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Tesla earnings updates: Investors head into Q3 results with the stock up 10% in 2025 7:34 AM (31 minutes ago)

Earnings day is here for Tesla, and the stakes are high.

After a roller coaster ride for the stock in 2025, shares are now up 95% in six months, but even with such a massive gain, that only amounts to a rise of about 10% year-to-date.

Now, investors will get a sense of whether the rally that's taken hold in the latter half of the year can continue. They'll be laser-focused on updates on Tesla's robotaxi rollout, which many on Wall Street see as the justification for the EV maker's premium valuation.

There will also be questions about the outlook for vehicle sales after Tesla reported deliveries earlier this month that crushed estimates. However, with the federal EV tax credit now off the table, some have wondered if sales will wane in the coming quarters.

Tesla will publish its results shortly after the 4 p.m. ET closing bell, with the analyst call scheduled for 5:30.

RBC sets a $500 price target for Tesla stock on "sum-of-the-parts" methodology

Analysts at RBC have a price target of $500 for Tesla stock, representing 12% upside from Wednesday's price. Their thesis hinges on a "sum-of-the-parts" methodology that values the company on revenues related to all of its business units, with its auto unit ranked lower than things like AI and robots.

The bank's Tom Narayan upped his Tesla price target after speaking with the company's management team about production of its humanoid robot, Optimus, which they say has a total addressable market worth $9 trillion.

Morningstar wants updates on Robotaxis and cheaper car models

Morningstar's Dave Sekera thinks the big updates from the call will be around robotaxis, but news on the company's cheaper Model 3 and Model Y cars should also be on investors' radar. The company unveiled the lower-priced versions of its most popular cars earlier in October, and Wall Street is eager to hear if the move has stimulated more demand for Teslas.

Morningstar is relatively bearish on the stock.

"We think generally the market is overestimating the amount and speed of earnings growth here. We think that to some degree, the market is really pricing in Tesla more as an AI stock rather than as an operating company," Sekera said.

Wedbush says listen for the AI updates

The outlook for car sales is important, but AI is the bigger update that investors should be looking for from this report, Wedbush Securities' Dan Ives said this week.

"We continue to strongly believe the most important chapter in Tesla's growth story is now beginning with the AI era now here," Ives said. "It starts with autonomous then robotics as we believe the autonomous valuation is worth $1 trillion alone to the Tesla story over the next few years that will start to get unlocked over the coming months."

Wedbush has a $600 price target for Tesla stock, representing 37% upside from Wednesday's price.

Wall Street expects Tesla to report revenue of $26.3 billion, EPS of $.042

THIRD QUARTER

• Adjusted EPS estimate 54c (Bloomberg Consensus)
• EPS estimate 42c
• Revenue estimate $26.36 billion
• Gross margin estimate 17.2%
• Operating income estimate $1.65 billion
• Free cash flow estimate $1.25 billion
• Capital expenditure estimate $2.84 billion
  
  YEAR
• Production estimate 1.72 million
• Deliveries estimate 1.63 million
• Capital expenditure estimate $10 billion

Source: Bloomberg

Tesla recalls almost 13,000 Model Ys and Model 3s over risk of sudden battery loss 7:30 AM (34 minutes ago)

• Tesla recalled almost 13,000 Model Ys and Model 3s over battery pack contactors that may "suddenly open."
• When the contactor opens, the vehicle loses its ability to accelerate, per a NHTSA report.
• Tesla must physically replace the part, unlike many of its past recalls, which can be remedied with software updates.

If you recently bought a Model Y or Model 3, you might be impacted by the latest Tesla recall.

Tesla is recalling almost 13,000 Model Ys and Model 3s manufactured between March and August 2025. Tesla dealers were notified around October 15.

An estimated 1% of the vehicles experienced sudden power loss, according to a report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The culprit was a battery pack contactor that "may suddenly open due to poor coil termination connection," the highway safety regulator said.

"If the contactor opens when the vehicle is in drive, the driver loses the ability to apply torque to the vehicle using the accelerator pedal resulting in a loss of propulsion, which may increase the risk of a collision," the report read.

Drivers who have lost the ability to apply torque receive a visual warning telling them to pull over.

As of October 7, Tesla has identified 36 warranty claims and 26 field reports related to the contactor issue, the regulator said. The company is unaware of any incidents that have led to collisions, injuries, or fatalities, according to the filing.

While prompted by NHTSA, the recall is voluntary on Tesla's behalf. Tesla's field reliability team first flagged an issue getting vehicles from park to drive in August; in October, it agreed to the recall. Almost 8,000 Model Ys and over 5,000 Model 3s are believed to be affected.

While many of Tesla's past recalls have simply required an over-the-air software update, impacted customers this time around will have to bring their vehicles in to have the contactors replaced, but will not be charged.

Tesla's Cybertruck has also been subject to several physical recalls. The "apocalypse-proof" vehicle was recalled at least eight times since its 2023 launch. That includes the March recall, which affected over 46,000 Cybertrucks and warned that the exterior trim panel could detach while the vehicle is in motion.

NHTSA and Tesla have had a rocky relationship. In August, the agency announced an investigation into whether Tesla had incorrectly reported crashes involving its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems. The highway safety agency has launched multiple investigations into the automaker in the past.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was also known to get into "yelling matches" with NHTSA regulators, per a 2022 Washington Post report.

During Musk's cost-cutting push with the Department of Government Efficiency, NHTSA laid off 4% of its workers.

Ukraine just took a big step toward buying as many as 150 Gripen fighter jets built to battle Russia 7:26 AM (39 minutes ago)

• Ukraine and Sweden signed a letter of intent to export up to 150 Gripen fighter jets to Kyiv.
• The development on Wednesday brings Ukraine closer to obtaining the fourth-generation JAS 39 Gripen.
• The fighter jet has long been considered the ideal aircraft for Ukraine to battle Russia.

Ukraine just got a lot closer to acquiring the Swedish-made Gripen, a much sought-after fighter jet built for war with Russia.

Ukraine and Sweden signed a letter of intent on Wednesday to export up to 150 JAS 39 Gripen E fighter jets to Kyiv, a major potential arms acquisition that would dramatically help modernize the country's air force.

The Ukrainian Air Force primarily operates a fleet of aging Soviet-designed aircraft, though it has gradually acquired Western fighters, including the American-made F-16 and the French Mirage.

The Gripen, manufactured by Swedish aerospace and defense giant Saab, is widely regarded as an ideal fighter jet for Ukraine. The jet is designed to operate from austere airstrips, requires minimal maintenance, and was built to fight and survive against Russian-style threats.

Given the demands of the war, including dispersed air operations, these jets could serve as a new backbone for Ukraine's rapidly changing air force.

Pål Jonson, Sweden's defense minister, said Ukraine has asked for 100-150 Gripens, specifically the E variant of the aircraft. Stockholm only recently received the first batch of these planes. These jets represent a new-generation upgrade with a range of higher-end capabilities, including electronic warfare, a more powerful engine, and increased weapons capacity.

The Gripen E is considered a fourth-generation-plus aircraft that would advance Ukraine's air force. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he expects to receive the first Gripens as early as next year.

However, at an estimated $85 million apiece, funding for the fighter jets remains unclear.

I've been married to my husband for a decade. I wasn't prepared as a new military wife for how long he'd be gone. 7:24 AM (41 minutes ago)

• My husband was in Kuwait and I was in Minnesota when we received congratulations on our wedding.
• We've been married for 10 years now, but things like trainings and deployments have kept us apart.
• We get to keep our own identities while making time for each other.

My husband and I started our part-time military marriage the day we got married in two different countries. We were both at work (he in Kuwait and I in Minnesota) when we received emails on our phones congratulating us on our newlywed status. So began our life together as husband and wife.

In the 10 years since then, situations such as deployments, rotations, job opportunities, graduate school, courses, field exercises, travel, and training have kept us apart for about half of that time.

