Link that uses a wearable device to automatically capture check-in and labor-hours data for "indirect" support roles, such as equipment maintenance, safety coordination, and floor management, that have historically been harder to track.

Unlike warehouse workers at packing stations, employees in indirect roles frequently move between assignments throughout a shift. Amazon expects the new devices to "improve labor tracking accuracy" and "reduce non-productive labor hours," one of the documents stated.

According to one of the internal documents from March, these indirect roles account for roughly $2.8 billion worth of labor spending, or 85 million labor hours. At the time of the analysis, conducted last year, many of those roles lacked the "digital signals" needed to automatically confirm worker presence.

"Right Station Link brings automated labor hour measurement to $2.8B of manually tracked labor spend in one deployment, enabling labor automation for all sortation roles," one of the documents stated.

The initiative is part of Amazon's next warehouse efficiency push. The company spent years streamlining how packages move. Now it's applying the same playbook to people, betting that smarter worker assignments and better labor monitoring can unlock millions of dollars in savings.

Wearable scanners

Internal documents show Amazon initially planned to rely on Zebra WS501 wearable scanners. Workers usually wear this scanner on the back of their hand. They get assignments and break notifications through the device, while missed check-ins automatically send alerts to managers, according to the documents.

Before Right Station Link, check-in and assignment data for many indirect roles was not automatically captured by Amazon. Managers instead documented station changes "manually on a digital platform," according to an Amazon spokesperson.

The internal documents show Amazon became concerned that some managers were assigning more workers to indirect roles than staffing models recommended and were relying on manual time edits that made labor allocation harder to track consistently.

Amazon later eliminated manual time editing and required labor hours to be coded through its internal staffing system, which internal analysis suggested improved productivity.

Right Station Link is intended to help indirect workers "adhere to staffing assignments," while reducing "idle time," one document stated.

The Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that during a pilot test, some managers were more cautious around their staffing needs to ensure they had enough employees to process volume, and they were not trying to "game the system."

Delivery delays

Amazon wants to expand Right Station Link to all North American warehouses before the holiday peak season, according to one of the documents.

However, company leaders warned that Zebra device delivery delays could create "significant risk" to deployment timelines and reduce expected financial benefits, the internal documents show.

To address that, Amazon is making its software compatible with other devices and plans to use existing scanners already deployed throughout its facilities. The company spokesperson said Right Station Link is not dependent on any specific hardware model and expansion plans may change. It's been testing hand-held devices as well as wearables, although employees prefer wearables, according to the spokesperson.

"Right Station Link is being piloted at a small number of sites, and any potential future expansion plans are entirely speculative," Amazon said. "As we test, we're being deliberate about where this technology makes sense, and where it doesn't."

The company said the system does not measure individual productivity or track workers' real-time movements.

"A natural extension"

Before publication, the spokesperson told Business Insider that the premise of this story was "inaccurate" because it drew overly broad conclusions from incomplete data.

This spokesperson described Right Station Link as a tool that lets employees check into stations and receive assignment updates, calling it a "natural extension" of existing workforce-management processes.

The $2.8 billion figure does not represent "excess or waste" spending, but a "theoretical modeled opportunity" of a specific category of data that had not yet been integrated into Amazon's staffing platform at the time of the analysis, the spokesperson added.

"Right Station wasn't developed to solve 'visibility' issues in our network — its intent is to streamline one element of our staffing processes through improving on our existing systems," the spokesperson said. "As is industry standard, we digitally track employee hours to ensure we're appropriately staffing our facilities to safely deliver on our customer promises."

Measurement challenges

Indirect roles have been difficult for warehouse operators to measure.

Unlike pickers or packers, whose productivity can be tracked through units processed, support functions such as maintenance and training are harder to quantify, according to Steve Tracey, a supply chain management professor at Penn State University. As a result, companies often rely on labor tracking and outcome-based metrics, such as equipment uptime and safety performance, to evaluate those roles, he said.

The Amazon spokesperson disputed suggestions that the company had difficulty capturing this data, saying the information already exists in its systems.

Right Station Link simply gives employees a device for receiving assignments and sending updates throughout the day, the spokesperson added, comparing it to a hotel maintenance worker using a handheld device to receive service requests and notify management when work begins.

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• Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said 90% of enterprise employees aren't "AI savvy."
• The cybersecurity CEO said the struggle is how to overhaul workforces to meet the moment.
• Arora said Palo Alto Networks is only hiring its technical roles from hackathons.

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora says enterprises don't have the workforces they need for the AI moment.

"The challenge right now is 90% of the enterprise employees are not AI savvy," Arora said during a recent episode of the "20VC" podcast.

Arora said the issue is there's no training course he can send his 21,000 employees at the cybersecurity firm to. It's on them to level up and help the company that has a total market cap over $235 billion.

"They have to be able to learn on their own," he said. "I think we're back to a Darwinian moment where everybody has to figure out who's really good."

Other companies, Arora said, are facing this reality and choosing to respond with mass layoffs. The former top executive at Google and SoftBank specifically referenced Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Block CEO Jack Dorsey.

"You've seen people like Brian Armstrong and Jack Dorsey go out and say, 'I'm going to decimate my organization and I'm going to start building from scratch,'" Arora said. "And they've gone to some version of 30 to 40% less people because they've figured out there's no redemption. I can't train these people. I'm going to just find the people who are going to come in and help me do this stuff."

Dorsey announced in February that Block was laying off over 4,000 workers, nearly half of the company. The former Twitter CEO said the company was doing well but needed to be "honest" about how AI, what he called "intelligence tools" was changing the status quo.

In May, Coinbase announced it was laying off 14% of its workforce, affecting about 700 roles. Armstrong wrote in an email to employees, which he posted on X, that cuts were designed to make the crypto company "leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth."

Arora said Palo Alto Networks has a different approach. Instead of large-scale layoffs, the cybersecurity firm is using natural attrition to gradually replace workers. He said the company also knows exactly where to find future technical workers.