I didn't know how long he'd be gone

Before getting married, I hadn't realized how often military life requires service members to be gone. As a spouse, I had to be prepared for things to change and for my husband to be gone often — from last-minute training exercises to deployment date shifts. You learn to adjust plans, to be flexible, and, in my case, to figure out how to make the most of the time apart.

In those early years of our marriage, while living in Savannah, Georgia, we both focused on advancing our careers and studies. I worked on my teaching degree and studied abroad. As a pilot, he attended courses, participated in field exercises, and went on numerous late-night training flights, so our schedules were completely opposite. We were apart more than we were together. But because of this constant "ships in the night" lifestyle, we appreciated our time together even more.

We don't hold each other back from opportunities, even if they keep us apart

Our big shift came in 2019, just a few months after our first miscarriage. I was at a crossroads — I wanted to become a mother, I had a teaching job, but I also had a good chance of acceptance into the History Ph.D. program at the University of New Mexico. My husband was planning to apply for the military's Physician Assistant school, which would mean nearly two years of schooling in San Antonio.

We knew we could make the distance work if we both got into our respective schools, but what if we got pregnant again sometime in between, like we had wanted? His proposal was that if we had a baby, I would still go to school in New Mexico. He would either stay in California or go to San Antonio, both of which were within driving distance from Albuquerque. We would see each other as often as we could, while each pursuing our own higher education. I was accepted to UNM five weeks after I gave birth to our daughter.

So began our part-time marriage in the Southwest. We spent summers together in San Antonio, then spent the semesters apart. I flew with our daughter to surprise him on her first birthday. He came home for Christmas. I was a solo parent, but I had the support of my mother-in-law. I was happily taking classes and working toward my Ph.D., giving me back a part of my identity after becoming a mother.

We needed to be apart sometimes so that we could be better together

We targeted El Paso, Texas, as our next duty station after San Antonio, so that I could still attend classes. Every week, I would drive up with our 3-year-old daughter, drop her off with my mother-in-law, and then continue driving to UNM for graduate seminars. Two days later, we drove back to El Paso to see my husband. We did this for a full year, and I finished my coursework just in time to have our second baby.

Living in the Southwest meant that my husband was close to home. He went on a hunting trip with his father, attended a training course in Arizona, and visited his family often, sometimes with the kids to give me a break. Each trip meant more time apart, but in the midst of our busy lives, we also needed our own time.

In 2024, when we faced another nine-month overseas separation, we decided I would move to Spain with the kids for my dissertation research during the time apart. I took care of the visas, and we put our things in storage. We all left for Europe that fall — he for Poland, and the kids and I for Spain.

We saw my husband twice during that year in Spain, thanks to airline miles. Now, we are all back in the same country again. We're hoping to transition to a more full-time marriage next year, for the sake of the kids, but we are proud of what we've accomplished — both together and independently — in order to maintain our own identities and continue reaching for our goals throughout our marriage.

Best True Classic discount codes we've tested in October 2025 7:18 AM (46 minutes ago)

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When it comes to refreshing your wardrobe, it's easy to overlook the basics, but the right ones make all the difference. Fit, quality, and durability are key, and True Classic delivers on all three with its lineup of men's essentials. Even better, you can save on these everyday staples by using the best True Classic discount codes at checkout.

True Classic already offers great value compared to brands of similar quality, but there's no reason to pay full price. The right True Classic discount codes can unlock even bigger savings, with some offering an extra 10% off on top of existing promotions.

Our Reviews team has tested a wide range of men's basics, and True Classic consistently stands out. The True Classic Bomber Jacket earned a spot in our guide to the best men's bomber jackets, while the Classic Polo 3-Pack remains one of our top picks in our roundup of the best men's polo shirts.

To make saving easy, we've rounded up the best True Classic discount codes we've tested below so you can score the lowest possible price on your next order.

Today's best True Classic discount codes

Previous True Classic discount codes

Are there any other True Classic sales running at the moment?

You can find a full list of current markdowns on the "Clearance" page of True Classic's site anytime. As of the time of writing, the brand is running the following promotions.

Use True Classic discount codes on these items

You can use True Classic discount codes to save extra on items our style editors love. The brand's Bomber Jacket, which is one of our favorites for men, is currently on sale for $56 instead of the original $69.99. But when you apply the promo code VIP10 or NEW, you can lower the price by 10% to $50.40. Or, use the same codes on a value pack of Classic Polos, which is already on sale for $64 instead of the original $104.97, to lower the price even more to just $57.60. In total, you'll save almost $50. 

• Follow our Instagram page and WhatsApp channel on mobile to be the first to know about new deals, buying guides, and reviews

How to use True Classic discount codes

To start, add coupon-eligible items to your cart, then continue to checkout. On the checkout page, you can add a coupon by pasting the promo code into the "Discount code or gift card" text box and clicking "Apply." From there, continue the checkout process by entering your shipping and billing information before placing your order.

Can you stack True Classic discount codes?

True Classic doesn't allow coupons to be stacked together. Only one discount code may be applied per order.

True Classic discount code frequently asked questions

Does True Classic offer discounts for students, teachers, and the military?

True Classic offers a 20% discount for students, teachers, and military members. Eligible customers must verify their status to access the discount.

If you're a student or teacher, check out our roundups of the best student discounts and best teacher discounts for more ways to save from your favorite brands.

Does True Classic offer free shipping?

True Classic offers free shipping on orders of $99 or more after discounts are applied.

What is True Classic's return policy?

True Classic allows free returns in-store or via mail within 100 days of the original purchase. Items must be unworn and unwashed to be returned. You can start your return or exchange on True Classic's website.

Can I apply a True Classic discount code after placing an order?

If you forgot to add a promo code before placing your order, you can contact True Classic's customer service team with the coupon and order details, and they will be able to apply the code for you.

Can True Classic discount codes stack with other sales?

Most True Classic discount codes cannot be applied to sale or clearance items. There may be exceptions, though, so be sure to check the specific terms and conditions for the code you want to use.

Can I reuse a True Classic discount code?

Most True Classic discount codes are designed for one use only. However, there may be exceptions, so be sure to check the terms and conditions for the specific code you want to use.

Check out more men's style deals in our roundups of the best Madewell coupons and Abercrombie promo codes.

States aren't sending November SNAP benefits during the government shutdown. See where Americans depend on food stamps. 7:17 AM (48 minutes ago)

• Several states will be unable to pay November SNAP benefits during the government shutdown.
• 42 million Americans rely on SNAP for groceries.
• The acting SNAP director said benefit checks may be smaller in November.

States are preparing to hit pause on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as the government shutdown approaches its fourth week.

Pennsylvania and Texas warned that benefits wouldn't go out, barring a prompt end to the shutdown. "November 2025 SNAP benefits cannot be paid," an update from the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, "Starting October 16, SNAP benefits will not be paid until the federal government shutdown ends and funds are released to PA." A similar warning from Texas Health and Human Services confirms, "SNAP benefits for November will not be issued if the federal government shutdown continues past Oct. 27."

State governments in Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, Colorado, Florida, California, and more have issued similar warnings for beneficiaries. SNAP is federally funded but managed and distributed at the state level.

As the nation's largest food safety net, SNAP helps 42 million low-income Americans afford groceries. A pre-shutdown memo from the US Department of Agriculture says the program has enough in the bank to fully distribute October's checks, but a longer shutdown could mean beneficiaries see smaller benefit amounts or delayed checks next month.

"If the current lapse in appropriations continues, there will be insufficient funds to pay full November SNAP benefits," Acting SNAP Head Ronald Ward said in a letter to regional program directors. The letter, which is dated October 10, was seen by Business Insider.

Ward said the program is working on a "contingency plan," and directed states to delay sending their regular record of eligible SNAP households to vendors, which would give the program flexibility to delay or pause benefits next month if needed.

SNAP costs about $100 billion each year in federal funds to operate — which translates to monthly checks of roughly $25 to $1,700, depending on a household's income and number of members.

Some states have higher SNAP enrollment than others. Data collected by the US Department of Agriculture shows that about 12% of Americans were receiving benefits as of May 2025.

Stakes are high for low-income Americans

A disruption to SNAP funding could have devastating impacts for low-income individuals. The money can't be used to buy household goods, but it's often a lifeline to families that need a boost to afford essential groceries. The program's qualification threshold follows the federal poverty line — which is about $15,000 annually for a single person — but varies slightly by state.

"We still have birthdays to celebrate," Judith Murray, a parent who receives $1,174 in monthly SNAP for her seven-person family, previously told BI. "We still have Thanksgiving to do and other holidays. When you see me out there buying a birthday cake with my SNAP benefit card, just try to understand that I don't want to let my little ones down any more than you do."

The White House announced last week that it will funnel tariff revenue to bridge funding gaps for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) during the shutdown — though the program said November benefits are in jeopardy. The Trump administration has not made a similar commitment for SNAP and did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

When the shutdown ends, beneficiaries can still expect SNAP changes. President Donald Trump's spending plan, which he signed into law in July, will reduce funding for federal nutrition aid like SNAP by nearly $200 billion over the next decade. The plan will also require nondisabled adults without dependents to fulfill work requirements until they reach age 64 to qualify for aid, up from the current cutoff age of 54. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that over 2 million Americans could lose SNAP coverage with this adjustment.

With Senate Republicans and Democrats still in a stalemate over healthcare funding, it's unclear when the government will reopen. The longest-ever shutdown in 2018 lasted 35 days. At the time, SNAP avoided a lapse in benefits by paying funds early, causing a longer-than-usual gap between checks. It's unclear if the program will adopt the same strategy in 2025.

Money for other safety net programs, like Medicaid and Social Security, are funded separately from SNAP and will be distributed as normal.

This story has been updated.

I visited Lisbon for the first time. Though I did a few things right, there's a lot I wish I'd known before I left. 7:04 AM (last hour)

• I made mistakes on my first trip to Lisbon, but I also got a few things right.
• I'm glad I did a guided day trip to Sintra and tried a tram, even though it wasn't very efficient.
• Visiting in late winter was a smart move to dodge crowds, but I wish I'd spaced out our itinerary.

My dad and I went to Lisbon on a last-minute whim in February.

We landed with no real plan beyond "eat, walk, repeat," which the Portuguese city rewarded — and then promptly humbled us with hills, staircases, and a few rookie mistakes.

This is the playbook I wish I'd had: what mattered on the ground for a first visit, where we accidentally nailed it, and how I'd structure the days if I could do it again.

It's important to wear the right shoes and give yourself extra time to navigate hills.

Lisbon's beauty stacks vertically. I learned to start days "up" and wander "down," saving energy and time.

When it rains, those calçada stones turn slick. Grippy shoes helped us get around, but the real hack was planning routes that flowed downhill.

Also, pad your itinerary because Lisbon's miles are sneaky. Everything seemed close by until we came across a staircase.

Eventually, we started adding a buffer between activities and stopped trying to pinball across the city. One great meal, one big sight, one slow neighborhood wander — that's the winning tempo.

Rideshares felt shockingly cheap, so we used them to avoid a lot of steps.

We couldn't believe how inexpensive Ubers were in Lisbon, so we took them daily. We usually spent 5 or 8 euros to get just about anywhere in town, even if the ride took 15 minutes.

For us, the ideal setup was taking an Uber up to a neighborhood, then walking our way down through cafés, shops, and viewpoints. It preserved our glutes for the fun stuff without making us feel lazy.

The trams were cool, but they weren't the most efficient mode of transportation.

The vintage cars are adorable and fun to ride, but I found them to move quite slowly. They're not ideal if you're trying to cross town on a tight schedule.

We rode them when we weren't in a rush — otherwise, we walked or grabbed those wonderfully cheap Ubers.

If you want to grab one, try the yellow Tram 28. It's known for its scenic route through iconic neighborhoods like Graça, Alfama, Baixa, and Estrela.

Some of the famous pastry shops are great, but you don't need to wait in line to get tasty tarts.

On our trip, we made sure to try the area's famous pastel de nata tarts. One night, we got them at the famous pastry shop Manteigaria.

Though the place is popular, we were able to head right inside after dinner without waiting in line. The tarts were warm, creamy, and perfect.

We also had lovely versions of the treat at the famous Pastéis de Belém. Both places lived up to their hype, and I suggest visiting them.

But don't be afraid to try a lesser-known spot — especially if there are long lines to get in. Throughout our trip, we stopped at several different neighborhood pastelarias to grab pastel de nata, and the tarts were all tasty.

However, I learned not to believe all of the hype I see online about certain eateries.

I'd seen a viral TikTok of someone saying the pork sandwiches at As Bifanas do Afonso were life-changing, so I told my dad this was a must-visit spot on my list.

Once we arrived on a Monday afternoon, we were met with a wildly long line. My dad's immediate reaction was to suggest going somewhere else, but I talked him into staying.

It took us about 45 minutes to make our way to the counter and place our food order. After all that, we didn't even think the sandwiches were particularly special or memorable.

Ultimately, the time we spent in line is just time we could've spent seeing more of the city. My dad will never let me live this one down.

Now, I know not to believe all the hype I see online and will reconsider how long I'm willing to wait to try any new restaurant.

It turns out that late winter is a perfect time to visit Lisbon.

We visited Lisbon at the end of February and felt like we'd hit the jackpot: blue skies, mild temperatures in the 60s Fahrenheit, and only a few drops of rain one afternoon.

Since our trip wasn't during Lisbon's peak, busiest season, the city also felt breathable and not overly crowded.

We didn't have to wait in long lines for certain attractions and felt had room to actually enjoy the streets without elbowing through tour groups.

Knowing a few dining basics (and recommendations) can save you time and money.

While eating our way through Lisbon, we picked up a few helpful tips.

First of all, it's common for servers to offer to bring couvert (bread, olives, and cheese that you can nibble on before your meal) to your table. However, keep in mind that they typically are not free.

Turn them down if you don't want them added to your check.

Also, if you want to try as much as possible without ordering too much food, lean into petiscos, which are Portuguese small plates.

And if sardines are in season, order them once and thank me later — just be aware that the bones can make mealtime a lot of work.

Sintra was perfect for a day trip, and I'm so glad we paid extra for a guided tour.

During our trip, we made plans to visit Sintra, a town located at the foot of Portugal's Sintra Mountains, about half an hour from Lisbon.

We booked a full-day guided tour with pickup and drop-off in Lisbon that stitched together a greatest-hits loop: Sintra's Pena Palace, Quinta da Regaleira, Cabo da Roca, and a stroll through the town of Cascais.

The real win wasn't "seeing more," it was not having to juggle the schedules of trains, buses, and shuttles, or worry about grabbing tickets — the guide sequenced everything and kept us moving.

I'd definitely book this day trip again for how easy it made navigating all of the logistics.

GM just revealed 2 AI updates coming to its cars 7:01 AM (last hour)

• GM announced that "eyes-off" highway driving is coming to its electric Cadillac Escalade SUV in 2028.
• The company is also integrating Google Gemini and conversational AI into its vehicles next year.
• GM said its eyes-off technology will allow drivers to read or respond to texts, and relies on LiDAR technology.

While many cars today encourage you to keep your eyes on the highway, General Motors has unveiled a new "eyes-off" self-driving feature that will allow the opposite.

Arriving in 2028, GM said the new eyes-off driving will be offered in its Cadillac Escalade IQ, an electric SUV, during highway driving. GM said that as long as there's turquoise lighting on the dashboard and outside mirrors signaling the system is working, drivers can read or go through their inboxes "while the vehicle handles the drive."