"We've been hiring people only through hackathons," he said, referencing technical roles. "Give me 12 months, I'll have sort of transformed 20, 25% of my team," he added. "Give me three years, I'll have hopefully enough AI savvy people working at Palo Alto."

The company is continuing to grow. Palo Alto Networks has added 5,423 total employees to its headcount from the end of fiscal 2025 to the third quarter of 2026, according to its most recent 10-Q filing.

How Palo Alto Networks will change

That doesn't mean every role at the company will grow in the same way.

Arora questioned why he needs "400, 600 people in marketing" when frontier models can already be trained on marketing strategies and a company's specific voice.

"My biggest problem in marketing is I have 600 people, but I'm not sure they all fully understand how to consistently deliver my tone of voice, my value proposition, and how not to break my brand by having different collaterals in public domain," he said.

Arora said his "rule of thumb" is that in the next three years companies will "probably have half of the people" in general and administrative roles like marketing, HR, and finance. In that time, Arora said AI applications will advance to the point of being able to replace a lot of the work those employees do.

One of those advancements will be when AI models/tools more freely express their opinions by providing feedback to human users.

"Your scholar, whether you want to call it an AI assistant, AI marketing assistant, AI HR assistant, is going to say, 'I looked at your copy, it sucks. It's not good enough It's not consistent with a tone of voice. Here's what I would recommend,'" he said. "This has an opinion. That will make my average employee much smarter than they were today. Then I don't need so many of them because they're doing most of the work for you."

At the same time, Arora said he wants many more technical and sales resources. Arora previously said he wants more cybersecurity engineers and researchers in the future. During the 20VC interview, he said he has employees who want AI resources to help implement plans to transform marketing and HR.

"I think there's this fallacy people believe we're going to have less people working because AI is going to take over our jobs," he said. "I don't believe that. I think what's going to happen is you can't imagine the number of people on my team who want more technical resources, more AI savvy resources because they want to do exactly these things."

Early last year, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, had a clear message for his staff. "You should quit if you feel that way," he told one employee who said workers were being treated poorly. "You should consider working elsewhere," he told another person who questioned controversial changes at the business. He was reinforcing the company Meta had spent the last few years trying to become: a lean, fast, high-pressure organization that no longer had the patience for internal debate. "You can leave," Bosworth said, "or disagree and commit."

But this month, in a memo and a meeting with employees, Bosworth sounded like a different person. Morale is "probably one of the worst it's ever been," he said, adding that the business had done "an atrocious job" with its recent restructuring. "We've undermined the trust you have that your specific expertise and contribution will be valued."

Since 2022, Meta has remade itself around a ruthless management playbook that helped define a new era in Silicon Valley. Through relentless layoffs and many other unpopular decisions, executives charged ahead, emboldened by record profits and apparently immune to the building discontent. Bosworth's comments last week were different — an acknowledgement that Meta's leadership may finally be confronting the costs of its actions.

Meta's workforce is at a breaking point. Employees in the UK are trying to form a labor union, decrying executives' "cruel and shortsighted behaviors." More than 1,600 workers have signed a petition demanding that Meta stop tracking employees' keystrokes to improve its AI models. As Wired reported this month, things have gotten so bad that one frustrated employee hijacked a livestreamed meeting with a profanity-laced outburst directed at an executive. Another compared working in a new AI-training unit to the gulag. Others are so dejected they're actually praying to get laid off so they can leave with at least some severance.

Against this backdrop, Bosworth was one of several executives in recent weeks scrambling to do damage control. Chief Product Officer Chris Cox acknowledged the "insanity of this company" that created a "difficult" and "brutal" environment. CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted "we've made mistakes."

"It's a classic example of chickens coming home to roost," says Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. "They have almost systematically destroyed trust. They are trying to figure out how to dig themselves out of the hole that they dug."

The digging started with a mass layoff of 11,000 people in late 2022, which Zuckerberg was at least apologetic about. The company then slashed another 10,000 jobs the next spring in what Zuckerberg hailed as a "year of efficiency," and then another 3,600 in 2025 that he said was to get rid of "low performers," effectively torpedoing some workers' job searches (many of them, it turned out, had received good performance reviews). In March this year, news leaked that the company was about to ax even more jobs, but it didn't confirm the cuts for weeks and didn't notify those affected until May, sending everyone into a nauseating, two-month purgatory. In April, amid the limbo, Meta announced it would start tracking employees' keystrokes, stoking fears that the company wanted to automate their work. And in May, as it laid off 8,000 employees, it reassigned another 7,000, many of them to menial jobs that involve training AI. Meta declined to comment on this story.

In a meeting with Instagram employees this month, Cox compared working there to "running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then, like, your teammate gets replaced and then we're recording you." He added: "It's like what the fuck."

For employees caught in the hailstorm, it must have felt validating for an executive to empathize with their situation. But surely he and the rest of Meta's leadership knew all these things would make employees unhappy, and yet they did them anyway. So why the sudden mea culpa?

Perhaps all the anger, dissatisfaction, and open rebellion was harming productivity. Or the particularly public nature of Meta's dysfunction, with the crescendo of news reports, had become a liability for its reputation with investors. Or maybe executives finally realized what had become patently obvious to everyone else — that whatever Meta was doing just wasn't working. The whole point of adopting this hard-charging management style was to get employees to innovate faster and catch up to competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the all-consuming battle over AI. Instead, Meta has been falling farther and farther behind. Last year, the company delayed — and ultimately never released — what was supposed to be its flagship AI model after engineers reportedly struggled to improve its capabilities; this year, it has repeatedly pushed back another model's rollout to developers.

Which raises the question: Was the post-2022 Meta a huge mistake? Decades of management research suggest fear and instability are a surefire way to hemorrhage star employees, struggle with recruiting new hires, and suppress the kind of creative risk-taking that leads to meaningful breakthroughs.

"I hope we can rekindle the best of the culture we joined," Bosworth said. "One where people have the psychological safety to take risks and do the right thing over a long period of time."

Sucher, who studies trust inside organizations, says executives are making the right move by acknowledging what they did wrong. So are the small concessions they have made in recent weeks, including promising to reduce the size of teams managers oversee, scale back the keystroke-monitoring program, and increase budgets for social events so employees spend more time with each other. Employees who had been reassigned to AI training roles also now have the opportunity to opt into a different role of their choice, the company announced internally this week.

But the real first step, Sucher advises, is for Zuckerberg himself to offer a proper apology that actually includes the word "sorry." And most importantly, she says, Zuckerberg needs to make a credible commitment that he won't keep making the same fundamental error: treating his employees as if they're not human beings deserving of respect and care. That means understanding that workers don't watch their colleagues get laid off, submit to surveillance, and get moved into unwanted assignments — and then magically go back to doing their best work.

"It's very hard to turn the ship on these things," she says. "Usually, it requires a new leader. It's unthinkable that Mark Zuckerberg would be a credible spokesman for change."

Whether that ship will actually turn is a big question for the 70,000 or so people who remain at Meta. It also matters for the rest of the tech industry. We now look back at November 2022, when Meta became the first tech giant to conduct mass layoffs, as the beginning of Silicon Valley's take-no-prisoners era. Will Meta executives' recent comments mark a real course correction at the company and beyond — or just a temporary pause before they return to their harsher ways?

There are some hopeful glimmers. In recent months, both Google and Microsoft have been opting to offer voluntary buyouts over mass layoffs, a more humane approach that helps preserve morale. Zuckerberg himself has promised a period of stability, pledging to hold off on any more big job cuts — at least through the end of the year.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

• Russia's drones are getting to a stage where AI can help them select targets and attack.
• Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov said the Kremlin is still missing some tech, such as decision-making AI.
• But he said it can likely already equip Shaheds with AI target recognition and terminal guidance.

The next evolution of attack drones like Russia's Shaheds will feature AI that allows the drone to independently recognize targets and choose to strike them, said one of Ukraine's top drone analysts.

"Analyzing targets by priority, selecting a target, and autonomously deciding to attack are undoubtedly the near future for the entire class of strike UAVs," wrote Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, an advisor to Ukraine's defense ministry on drone warfare, on Wednesday.

His post was centered on the Shahed, a fixed-wing loitering munition designed by Iran but co-opted by Russia. Every month, the Kremlin manufactures thousands of its own versions of Shaheds, dubbed Gerans, which it launches in waves of hundreds at Ukrainian cities.

Russia typically pre-programs the flight paths of these drones, but has continually equipped them with upgrades such as anti-jamming tools, rear-facing cameras to detect and avoid interceptors, and components that allow human operators to pilot them remotely.

Beskrestnov, who is widely recognized in Ukraine for his analysis of drone wreckage and footage, said Russia already possesses the technology for drones to identify and highlight targets through advanced video cameras made in China.

"The camera can find a target and keep it in focus. That's nothing unusual anymore," Beskrestnov wrote.

However, the next stage of AI assistance — getting a model to automatically select a target and decide to launch an attack — is still "only going through the first stages of combat testing" in the war from both Ukraine and Russia, he added.

Terminal guidance for the drone, or having the AI steer the loitering munition to its target, is more difficult for fixed-wing platforms such as the Shahed, Beskrestnov wrote.

"But it has already been implemented both in our UAVs and in those of the enemy," he added. "For terminal guidance to work on a Shahed, such a function must be implemented in the flight controller's interface. Technically, this is possible."

Beskrestnov said Russian forces had already been posting videos of their drones using artificial intelligence to recognize targets and assist with attacks.

He also posted footage that appears to be shot from a drone flying over a compound that had come under attack. Several buildings and vehicles are highlighted in colored boxes in the footage, indicating AI-assisted target recognition.

It's unclear who the drone belonged to and where the footage was shot. Business Insider could not independently verify the authenticity of the footage.

Combined, the three AI elements mentioned by Beskrestnov would allow a drone to operate independently in combat, a precursor to what military analysts and top commanders around the world have said is the future of drone warfare: swarm technology.

AI also makes it much harder to stop a drone with electronic warfare, which has typically relied on severing the radio link between the system and its operator or spoofing its satellite navigation signals.

Ukraine has already been reported to be implementing AI-assisted targeting and terminal guidance on some of its fixed-wing drones.

More recently, it's been using mid-range attack drones, designed to fly between 30 and 300 km, to strike logistics routes and command posts in the heavily jammed rear of Russia's front lines.

• Anthropic accused Alibaba of trying to "illicitly extract Claude's capabilities."
• It said the Chinese company interacted with Claude millions of times through 25,000 fraudulent accounts.
• The AI lab called for stronger government legislation against distillation attacks by foreign actors.

Anthropic accused one of China's biggest tech companies of exploiting its advanced AI models.

Anthropic's head of policy, Sarah Heck, said in a letter to South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren on June 10 that Alibaba had recently carried out "the largest known distillation attack" on it to date.

Heck wrote in the letter, obtained by Business Insider, that Alibaba-affiliated operators tried to "illicitly extract Claude's capabilities" to train Alibaba's own models, and called for legislation to prevent further attacks.

Between April 22 and June 5, the operators conducted "28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts," Heck wrote.

Distillation attacks refer to using advanced AI models to train and improve the capabilities of less advanced models. Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce behemoth, develops AI models under its Alibaba Cloud umbrella, including its Qwen LLMs.

"These distillation attacks are carried out illicitly, systematically, and at industrial scale to harvest US AI capabilities across frontier labs and repackage them as their own without incurring the training and R&D costs required to train US frontier models," Heck wrote to the senators.