The upcoming feature is part of GM's roadmap to autonomous driving, which CEO Mary Barra outlined at a Wednesday event in New York.

While the eyes-off feature will be limited to highways when it arrives, Barra described GM's vision for a fully autonomous future.

"Let's fast forward a few years. Imagine you step into your vehicle, you push a button, and it drives you to the office. You catch up on work, send emails, or watch an episode of your favorite show," Barra said at the GM Forward event.

"The car drops you off, and it notices it's time for a break inspection, and heads to the dealership," Barra said. "Then it goes to get your dry cleaning, take out for dinner, and it comes back in time so you can drive your kids to their soccer game."

Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson said at the event that GM is starting with eyes-off driving on the highway "because that's where autonomous technology delivers the greatest immediate impact." Commuters, he said, spend on average five hours each week doing "monotonous driving."

GM also said that drivers will be able to chat with AI as soon as next year, when the company integrates Google Gemini into its vehicles. Drivers can send messages and plan detailed routes by talking to the AI, and the company plans to integrate its own custom AI system into its vehicles, which will give information on things like maintenance needs and the best routes.

The future system could, for example, coach a driver through parallel parking, queue up an audiobook, or flag an unusual vibration and give directions to a nearby servicing center, senior vice president of software engineering David Richardson said.

GM's announcement comes on the heels of better-than-expected earnings on Tuesday. The stock for the country's biggest automaker ticked slightly up following the news, and is trading up more than 25% since the start of the year.

GM's eyes-off technology relies on Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, a sensor that scans a vehicle's environment with laser beams and measures the time it takes to get a return signal. Waymo's robotaxis use LiDAR, but Tesla's vehicles don't. Instead, Tesla uses a vision-only system that relies solely on cameras. Elon Musk has repeatedly criticized LiDAR, calling it unnecessary and expensive.

Tesla's stock was trading down more than 1% after the announcement.

At the GM Forward event, the company also said its engineers are developing software for collaborative robots, or "cobots," that are hitting the ground at assembly plants this year.

"These are robots designed to work side-by-side with people," Anderson said, adding that, ideally, the cobots will eventually be able to "adapt to any role."

Victoria and David Beckham have been married for over 25 years. Here's a timeline of their relationship. 7:00 AM (last hour)

• David and Victoria Beckham met in 1997 when they were both famous in their respective fields. 
• The couple got married in 1999 and has four children together. 
• They have spoken about their family in Netflix docuseries like "Beckham" and "Victoria Beckham."

Victoria and David Beckham first connected as they were both building their respective careers. Decades later, they're still married.

The couple has also given the public peeks into their lives through Netflix documentaries "Beckham," which aired in 2023, and, most recently, "Victoria Beckham," a three-part series that premiered earlier this month.

Here's a look at their relationship through the years, from when they began dating to where they are now.

1997: Victoria and David met for the first time.

The two first crossed paths in the Manchester United players' lounge in early 1997.

At the time, Victoria was better known as Posh Spice of the Spice Girls, and David was on the brink of global stardom for his impressive European soccer career.

According to Victoria, she knew David was the one right away.

She told British Vogue in 2016, "... Love at first sight does exist. It will happen to you in the Manchester United players' lounge — although you will get a little drunk, so exact details are hazy."

January 24, 1998: The pair announced their engagement during a press conference.

About a year after they met, the couple announced their engagement in a press conference. 

The diamond engagement ring David presented to her was the first of 15 that he's given his wife throughout their marriage, according to a 2020 story from Elle.

March 4, 1999: Their first child, Brooklyn, arrived exactly four months before their wedding.

After announcing their engagement, the couple was expecting their first child.

Their son, Brooklyn, was born on March 4, 1999.

July 4, 1999: They tied the knot in Ireland that summer.

Exactly four months after their son was born, Victoria and David were married at Luttrellstown Castle near Dublin.

September 1, 2002: The couple welcomed their second son, Romeo.

Three years after welcoming their first child, Victoria and David had their second son, Romeo.

July 1, 2003: David transferred teams and relocated his family to Spain.

After starting his soccer career on English teams, David transferred to Real Madrid in 2003, which meant his family of four had to move to Spain. 

April 2004: Reports started circulating that David was cheating on Victoria.

In the 2023 Netflix docuseries "Beckham," the couple opened up about the difficult period of their marriage. 

"I don't know how we got through it in all honesty," David said. "Victoria is everything to me. To see her hurt was incredibly difficult … what we had was worth fighting for."

Victoria called it "the hardest period" of their marriage, adding, "It felt like the world was against us … and we were against each other."

February 20, 2005: Cruz was born.

Victoria and David's youngest son, Cruz, was born while they were living in Spain. He was given the middle name David as an homage to his father.

July 1, 2007: The entire family packed up and moved to Los Angeles.

After spending a few years in Spain, Beckham signed a new contract with the LA Galaxy, so the whole family moved to the US. 

In 2017, Brooklyn told Capital FM that Tom Cruise threw the Beckhams a "huge" welcome party when they moved to Los Angeles. 

January 2009: David and Victoria modeled together for Giorgio Armani.

In 2009, fashion legend Giorgio Armani enlisted Posh and Becks to model Emporio Armani's spring/summer underwear and lingerie campaign together. 

April 29, 2011: The couple attended Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding.

Not long after confirming her fourth pregnancy, Victoria and David attended Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding.

July 10, 2011: The couple welcomed their first daughter, Harper.

Victoria and David welcomed their daughter, Harper, about a week after their 12th wedding anniversary.

May 2013: The family moved back to England after David announced his retirement.

In May 2013, David announced he would be retiring from soccer after 21 years on the field, according to The New York Times.

That same year, the family left Los Angeles and returned to London.

January 29, 2017: David shared that the couple renewed their vows in a private ceremony.

David told BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs that the couple has renewed their vows since their 1999 wedding. 

"It was a lot more private with only six people there in our house," he said. He didn't share exactly when the renewal ceremony took place. 

June 8, 2018: Victoria's team silenced divorce reports.

When reports started circulating that the couple was getting divorced, Victoria's reps told Us Weekly, "There is no impending statement, has been no statement and there is no divorce."

The statement continued, "What nonsense. Fake news fueled by social media. Embarrassing for the sloppy outlets who have chosen to write such rubbish."

July 4, 2018: They celebrated their 19th wedding anniversary.

The two celebrated their 19th wedding anniversary with posts on their Instagrams.

Victoria simply captioned her photo of the two of them, "19 years!!! X I love u so much x."

David emphasized how much the two have changed in 20 years with the caption, "19 Years WOW ... This time 19 years ago I was dressed from head to toe in purple ... Happy anniversary to the most amazing wife & mummy ... Love You x"

September 3, 2018: The couple posed with their whole family for the cover of British Vogue.

When Victoria landed the cover of British Vogue in October 2018, her husband and children joined her for the cover shoot.

The fashion mogul shared the final cover photos on her Instagram.

July 4, 2019: The couple celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary.

To celebrate 20 years of marriage, Victoria and David took a private tour of the Palace of Versailles in France.

Victoria documented the day in an Instagram post. Part of the caption read, "The most incredible visit on a very special day ... Can't believe it's been 20 years! So many kisses xxx"

July 4, 2021: The couple celebrated their anniversary by posting some throwback photos.

In honor of their 22nd wedding anniversary, the pair shared a few throwback photos with heartfelt captions.

Victoria posted a video montage of some of the couple's sweet behind-the-scenes moments together over the years with the caption, "I love you David. Happy Anniversary."

David posted a series of photos showing off the pair's many matching looks with the caption, "22 years later, still matching outfits. Happy anniversary love u so much and thank you for giving me our amazing kids so we can all wear the same."

February 1, 2022: David revealed that his wife eats the same meal over and over.

On an episode of iHeart's "River Cafe Table 4," David discussed his wife's eating habits throughout their marriage. 

"I get quite emotional about food and wine. When I'm eating something great, I want everyone to try it," he said. "Unfortunately, I'm married to someone that has eaten the same thing for the last 25 years. Since I met Victoria, she only eats grilled fish, steamed vegetables. She will very rarely deviate away from there."

He went on to say that the only time he remembers her eating something from his plate was when she was pregnant with their daughter, Harper. 

"... It was the most amazing thing," he said. "It was one of my favorite evenings. I can't remember what it was, but I know she's not eaten it since."

October 4, 2023: The Beckham family graced TVs around the world in the Netflix docuseries "Beckham."

According to Variety, David and Victoria signed a deal with Netflix for a fly-on-the-wall documentary series in 2020.

The four-part show, which documents the rise and successful career of David, hit Netflix on October 4, 2023. The whole family came together to celebrate the UK premiere of the series. 

April 20, 2024: David helped Victoria celebrate her 50th birthday.

David, Victoria, and several of their famous friends got together in London to celebrate the former Spice Girl's 50th birthday. 

At one point, David was even photographed giving Victoria a piggyback ride as they exited the venue.

According to People, Victoria thanked her husband on her Instagram stories after the party, writing, "I still can't believe how special you made me feel on this evening, on my birthday, this entire week, and all of our magical years together! Thank you. I love you so much!"

May 2025: Victoria helped David celebrate his 50th birthday.

David turned 50 on May 2 and celebrated with several parties (including one with A-list guests like Tom Cruise and Gordon Ramsay) and lots of heartfelt Instagram posts.

"Feeling very lucky to round off an amazing week celebrating my 50th with incredible friends , I think you can tell by my smile I enjoyed this... Thank you to everyone and especially my wife @victoriabeckham… We are still laughing and dancing after all these years," he wrote in one.

In another, he shared how grateful he is for his career, family, and wife. "… My wife and best friend of 28 years and my beautiful children Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz & Harper you are the reason I get out of bed each day," he wrote in part of one post.

An earlier version of this story was published on February 2, 2022, and it was most recently updated on October 22, 2025.

I went on a weeklong trip to Italy. Here are the 4 best things I did and the 2 I'd skip next time. 6:54 AM (last hour)

• This spring, I spent a week traveling through Italy.
• One of my favorite parts of the trip was a DIY food tour through Bologna.
• Next time, I'd skip the crowds in Pisa and visit smaller cities such as Lucca or Siena instead.

With its picturesque coastline, mouthwatering cuisine, and rich history, Italy has so much to offer.

That's why, after moving to the UK in 2021 and visiting more than 20 European countries, I've continued to return to Italy.

This year, my husband and I spent a week traveling through Tuscany and the surrounding regions in search of culinary experiences and a countryside escape. Here are the four best things I did during my trip and the two I'd skip next time.

Hands down, one of the best things I did was organize a DIY food tour in Bologna.

In addition to being the capital of the Emilia-Romagna region, Bologna is often called the food capital of Italy, thanks to its history as the birthplace of iconic Italian dishes such as ragù and mortadella.

So, it only felt right to explore the city through the lens of food. However, the more food tours I researched, the more I was drawn to craft my own. I liked that a DIY food tour was more affordable and allowed us to personalize our culinary pursuits.

We began the day at Paolo Atti & Figli to sample their torta di riso (rice cake) and then enjoyed mortadella sandwiches at Crock, tagliatelle antica ricetta (a delicious pasta dish) at Ragū, and gelato at Cremeria Santo Stefano.

Later, we ended the day with tortellini at Sfoglia Rina, departing Bologna with full stomachs and an ever-growing list of dishes to try upon our return.

I loved taking a bike tour through Tuscany.

The Tuscan region of Italy is known for its vineyards, rolling hills, and Chianti wine (a type of dry red).

In an effort to explore the countryside, we decided to embark on a bike tour hosted by We Like Tuscany. The company offered a range of tours from beginner-friendly options to multiday biking adventures, and I appreciated that some routes also included local food and winery stops.

Not only was this immersive experience a great way to see the region and try a Chianti or two, but it also allowed us to venture off the beaten path — and fit in a workout.

I'm glad I included time in our schedule to wander.

It's so easy to overplan for a vacation, but in my experience, including time to wander is one of the best things you can do for yourself.

Of course, travel rarely goes according to plan, and leaving some extra time in the itinerary has not only helped reduce fatigue, pressure, and stress, but it's also often led to unique discoveries.

Some of the best, most memorable moments from this trip were also the most unexpected. In Florence, we enjoyed a last-minute meal at Mirò Ristorante Pizzeria (which was recommended by a local) and watched a sunset performance on the Ponte Santa Trinita.

Including time to wander and explore gave us a chance to truly soak in the atmosphere and feel more connected to Italy and its people.

I'm happy we visited more remote locations in addition to bigger cities.

I enjoy visiting different regions in a country because they often exhibit distinct cultural characteristics and offer different activities.

In our experience, our time in cities was more fast-paced and centered on specific attractions and events, while our time in remote areas was restful and focused on leisure and nature.

By visiting both types of locations, we avoided having our vacation feel monotonous and gained a multifaceted perspective of Italy.

Next time, however, I'd skip the crowds in Pisa.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is often included on the short list of the country's must-see destinations, and though it's a sight to behold, I think the city itself has become a tourist magnet.

Since it was my first time visiting Pisa, we spent an afternoon seeing the tower and the surrounding museums and wandering through the city.

But next time, I'd skip Pisa altogether and revisit smaller cities such as Siena. There, we climbed a 14th-century tower called the Torre del Mangia and relaxed in the Piazza del Campo.

I'd also recommend visiting Lucca, where we walked around the city walls and enjoyed one of the best meals on our trip: ravioli at In Pasta Cibo e Convivio.

I don't think sightseeing indoors in Cinque Terre is enough to capture the full experience.

When visiting a destination such as Cinque Terre, which boasts striking natural landscapes and picturesque beauty, I say skip the indoor activities altogether.

Attractions like museums and historical monuments are plentiful throughout Italy, but Cinque Terre's hiking trails, cliffside walks, and pebbly beaches are what make these five towns so special, in my opinion.

By prioritizing activities that align with the destination's unique features, I think you'll gain a greater appreciation for the place and have a more authentic experience.

This story was originally published on June 24, 2025, and most recently updated on October 22, 2025.

I compared Costco in the suburbs and the city. The layouts were the same, but the experiences felt completely different. 6:40 AM (last hour)

• As a New York City resident, I've been hesitant about becoming a Costco member.
• I finally joined last year and decided to compare city and suburb locations.
• The two stores had similar layouts but there were some major differences between what they stocked.

As a child on Long Island, New York, I grew up going to one wholesale club with my parents: BJ's.

I loved running around the store, which seemed to carry anything you could ever want. Then, when I was in college in New Orleans, I'd tag along with friends to the Costco there, which was just as fun.

In the summer of 2024, I finally signed up to Costco myself, joining the 2.5 million other millennials and Gen-Zers who have decided it's the newest "hottest club."

In an earnings call at the end of last month, Costco's CFO Gary Millerchip said nearly half of the wholesaler's new members between June and August were under 40. He credited Costco's online sign-up option as a key driver.

I now live in New York City and, after joining Costco, assumed I would order products online, but that was before I learned there was a Costco in Manhattan. I couldn't quite grasp the concept of a Costco — which are more common in suburban areas — in the city: How could you transport the giant bulk items without a car?

I also wanted to know if a New York City Costco is the same as the suburban Costco I've visited in the past. Did both locations sell the same items? And would I see people on the city streets lugging giant packs of toilet paper?

In September 2024, I paid two Costcos a visit: the one in East Harlem, and one in the Long Island town of Westbury, which is about 33 miles outside New York City.

Here's what it was like to shop at both locations.

There are eight Costco locations on Long Island. When I visited the Westbury location on a Tuesday, the parking lot was packed.