She added that the attacks could help Chinese models reach Claude Mythos Preview-level capabilities sooner. Mythos is one of Anthropic's most advanced LLMs, capable of detecting software vulnerabilities and outperforming humans on cybersecurity tasks.

She asked the senators for more legislation against distillation attacks, such as limiting China's access to advanced US computing infrastructure and penalizing Chinese entities that launch them.

Anthropic's letter to lawmakers comes several weeks after the US government slapped an export control on its latest Fable 5 model, barring foreign individuals from accessing it and citing national security risks.

This is the latest blow to Alibaba, which was also recently added to a Pentagon blacklist — a list of businesses the defense department linked to the Chinese military. On Tuesday, Alibaba sued the US government for this designation.

As of press time on Thursday, Alibaba's share price has dropped more than 4%.

Representatives for Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Michelle Obama says her husband, Barack Obama, inspired her to dream bigger and take risks.
• The former first lady said he gave her "the forward push" she didn't always have.
• "I think I would have had a beautiful life here, but I think it would have been smaller," she said.

Michelle Obama says her husband, Barack Obama, has always challenged her to dream bigger.

In a joint interview with People on Wednesday, the Obamas reflected on their nearly 34-year marriage and what they've learned from each other over the years.

"We are each other's counterbalance," Obama said. "I mean, the truth is that I probably would have been someone who stayed more put, right?"

The former first lady said she grew up valuing stability and might have been reluctant to step outside her comfort zone on her own.

"I think I would have had a beautiful life here, but I think it would have been smaller. I think I wouldn't have had that kind of impact," she said.

Obama added that her husband's influence extended beyond their marriage.

"Because of my husband, because of who he is, he offered all of us — my mom, my family — just a broader sense of what's possible in life," she said.

She said Barack Obama provided "the forward push that sometimes some of us don't have." That influence was behind some of the earliest "uncomfortable steps" she took in her career, including her decision to leave a corporate law firm, she said.

"I think it's been good for me to be a little shaken, to be pushed to do more than what I thought I could do," she added.

The former first lady has often spoken candidly about the dynamics that have helped her marriage last.

In a 2023 podcast appearance, Obama said she and her husband share different love languages. While she prefers acts of service and quality time, he usually expresses affection through words of affirmation and physical touch.

Despite those differences, Obama said a lasting marriage requires both people to keep showing up for each other. "I believe more of us have to be honest about the work that it takes to build a life with another person," she said.

Obama has also said playful teasing is one of her love languages. In a 2025 podcast appearance, she described it as "a love tap."

Prime Day is one of the few times of year you can find meaningful price drops on Dyson hair tools. This year Amazon has deals on multiple Supersonic hair dryers, the Dyson Airstrait, and an all-inclusive Airwrap kit.

Dyson's Airwrap i.d. feels surprisingly lightweight in hand, despite being packed with clinically researched Coanda technology (hence the $709.99 price tag). Today, you'll find it for $499.99 at Amazon — a rare $210 drop. However — if you want a more pared down Airwrap, there's a better deal over on Dyson's website: The Airwrap Origin is now $399.99.

I've used my Dyson Supersonic to style my 3B curls for almost five years, and to this day I stand by the splurge. The Supersonic Origin usually costs $400, but today you can find one for $279.99 at Amazon. Our new favorite hair dryer, the Supersonic Nural, is also on sale. It's typically only marked down this low for Black Friday, so today's a rare chance to score one for $327.49 compared to its usual $449.99.

For more of our favorite Dyson tools, see our guide to the best Prime Day vacuum deals. And for more discounts across Amazon, visit our main Prime Day deals hub.

My hairdresser used a Supersonic to style my hair in half the time it took me, so I eventually caved and bought my own. Now, I can't imagine using another. It's a lot to spend on any device, but I have too much hair and too little patience for anything else.

The Supersonic makes it easy to diffuse precise sections of my hair, and it uses a powerful digital motor to cut down on drying time. It's also lightweight, so I like to bring it with me when I travel.

Best Dyson Supersonic and Airwrap deals

There's an important distinction regarding today's Prime Day Airwrap deal. Your hair type may not need a whole kit complete with a serum and six styling attachments, which is what the Amazon exclusive Airwrap i.d. entails.

If your routine requires only some light styling and drying, go for the $400 Dyson Origin deal directly from Dyson. It's cheaper and still does the job.

Still, you likely won't find a better price on Dyson Supersonic hair dryers than today's Prime Day deals (at least until Black Friday). Freelance beauty writer Talia Ergas tested 10 hair dryers and had two Dysons in her final roundup: Her favorite travel option was the Dyson Supersonic r, named for its slim curved shape. Her best overall pick is the new Supersonic Nural, which uses a "Scalp Protect" mode to prevent heat damage.

FAQs on Dyson hair tool Prime Day deals

Is Prime Day a good time to buy a Dyson Supersonic or Airwrap?

We've seen the Airwrap for less on Dyson's website around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so this won't be your best or last chance to save. However, $279.99 is a notably low price for the Supersonic.

Is the Dyson Supersonic worth it?

Absolutely. As someone who's used a Supersonic for nearly five years, I've found that it preserves my hairstyle between washes for up to 2 days longer than other hair dryers do.

What is the best Dyson Airwrap dupe?

The Shark FlexStyle is on sale for $151 cheaper this Prime Day, and it's the next best thing to the Dyson Airwrap. It uses the same Coanda technology, although the soft-bristled brushes became frayed easier than the stiff bristles on the Airwrap.

Why is the Dyson hair dryer so expensive?

As we note in our Dyson hair dryer review, Dyson's research and the complex technology behind each device's development contributes to high price tags. That being said, we're confident that once you've invested in your own, you'll see why it's worth the splurge.

Shopping for more discounts today? Check out our roundup of all of the best Prime Day deals or browse Amazon's website for the full selection.

In the whirlwind of Prime Day, it's easy to get caught up in deals on the earbuds and hair care that have been sitting on my wish list since the holidays. But as I've taken stock of what I actually use in bulk on a weekly basis, it's clear that's where the real opportunity for saving lies.

Prime Day should be about the expendables: Paper towels, trash bags, dish soap, and the like. These are the "may as well" deals that I'm not particularly excited about, but will be thanking myself later for. And with Prime's free 2-day shipping, I'm saving myself a trip to Target, Whole Foods, or Costco in the long run.

If you're looking for additional discounts beyond bulk essentials, it'll be worth exploring our Prime Day deals guide. Our deal-hunting experts are rounding up the best sales across multiple categories, including tech, beauty, home, kitchen, and more. This year's Amazon Prime Day event runs until June 26, so you still have a couple of days to shop the sale (while supplies last).

The best Amazon Prime Day deals to buy in bulk

While I can allow overspending a little on a new desk for myself, I won't accept spending top dollar on a box of tissues (which my family and I will run through in less than a day anyway). Here are the everyday basics worth buying in bulk this Prime Day.

FAQs on buying in bulk for Prime Day

Is Prime Day a good time to buy in bulk?

Yes, if you're purchasing products you use regularly and would buy anyway. Household essentials, toiletries, and cleaning supplies are often among the strongest Prime Day values because they combine sale pricing with multi-pack discounts.

Which categories have the best bulk buy deals?

Paper products, cleaning supplies, personal care items, and pantry staples have the best deals. Paper products will give you the best return for your money because they don't expire and will be used consistently.

Should I choose "Subscribe & Save" if it's an option?

Amazon sometimes allows shoppers to stack Prime Day discounts with Subscribe & Save discounts, lowering the effective price further. Check your stock in a month and cancel future shipments if it turns out you don't run through as much as you expected.

Shopping for more discounts today? Check out our roundup of all of the best Prime Day deals, or browse Amazon's website for the full selection.

I'm traveling for a wedding soon, as many are this time of year. Luckily, the best Prime Day travel deals are aplenty. I consider myself somewhat of a gear nerd, with a belief that everything I need can fit in a backpack with the right configuration. Today, some of my favorite space-saving solutions are on sale.

This year's best Prime Day deals include discounts on the comfortable walking shoes, suitcases, organizers, and clever tech we already love and recommend. Below, you'll find the best Prime Day travel deals we've spotted so far, from staple luggage to small-but-useful upgrades for your next trip.

The best Amazon Prime Day deals on travel bags and toiletry pouches

Travel bags and toiletry pouches can make packing feel less chaotic, whether you're organizing makeup, skincare, chargers, or in-flight essentials. For more editor-tested picks, see our guides to the best travel makeup bags and best travel totes.

The best Amazon Prime Day luggage deals

Prime Day luggage deals are live, with discounts on carry-ons, checked bags, luggage sets, and travel organizers for every kind of trip. For more travel gear recommendations, see our guides to the best checked luggage and the best carry-on bags.

And see our full guide to the best deals you can score now in our article on the best Prime Day luggage deals.

The best Amazon Prime Day deals on travel apparel

From stretchy pants to splash-proof walking sandals, here's what our style editors are packing for summer getaways.

The viral Amazon dupe for Spanx's AirEssentials set is one of our favorite sweatsuits we've ever tried. Freelance style contributor Talia Ergas wears hers to feel put-together on busy travel days, saying "the stretchy, silky-soft, medium-weight fabric is much more expensive-looking than I anticipated."

We also found soft, wide-leg jeans as part of the best Levi's Prime Day deals. Style editor Gabrielle Chase says her Cinch Baggy Jeans are so comfortable, she almost forgets she's wearing denim.

The best Amazon Prime Day deals on travel toiletries

Travel toiletries are easy to forget until you're packing in a rush, so Prime Day is a good time to stock up on TSA-friendly essentials. For a great place to store these, see our guides to the best travel makeup bags and best toiletry bags.

The best Amazon Prime Day deals on travel tech

Travel tech is all about making the less glamorous parts of a trip easier, from staying charged to keeping track of your bags. Prime Day can be a smart time to upgrade the small essentials you'll use on every flight, hotel stay, or long day away from an outlet.

In our review of the Anker Nano Power Bank, our writer named it the best charger for travel.

Shopping for more discounts today? Check out our roundup of all of the best Prime Day deals, or browse Amazon's website for the full selection.

Finding the right pillow for your sleep style can make a big difference in how well you sleep, and on Amazon Prime Day is one of the best times to buy one. Not every Prime Day deal is worth your time, but after seven years covering Amazon sales and consulting price trackers, I've identified the best Prime Day pillow deals that genuinely are. Most of our picks for the best pillows have modest but meaningful discounts, and a few are near their lowest prices ever.

Now that I'm in my late 30s, I fully understand that what I sleep on really makes a difference in my entire day. Case in point: After waking up with neck and shoulder pain for a few consecutive days, I adjusted the filling in my Coop Sleep Goods Original Pillow until I found the right support. And boom — my soreness greatly dissipated overnight. For Prime Day, you can score 20% off my favorite pillow.

Read on for more pillow deals plus discounts on some of our favorite bedding, including mattress toppers, sheets, and comforters.

The best Amazon Prime Day pillow deals

Many of the top Prime Day pillow deals are on pillows that Business Insider editors have personally tested, including options from well-known brands like Casper and Purple. I've also included a couple of picks that I've personally tested.

Best for: Back sleepers, stomach sleepers

Why buy it: Our top pick for affordable pillows, the Beckham Hotel Collection Down Alternative Pillow is soft yet supportive. It has a breathable cotton cover that helps it stay cool while you sleep. While Amazon describes it as "overfilled" with an 8-inch loft, our tester reported that it has a "thin feel" that kept her head close to the mattress — and more aligned with her spine. Side sleepers may want to stack two of these pillows to maintain their alignment.