The shopping carts were in front of an attached but separate liquor store. In New York, grocery stores can't sell hard alcohol.

After flashing my membership card and being waved in by an employee, I saw just how large this location is. It felt like an airplane hangar.

One of the first sections I saw was a technology section with laptops and tablets.

There are also plenty of huge TVs.

From across the floor, I could see a hearing-aid center, which I didn't even know Costco had.

This location was also offering flu shots.

I wandered through the aisles, struck by how huge this place and its products were.

It was selling gift cards for AMC, Instacart, and DoorDash. There was also a Topgolf section — there's one Topgolf location on Long Island.

In the center of the store was the clothing section. It seemed endless, with sweaters, jackets, pants, activewear, and more.

I was immediately drawn to the Costco merch. I ended up purchasing a sweatshirt for $19.99.

The furniture section was also in the center, but Costco devotees say the layout changes constantly, making shopping a "treasure hunt."

Source: Business Insider

I was taken aback to see that a giant couch was for sale. Would I find the same selection of furniture at the Manhattan store?

Nearby was a large table filled with books. In June 2024, publishing execs said Costco would stop selling books except around the holidays, but clearly, this store didn't get the memo.

Source: Business Insider

It wasn't just dingy paperbacks, either. I could've bought the Pulitzer Prize winner "Demon Copperhead" for $12.99.

There was a sizable outdoor section with tents, fire pits, a blow-up tub, and more.

Another surprise was the garden section. There were rows of trees, mums, and other flowers.

There were even delicately wrapped orchids.

And, of course, as it's fall, there were bins and bins of pumpkins.

Fittingly, the Halloween costumes were nearby. There weren't that many options to choose from.

But the decor is where Costco really shines. I walked by a 7-foot-tall werewolf and almost jumped.

There was more candy than at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

There was also a lot of Disney merchandise for Halloween, which I didn't expect.

For example, there were huge "Nightmare Before Christmas" plushies. That's my hand for scale.

Even though it was only September when I visited, a lot of Christmas decorations were already out.

Like, a lot.

There were also lawn ornaments, like this 3-foot penguin.

If you ever need to wrap presents, Costco is the place to go.

As I made my way toward the back of the store, I started seeing more food and drinks, like these crates of beer.

There's a bakery, a rotisserie section, a deli, and another meat section at the back of this location.

There are aisles and aisles of meat products.

I am a single person who lives with a roommate. It would take us months to get through all of this pork shoulder.

I have a car available on Long Island, so it would be relatively easy and quick for me to transport all this refrigerated food home — but not in NYC.

There was also a separate produce room.

It was filled with crates of fruits and veggies. The large containers of strawberries would rot before I could eat them all.

There's also a milk and eggs room. This area was particularly crowded during my visit.

As I exited with my meager single bag of purchases, I wondered how I would fare at the NYC location.

As I walked to my car, I noticed people loading up their trunks with cartfuls of items. Would — and could — people be doing that in the city, too?

A week later, I visited the East Harlem Costco, one of four Costcos in New York City. It's inside the East River Plaza shopping complex.

The multi-level mall also has an Aldi, Bob's Discount Furniture, and Planet Fitness.

There is a parking garage that all shoppers share, but it's not free. Less than a quarter of Manhattan households have a car anyway.

Source: Hunter Urban

I took the bus to get to Costco. On my way up, I was already thinking about how difficult it would be to transport multiple bulk items without a car.

On my way there, I noticed people pushing carts like this one toward the store. It's the easiest way to transport groceries in NYC.

Unlike at the location in the suburbs, I had to physically scan my membership card to get in.

Source: Business Insider

The store was generally set up the same way as the Long Island location, down to the electronics section being the first thing I saw.

There was an eyeglasses and eye-exam area, just like in Westbury.

The gift cards were in the same spot, but there were different options. I spotted cards for Mighty Quinn's, a New York-based barbecue chain.

There were also gift cards for Subway and Crumbl, a cookie chain.

Walking around, I was struck by how annoying it would be to cart a case of water bottles back to my apartment. Plus, I didn't have space for them.

The ceiling at this Costco was much lower, making it appear smaller, even though the location is 110,000 square feet.

Source: The New York Times

The furniture selection was much more limited than in the suburban store. There were no giant couches in sight.

This was the totality of the outdoor section: two types of lawn chairs.

However, this Costco offered Jets and Giants merch, which the Long Island one did not.

There was no plant section — just a small display of pre-made bouquets. It makes sense since most people in NYC don't have space to garden.

Both locations had Halloween decorations.

But there were some slight differences. This Mickey-shaped pumpkin was only for sale in NYC.

I found the Harlem costume selection to be similarly lacking.

Christmas items were out here, too.

The same ornaments I bought in Westbury were here, too — and for the same price.

There was also a separate produce room.

And a room for dairy, milk, and eggs.

The meat and bakery sections were almost identical. I even spotted the "cake box" that Costco fans love.

Source: Business Insider

This location had self-checkout, which I hadn't noticed at the Long Island store.

Overall, this store was smaller and lacked some items I'd seen in the suburbs, like big furniture, outdoor items, books, and plants. It makes sense that an urban store wouldn't stock most of these.

I might keep my Costco membership so I can get some items shipped, but buying in bulk seems difficult for anyone living in New York City.

Editor's note: A version of this story was published in October 2024 and was updated in October 2025.

The 5 items you should replace in your home this fall, from an interior designer 6:11 AM (last hour)

• As an interior designer, I believe fall is the perfect time to make sure you have a cozy home.
• You'll be inside more often, so it's imperative to get rid of clutter and outdated decor.
• I recommend ditching stiff throw pillows, mismatched vases, and bland wall art this season.

For most people, fall means cozy quality time with loved ones, fanciful feasts, and early holiday gatherings.

However, to truly enjoy the warmth of the new season, it's essential to have your home in order, free from clutter and unnecessary decor that may not be a good fit for your space. As an interior designer, I'm always telling clients that less is more.

So, how do you identify what to toss? Instead of focusing on fall themes, think of how you'll be using your space this season. If you plan to host dinner parties and intimate gatherings, consider organizing your living area to open up more space for loved ones.

On the other hand, if you're interested in transforming your home into a cozy retreat from the chilly weather, consider assessing which decor and furniture actually make you feel comfortable, and adjust from there.

If you're still lost on where to start, here are five decor items I often tell my clients to replace in the fall.

It's time to get rid of any throw pillows that aren't comfortable.

Chances are, your living room — and couch, specifically — will see more guests than almost any other room this fall.

This means now is the perfect time to swap out any old, outdated throw pillows for ones that make you want to hang out on the couch.

Adorning your seating areas with comfortable, sophisticated throw pillows will also make the space feel cozier for guests. I suggest bringing your space together with beige pillows; textured and plush ones will add visual interest and extra comfort.

Replace art that doesn't move you with pieces you actually enjoy looking at.

It's time to remove any art from your space that you've started to find dull. Instead, seek out paintings, framed prints or photos, and decorative objects that will spark conversation at holiday gatherings and living room cocktail parties.

Contrary to popular belief, your new decor doesn't have to scream "fall." Rather than shopping for seasonal artwork featuring autumn leaves and pumpkins, try to scour Etsy or local vintage shops for pieces you find interesting, thoughtful, and inviting.

I'd suggest keeping a warm color palette top of mind, but don't limit yourself. Given that you'll be spending more time at home as the weather gets cooler, you should feel comfortable and like your space accurately reflects you.

Swap out clutter on your bookshelves.

I am a person who loves a great display of sculptures, varied objects, books, and photos on floating bookshelves and beyond.

However, as a designer, I believe it's essential to take a measured approach to decorating your bookshelves and entertainment centers.

Are you overloading each space with decor that's not relevant or outdated? Probably. Do you need every tchotchke on your shelf? Probably not.

Instead of jam-packing your space with cute objects, consider paring down your decor for a sleek effect. Your guests will likely find it more calming — and you might, too.