Why now: Beckham pillows always have a Prime Day deal, but it only lasts for the duration of the sale. In other words, if you're not buying them during an Amazon sale, you're basically throwing money away.

Best for: Back sleepers, side sleepers, stomach sleepers

Why buy it: Coop Sleep Goods put adjustable pillows on the map more than a decade ago, offering sleepers a chance to FIY (fill it yourself) with its Original Pillow. It takes a little trial and error to find your custom loft, but it's worth the experimentation, multiple Insider editors have confirmed. It's not super soft, but because it offers personalized support, we recommend this pillow to almost everyone — and have done so for years now.

Why now: The brand has been 20% off for the past several Prime Day deals. The only time you may find it cheaper is during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But if you're waking up with neck pain, that's too long to wait.

Best for: Back sleepers, side sleepers

Why buy it: An Insider editor once nicknamed Casper's pillow the "Goldilocks pillow" because it's not too firm, yet not too soft. It's actually two pillows in one, with a removable supportive inner pillow hidden inside a plush outer layer pillow. So it's sort of customizable, but nothing like the Coop Sleep Goods pillow. Its high loft makes it a good pick for side sleepers who want something a little squishier than memory foam.

Why now: The Casper Original doesn't go on deep sale often — the brand tends to rely on its reputation and relatively low prices for premium quality. This Prime Day price is a meaningful drop from what you'd pay most of the year.

Best for: Back sleepers, side sleepers, stomach sleepers

Why buy it: In addition to the Coop Sleep Goods pillows, I've had two Qutool Cooling Pillows on my bed for the past two years. Like the Coop pillows, they have adjustable memory foam fill to accommodate all sleeping positions, but unlike the Coop pillows, one side of this pillow is cooling, and its icy touch remains to this day. It doesn't totally stop me from sweating at night, but it definitely helps to regulate my body temperature.

Why now: This is a solid budget alternative to the Coop Sleep Goods adjustable pillows with the added bonus of cooling features. This pillow sees moderate discounts year-round, but Prime Day typically pushes it near its lowest price of the year.

Best for: Back sleepers, stomach sleepers

Why buy it: If letting your head sink into a plush, hotel-like pillow sounds like luxury to you, this is the pillow you should buy at Amazon Prime Day. FluffCo actually consulted hotel pillow manufacturers to achieve this feel. Our tester recommended getting the firm version with down feathers to make sure your head and neck are fully supported amid all that softness. One caveat: like any quality down pillow, it benefits from a quick fluff each morning.

Why now: The FluffCo pillow is on sale periodically, but its base price has been steadily increasing over the past few years. Prime Day gives you a chance to get it for lower than the price it debuted with.

Best for: Back sleepers, side sleepers, stomach sleepers

Why buy it: Down, down alternative, and memory foam are nowhere to be found in Purple's pillow. Instead, the Harmony pillow has a latex core surrounded by a honeycomb grid made of flexible gel, which is wrapped inside a moisture-wicking outer layer. All together, it's "ridiculously cooling, comfortable, and pressure-relieving," according to our tester. It comes in three lofts to satisfy side, back, and stomach sleepers.

Why now: The Purple pillow is one of the most expensive pillows Business Insider recommends buying. While this Prime Day deal isn't major, you should really take any chance you can get to grab the pillow for under $200 outside of Black Friday.

More of the best Prime Day pillow deals

If you haven't found your match yet, there are even more editor-tested pillows on sale for Prime Day. I also included a couple of pillows that are under $25 apiece yet still deliver comfort, support, and quality.

Coop Sleep Goods Cool+ Adjustable Pillow - $149 $119: Hot sleepers should pass on the brand's Original pillow and opt for the Cool+ instead. Mixed in with the cooling memory foam are proprietary gel-infused pieces that promote airflow and dissipate heat. One downside is that its MSRP is significantly pricier than the Original.

Casper Essential Pillow (2 pack) - $81 $60: The Essentials line is a legitimate step down in price without a significant drop in quality. Compared to the Casper Original, this version has a more streamlined design that eschews the 2-inch gusset, making it better suited to back and stomach sleepers.

FluffCo Down Alternative Pillow $109 $76: This is similar to the FluffCo feather pillow featured above, except that it's filled with down alternative. That makes it more affordable and a smart choice for a simple, high-quality pillow with soft, fluffy fill.

More Prime Day bedding deals we recommend

In addition to pillows, Prime Day has thousands of deals on all kinds of bedding, including sheets, mattress toppers, and comforters. Here are a few standout options we've personally tested that are now on sale at Amazon.

Brooklinen Luxury Percale Sheet Set (Queen) - $200 $138: Brooklinen makes some of our editors' favorite sheets. This deal on select colors and sizes is the lowest price you'll see all year, so it's a great time to snag the 100% cotton percale sheets for crisp, cool rest.

Tempur-Pedic Tempur-Adapt Mattress Topper - $349 $249: This topper offers the feel of a Tempur-Pedic bed without the hefty price tag of a mattress. Check this out if you have back pain.

Coop Sleep Goods Ultra Tech Mattress Protector - $59 $47: The best mattress protector we tested didn't let a drop of water in. The bamboo blend cover renders it both silent and invisible.

Rest Evercool Cooling Comforter - $229 $149: Hot sleepers need a comforter they won't toss off the bed during the night. Rest's comforter has a cool-to-the-touch feel that can ease night sweats.

Why you should trust my Prime Day recommendations

I've been covering Amazon sales as a shopping editor since 2019 (and personally shopping them for even longer), which has honed my ability to spot truly good, legitimate deals from both big brands and lesser-known labels. I've also tested dozens of home products over the years, including multiple pillows and bedding options. Finally, I started my career by reporting on New York City sample sales, giving readers the inside scoop on what's really worth it and what they should skip.

Prime Day pillow FAQs

Are Prime Day pillow deals actually worth buying?

Yes, if you know what to look for. While Prime Day is flooded with massive markdowns on cheap, no-name pillows, many are fake discounts on questionable products. To find a legitimate deal, focus on top-tier, tested brands that rarely go on sale. For example, the Coop Sleep Goods Original Pillow is showing a modest but rare discount right now.

How do I know if a pillow or bedding discount is a real deal?

First, ignore the slashed list price and look at the item's Price history. Real, record-low prices absolutely happen on Prime Day and we only include deals that meet the BI Reviews' team's deals standards.

Shopping for more discounts today? Check out our roundup of all of the best Prime Day deals, or browse Amazon's website for the full selection.

When people ask me what to buy for the kitchen on Amazon Prime Day, my answer is simple: the quantity of deals doesn't really matter — it's the quality. After covering every Amazon sale since 2019, I use these events to invest in kitchen products I'll use often, whether it's a durable kitchen appliance, a well-made tool, or an everyday essential I'll use for years to come.

Amazon offers hundreds of kitchen deals, all boasting their worthiness and quality. To find the best of the best, I had to dig deep. That's where I found Prime Day deals on the best kitchen brands, meaningful markdowns on the kitchen products BI Reviews has thoroughly tested, and savings on favorites from my own kitchen.

Below, my findings are organized into five categories, starting with the absolute best Prime Day kitchen deals. You'll also find deals for everyday cooking, coffee drinkers, and the sale's most worthy splurges. You'll also find a handful of worthwhile Prime Day deals under $50 to top off your cart.

Related: 99 actually good Prime Day deals

The top Prime Day kitchen deals

Le Creuset Dutch Oven

Le Creuset is the first name that comes to mind when I think of the best cookware. The brand's Dutch ovens are among my favorite pieces. The enameled cast iron is easier to maintain than its seasoned counterpart and makes an attractive stovetop feature.

As a shopping editor, I've been asked if Le Creuset deals are worth it at Prime Day, and generally, I think they are. Check the brand's Amazon storefront for the best Prime Day deals on grilling essentials, cookware sets, and more. They're often comparable to Black Friday prices, and the sale selection includes several multipurpose pieces like these. Keep in mind that discounts typically only apply to the core color range. If you're eyeing a seasonal color, you may need to pay full price. While Le Creuset is the gold standard, you can also score deals on cast iron pieces from Staub and Lodge.

Cuisinart ICE-30 Pure Indulgence ice cream maker

One of the best ice cream makers you can buy is at one of its best prices of the year, which I wouldn't expect at the start of peak ice cream season, when demand is high. It's much less expensive than the Ninja Creami, which makes highly customized treats but ultimately frustrated our reviewer. The Cuisinart, on the other hand, is simple to use and churns out 2 quarts in a half-hour, provided the metal bowl is frozen beforehand.

My tip is to leave it in your freezer at all times so you're ready to go when the ice cream-making mood strikes — that's what I do with the bowl of my Cuisinart ice cream maker, which still works well after nearly 15 years of use. Should it ever break, I'd replace it with the current model.

KitchenAid Artisan Series 5 Quart Tilt Head Stand Mixer

The only stand mixers worth your time are KitchenAid's. They last for decades with minimal upkeep, and with the breadth of available attachments, they can help you make almost anything. So far, I've only used mine for baking with the basic included attachments, and it's worth the money for that alone.

There are a lot of products that you should never buy at full price, and this is one of them. Prime Day's discount isn't the best KitchenAid deal I've ever seen, but it's still meaningful savings on a buy-it-forever product. And keep in mind that the stand mixer is only going to get more expensive in the future — when I bought mine in 2020 (at 20% off), it retailed for $350, which is 33% less than the current list price.

Prime Day deals on top kitchen tools

Pyrex Sculpted Tinted Glass Mixing Bowls With Plastic Lids

Pyrex is my food storage go-to. I own 19 of its glass containers, each with a colorful BPA-free lid. They keep food fresher for longer than my old plastic containers did, and are easy to keep clean. I've trusted their leak-proof seal to take soup to the office more times than I can count — and via public transportation, no less.

This is one of the best Prime Day Pyrex deals I spotted, and the brand's not often on sale outside events like these (save for clearance). With their bright colors and fluted texture, these containers are perfect for bringing a dish to a picnic or potluck.

Cookware upgrades

Caraway Cookware Set

Our former kitchen editor used this set in her own kitchen for more than 2 years, and it held up well. She likes the ceramic nonstick cookware's even heat retention (though they take time to heat up) and interchangeable lids, which fit her pots and pans from other brands. And while the included storage system isn't compatible with her small kitchen, she doesn't mind leaving the attractive saucepan on her stovetop.

Caraway usually sees its highest discounts during Black Friday, but not by much more than what I'm seeing at Prime Day. Before purchasing, it's worth your time to figure out where the storage rack would live in your kitchen, and where you'd store your cookware if it doesn't.

Our Place Titanium Always Pan Pro

Titanium cookware is lighter and easier to use than stainless steel, and it has a nonstick surface that won't wear down as quickly as traditional nonstick pans, though it's not quite as slick. Our Place's titanium pan is a winner for its patterned nonstick surface that can both could sear crusts to a crisp and delicately fry an egg during testing. Its high sides and high heat retention come in handy when baking, too.

Our Place is another "never buy full price" brand for me, and it reliably provides good discounts on Prime Day. My best guess is that you won't find it at a better price until November.

Cosori 9-in-1 TurboBlaze Air Fryer

"My favorite day-to-day air fryer is the single-basket Cosori TurboBlaze," said our food writer in her thorough guide to buying an air fryer. "I was shocked that it unseated our previous winner, the Instant Vortex Plus Air Fryer Oven. It was more consistent and also prettier to look at on the counter." At 6 quarts, it's a good size for most households.