Consider whether it's time for a new go-to vase.

It's extremely easy to accumulate a lot of mismatched vases over the years. Consider getting rid of the ones you never use, and instead, investing in a new statement vase you can keep on hand.

A large teardrop vase can inspire conversation among cocktails, while providing some visual interest — and helping your entire space feel more organized.

Swap out any fall decor that feels too on-the-nose.

I know, I know: The beginning of the holiday season is exciting, and decorative gourds can be cute. That said, I recommend staying away from holiday and fall decor that feels too specific and will only be relevant for a month or two.

It's more budget-friendly and sustainable to invest in seasonal touches that you'll want to keep. Instead of incorporating fall-themed decor within your space, opt for a tasteful fall wreath or a seasonally appropriate, pumpkin-scented candle.

Ultrawealthy families are pouring billions into private credit and real estate, but cutting back on early-stage startups 5:58 AM (2 hours ago)

• Ultrawealthy families in North America are favoring more steady incomes, research firm Campden Wealth found.
• Private credit and real estate now account for 29% of portfolios, the study found.
• Early-stage startup investing has fallen out of favor as families prioritize stability.

The richest families in North America are quietly reshaping how they invest their money — trading the high-risk thrill of startups for the steady pull of private credit and property.

As of August, private markets accounted for 29% of the average family office portfolio in North America, according to the North America Family Office Report 2025.

The report — produced by Campden Wealth, a London-based family office research firm, and RBC Wealth Management, the wealth management arm of the Royal Bank of Canada — was based on 317 survey responses from single- and multi-family offices worldwide. That included 141 in North America, all of which were collected between April and August.

On average, the North American families surveyed held $2 billion in total wealth and managed $1.5 billion in assets.

Based on the report's figures, that 29% share equates to roughly $62 billion of the $215 billion managed by North American family offices.

And that share is still growing.

"Future investment is likely to go toward direct private equity, private credit, and real estate," the report said, adding that private credit is attractive to wealthy investors because borrowers are paying higher interest rates.

The rise of private credit

Private credit has emerged as one of the most attractive havens for the ultrawealthy as traditional markets swing with volatility and central banks keep rates elevated.

"Private credit reflects the high nominal interest rates that sub-investment-grade borrowers are prepared to offer," the report said.

Larger family offices are particularly drawn to the sector, often investing through funds or co-investing alongside private equity managers.

The report notes that private credit, direct private equity, and real estate are the three asset classes most likely to see increased allocations in 2025.

Real estate stays in favor

Real estate, long a cornerstone of multigenerational wealth, remains another magnet for family capital.

About 75% of family offices hold real estate, with the most enthusiasm directed toward industrial and logistics at 30% and residential housing at 23%, according to the report.

The report highlights that family offices in Sun Belt states — where population and job growth are strongest — are outperforming the national average, though it does not include specific numeric projections.

It adds that affordability pressures have "made home ownership increasingly difficult and channeled demand into the rental sector," but again provides no quantitative breakdown of rents or prices.

Cooling on risky startups

While private credit and real estate are heating up, early-stage venture investing — long the domain of bold family fortunes — is cooling fast.

"Venture, high-risk investments in early-stage innovative businesses, which was in top position last year, has now slipped down the ranking following its recent poor performance," the report said.

It also found that "a second factor behind the caution is disappointing year-to-date returns from direct private equity, private equity funds, and venture capital reported by significant percentages of family offices."

Family offices, which often value liquidity and patience, are finding the decadelong wait for venture payoffs less appealing amid higher yields elsewhere.

One chief executive of a single-family office in California told Campden Wealth that while early-stage deals can deliver windfalls, "this only happens 20 to 30% of the time. The trick is to minimize the number of failures."

A cautious new era

After years of chasing growth, the world's wealthiest families are pivoting toward stability.

The report found that 48% of family offices listed "improving liquidity" as their primary investment objective for 2025, followed by 33% who want to de-risk portfolios.

That shift mirrors a broader "risk-off" sentiment: average return expectations for 2025 have fallen to 5%, down from 11% in 2024, and 15% of family offices now expect negative returns — a sharp drop in optimism from last year, when almost none did.

Newly minted meme stock Beyond Meat extends its scorching 3-day run to nearly 900% 5:50 AM (2 hours ago)

• Beyond Meat's blistering stock rally is pushing into the middle of this week.
• The stock jumped as high as 73% on Wednesday.
• This surge takes its gain to almost 900% as retail investors.

The move: Beyond Meat spiked another 73% on Wednesday, bringing its three-day gain since last Friday's close to 866%.

Year-to-date, shares are up 56%.

The chart:

Why: The new meme stock has been picking up momentum in the last week as retail traders set their sights on the plant-based meat company around the time it tumbled to an all-time low last Wednesday.

The gains began to stack up this week as a Dubai-based retail trader named Dimitri Semenikhin announced that he had purchased a significant amount of the shares outstanding.

Semenikhin told Business Insider that he saw misconceptions around a recent convertible note exchange, and also believes the business has high potential for a turnaround. Backing up his argument, the company this week announced a new distribution deal with Walmart that helped the stock surge on Tuesday.

Now, it seems the stock is in the grip of a retail frenzy that some online are hoping will go the way of Gamestop, the original meme-stock short squeeze.

The stock was also added to a popular meme stock ETF managed by Roundhill Investments this week.

What it means: While Beyond Meat stock continues to surge and interest from retail traders remains high, the day-trader who's been cheering it on admits that it remains unclear how high it can go.

"Fundamentals, I think, suggest a $6-8 [price per share] in the medium term," Semenikhin told Business Insider, after previously moving his price target from $2.50-$3 to $6 a share as the stock rallied.

A husband and wife built a million-dollar business selling cinnamon buns. Here's how their edgy, quirky Instagram posts launched them to a viral sensation. 5:40 AM (2 hours ago)

• Mav's Top Buns has sold over half a million cinnamon buns.
• Nikki Ashkar leveraged social media to grow the business without paid marketing.
• Balancing family and business, the Ashkars produce up to 1,000 buns daily on weekends.

When Nikki Ashkar and her husband Mike baked her grandmother's cinnamon buns for the first time, they didn't plan to start a million-dollar business.

Five years later, however, their small business, Mav's Top Buns, has sold over half a million cinnamon buns. Since the start of 2024, it has generated more than $1 million, according to sales report records reviewed by Business Insider.

"We went from selling cinnamon buns from a U-Haul truck to making over $1 million in about a year," Nikki told BI's Rachel Cohn.

Today, they bake the buns at a bakery in New Jersey. At $10 a bun, the price isn't cheap, but neither is the labor. "You've got to know your worth," Nikki said.

The dough rests for 72 hours before hitting the oven. The frosting, a secret ratio of vanilla bean to cream cheese, is applied twice. "We ice every single nook and cranny," Nikki said, adding, "So that you never miss a good bite."

How they built a million-dollar business

Coming from a marketing background, Nikki knew that branding was as essential as the recipe itself. She didn't want to call the business "Mike and Nikki's buns."

Ultimately, they chose the name "Mav's Top Buns," named after her firstborn son, Maverick. From the start, she positioned the business as the "best cinnamon buns in New Jersey."

"We truly believe that," Nikki said, adding, "When you believe something so intrinsically about your product and what you bring to the table, you become that."

Nikki said they have never paid for marketing or influencer promotions. Instead, their own social media accounts helped drive growth.

For example, Nikki began posting photos and videos on the business's Instagram account in 2020, some of which have since gone viral. One of her first viral posts racked up 80,000 likes.

"At first I was kind of offended," she said of the viral video's angry comments at how she was holding the bun. "But as we grew and as we got more viral, it just became one of those things where the more viral you get, the more people are going to comment whatever they want to comment, and it's good for the algorithm, it's good for us."

One of the account's most viral posts features standard visuals but pairs them with an edgy audio clip that includes some profanity.