I'll admit, I haven't had great experiences with air fryers so far. The one my partner brought over when he moved in is a dud — my clunky rental apartment oven heats tear-and-bake cookies faster. The idea of an easy-to-use air fryer is appealing, particularly when it's at its lowest price, according to the price trackers I consulted.

For coffee drinkers

Breville Barista Express Espresso Machine BES870XL

This is the best at-home espresso maker you can buy at Amazon Prime Day. Breville's Barista Express, the now-cheaper predecessor to the newest Barista Pro, is a 9.5-pound machine that quickly and reliably makes great-tasting espresso every time. It's a complete setup with grinders, steam wands, and beginner-friendly features that let you enjoy homemade coffee without barista-level skills.

Ninja DualBrew Pro

The versatile Ninja DualBrew Pro brewer can make full carafes, single servings, iced coffee, and concentrate for lattes and cappuccinos. The built-in fold-away frother adds extra value for coffee drinkers who like to make coffee-shop style beverages at home. Its Prime Day discount makes it a compelling all-in-one coffee solution under $200.

Moccamaster KBGV Select

If you're serious about your drip coffee, scoring 35% off the iconic Moccamaster KBGV is a rare discount that deserves your attention. Beloved for its durable build, simple one-switch operation, and consistently excellent drip coffee, this coffee maker brews a full 40-ounce pot in just 4 to 6 minutes and is available in several colors.

Kitchen deals under $50

The products in this section are affordable to begin with, so the Prime Day discounts listed here don't exactly translate to huge savings. Still, we think these deals are worth your time — not every high-quality purchase needs a big price tag.

Rubbermaid Brilliance 2-Compartment Meal Prep Containers: We recommend these meal prep containers for their two-chamber design and airtight lids that won't cause leaks on the go. The vented lids are safe for the microwave and dishwasher, but they require thorough drying before storage.

Yeti Rambler 12 oz Travel Bottle: I love using my 40-ounce water bottles, but they're too heavy to throw in a purse, and I don't chug water when I'm out and about like I do at the gym and around the house. This tiny Rambler is a perfect purse size, and the soft color is unique.

Nordic Ware Naturals Half Sheet Set: A simple way to improve your baked goods and roasted vegetables is to use a sheet pan that heats evenly, and Nordic Ware's sheet pans provide reliable heating every time they go in the oven. Their one downside is that they quickly show wear, despite cleaning easily.

OXO Good Grips Olive and Cherry Pitter: I don't often advocate for single-use devices, but I recently saw my friend use a cherry de-pitter so that her 2-year old son could safely eat the summer fruit, and it intrigued me — so I'm making an exception. In my child-free household, it would come in handy for desserts like pies and ice cream. Getting it at a discount is — dare I make the pun? — a cherry on top.

Why you should trust my Prime Day recommendations

Helping readers make smart shopping decisions is at the core of my career. I started out covering New York City's sample-sale scene, sharing which events were worth the time and money. Since 2019, I've written and edited shopping stories for every Amazon Prime Day event, and I've developed a strong sense for finding its real, true deals. In the past couple of years, I've focused more on kitchen content, testing and researching products, and writing guides for items like cast-iron skillets.

Shopping for more discounts today? Check out our roundup of all of the best Prime Day deals, or browse Amazon's website for the full selection.

It's no secret that MacBooks are excellent laptops, but they can be a bit costly at full price. That's why I'm tracking all the best Prime Day MacBook deals throughout this year's four-day sale event. So far, the discounts have been solid but nothing to get too excited about, with most MacBooks on sale for the same deal prices Amazon has been offering on and off for the last few months.

Right now, you can get the latest 13-inch MacBook Air for $950. Though this model has dipped to $900 before, that's still a solid $150 discount off its list price. Meanwhile, the larger 15-inch model is on sale for 11% off. Again, that's a solid price, but it's no different than the typical deal price Amazon has had since April. If you're looking for something with a little more power behind it, you can save at least $150 on the MacBook Pro.

I'll keep tracking MacBook prices through Friday night when the Prime Day event officially ends, so you can expect to see any new deals added here over the next few days. If you'd rather shop iPads, Apple Watches, and AirPods, you can find the top discounts in my guide to the best Prime Day Apple deals. Interested in sales other than Apple? Check out our massive Prime Day deals roundup, which covers everything from tech to home to style.

Best Prime Day MacBook deals

Is the MacBook Neo on sale for Prime Day?

The MacBook Neo is the brand's new budget-friendly laptop, delivering impressive performance for $599. Though I was hoping this model might get its first notable discount for Prime Day, Amazon has it listed at a modest $10 off its retail price. I'll update this roundup if the price drops, but it's looking like the Neo won't be getting a major deal for Prime Day. Still, even at full cost, the MacBook Neo is an excellent value and well worth considering if you're shopping for an entry-level laptop. You can learn more in our MacBook Neo review.

FAQs

Which MacBooks are the newest?

Apple's latest lineup of MacBooks includes various Air and Pro configurations, as well as the budget-friendly MacBook Neo.

Here's a full rundown of the core models available now. Just note that each MacBook is configurable with various storage and memory options.

MacBook Neo

• 13-inch MacBook Neo with A18 Pro (2026)

MacBook Air

• 13-inch MacBook Air with M5 (2026)
• 15-inch MacBook Air with M5 (2026)

MacBook Pro

• 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 (2025)
• 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro (2026)
• 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Max (2026)
• 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro (2026)
• 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Max (2026)

Is Prime Day a good time to buy a MacBook?

As I mentioned above, we're not seeing any major discounts on MacBooks for Prime Day, but there are still some decent sales on select models. If you've been planning on buying a MacBook, it can be a good time to purchase one since you can save at least $150 on multiple models. It's worth noting that Apple doesn't offer many discounts on its own website, so what you see listed on Amazon Prime is probably the best discount around right now.

Shopping for more discounts today? Check out our roundup of all of the best Prime Day deals, or browse Amazon's website for the full selection.