Nikki said she hesitated before posting it, worried it might be too bold for a family business. However, the post felt authentic to her. "People related to things a lot when we were just authentically ourselves."

It's not like the Insta page is filled with edgy content, however. Other posts showcase the couple's quirky personality through delicious-looking cinnamon buns accompanied by metal music and rap, and some dancing videos.

Juggling 3 kids while running a business has been tough

Nikki opened the bakery while eight months pregnant, balancing a newborn, late-night bakes, and long lines of customers. Mav's Top Buns now produces up to 1,000 buns a day during peak weekends, she said.

Behind the scenes, Nikki and Mike juggle the demands of entrepreneurship and parenthood.

"I think that's what people really grabbed onto, and that's why they love to support us because they know how hard a mom and dad work," Nikki said.

When asked what keeps her going through burnout and sleepless nights, Nikki credited perseverance and authenticity.

"Sometimes we'd lose power and we'd roll buns by candlelight, but it was those times where it really separated the men from the boys, where if you keep going, you will succeed," she said.

Nikki said their three children are already mimicking the family trade, rolling Play-Doh into miniature buns at home.

Hairstylists share the 6 men's hair trends their clients can't get enough of 5:37 AM (2 hours ago)

• Business Insider asked hairstylists about the popular trends their male clients are loving.
• Younger men are all about the modern mullet and broccoli cuts.
• For a more polished look, clients are loving faded sides with a textured, messy top.

The change of season is a great time to freshen up your look, whether you're in the market for a new outfit or a new hairstyle.

That's why Business Insider asked hairstylists and barbers which trendy haircuts and styles their male clients are asking for the most. Here's what they said.

The modern mullet is in.

Francis Catanese, a senior stylist at Julien Farel Salon and Spa in New York City, said his clients are into the modern mullet, which has clean, faded sides and a longer, textured back.

"Men love the modern mullet because it combines retro flair with a bold, updated twist that stands out without feeling over-the-top," Catanese told BI.

The modern mullet offers a rebellious yet stylish look that's surprisingly versatile.

Younger clients love the "broccoli cut."

Samantha Lawrence, owner of Chromatique Salon in Washington, told BI that Gen Z clients favor the "broccoli cut," which features a curly or heavily textured, rounded top with a tight taper or fade on the sides.

"This cut is playful, fashion-driven, and makes a strong statement without requiring a lot of daily styling. The contrast between structure and texture gives it wide appeal," she said.

For a more polished look, men are loving faded sides with a textured, messy top.

According to Lawrence, her clients are loving "tightly faded sides that lead into a tousled, dimensional top." She said this cut can be styled to feel effortless and undone, and is versatile enough to work across different hair types and textures.

Lawrence told BI it's popular among professionals who want a low-maintenance style that "feels current and cool."

Men looking for an effortless look are opting for soft layers with natural texture.

Gabby Fishman, a hairstylist at Arté Salon in New York City, told BI her clients have been liking the soft layered look.

"Clients love this look because it feels masculine without being overly styled, and it grows in really well with little maintenance between appointments," Fishman said.

She said the style works well with naturally textured hair types, especially wavy hair.

Clients love the burst fade for its flexibility.

Elvis Amezquita, a barber manager at Famous Fadez in Illinois, told BI that men who love a style with some flexibility are opting for the burst fade —  a short or bald cut near the ear that fades into longer hair toward the top and back.

"The burst fade is flexible with many hair textures and is normally less maintenance compared to longer hairstyles," Amezquita said.

The slick back is the perfect combination of classic and modern.

According to Amezquita, another popular style combines a tapered back and sides with a slicked-back top to achieve a smooth appearance.

This cut offers a stylish and clean look, especially around the ears, neck, and forehead.

"The slick back offers a smooth, controlled top, while the taper keeps the sides clean, giving a sharp, professional, and stylish appearance," Amezquita told BI.

Ukraine shows off new 'Sea Baby' naval drones decked out with automated machine guns and rocket launchers 5:28 AM (2 hours ago)

• Ukraine's internal security agency revealed new variants of its "Sea Baby" naval drone on Wednesday.
• The naval drones have been given automated machine guns, rocket launchers, and an extended range.
• The modifications underscore Ukraine's continued investment in the development of drone technology.

Ukraine's internal security agency has unveiled new variants of its "Sea Baby" naval drone, giving the boats an extended range and arming them with automated machine guns and rocket launchers.

The modifications highlight Ukraine's continued efforts and investment in the development of its naval drone programs, which are among the country's most important innovations of the war.

The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, announced on Wednesday that the next-generation Sea Baby naval drones have already completed testing in the Black Sea, and were used in July to attack a major bridge connecting the occupied Crimean peninsula with Russia.

The modified drones have been given an extended range that allows them to cover distances of over 1,500 kilometers (930 miles), a significant upgrade from their previous range of 600 miles, the SBU said in a statement shared to the Telegram messaging platform.

The drones can carry up to 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of cargo and have reinforced engines and a modern navigation system.

The SBU shared images of two different variants of the modified drones: one equipped with a gyro-stabilized automated machine gun and another with a Grad multiple rocket launch system. The modifications were carried out with money raised by Ukraine's government-run United24 crowdfunding site.

Ukraine, which lacks a traditional navy, has relied on its naval drones and missiles to wage a campaign against Russia in the Black Sea, damaging or destroying dozens of warships and vessels over the past three years. Kyiv has also used these weapons to target critical infrastructure, like the Kerch bridge and offshore oil platforms.

The Ukrainian operations have forced Russia to relocate the bulk of its Black Sea Fleet from its long-held headquarters in Crimea to the port of Novorossiysk on the other side of the region.

Ukraine has invested heavily in the development of its naval drones to support this asymmetric campaign. The drone boats typically carry an explosive payload, but some have been modified with other weapons, like surface-to-air missile launchers, enabling them to shoot down Russian aircraft.

Other Ukrainian naval drones have been equipped with large-caliber machine guns, while some have even been transformed into launch platforms for smaller quadcopter drones.

The latest Sea Baby variants will presumably help contribute to the anti-aircraft efforts.

"Our drones have changed the balance of power in the Black Sea and proven their effectiveness," SBU chief Lt. Gen. Vasyl Malyuk said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that "the new generation of 'Sea Baby' is even more efficient."

He said Ukrainian operations to rid the Black Sea of Russian warships "will continue," adding that Moscow "will feel the full power of our technological developments," according to a translation of his remarks.

The Black Sea battle has been a bright spot for Kyiv, demonstrating that low-cost drone technology can effectively counter expensive warships.

"The SBU is the ideologist of a new type of naval warfare," the SBU's Brig. Gen. Ivan Lukashevych said. "We are constantly looking for effective means to maintain Ukraine's advantage in the Black Sea for as long as possible."

NATO forces are closely watching the Black Sea campaign and have adjusted their training and tactics to plan for the naval drone threat in future conflicts.

Self-driving cars are here. 2 industry pros share with BI how to get the public to trust them. 5:04 AM (3 hours ago)

• How do you build trust in self-driving cars?
• BI is sitting down with Rivian's James Philbin and Charlie Tyson from Michigan's Office of Future Mobility & Electrification to discuss.
• Follow along with the conversation live here at 12 pm ET,

Self-driving cars aren't science fiction anymore. From self-driving technology in the latest electric vehicles to fleets of taxis you can order from your phone, the autonomous vehicle revolution is just getting started.

But how will the public react as self-driving cars become more of an everyday part of our bustling cities? Automakers and city leaders across the country are balancing how to encourage adoption without compromising safety as they prepare communities for the ripple effects of autonomy — from infrastructure to human behavior.

Business Insider has invited two experts in the field — James Philbin, Rivian's Head of Autonomy, and Charlie Tyson, the Technology Activation Director of Michigan's Office of Future Mobility & Electrification — to discuss where autonomous vehicles are heading next.

Join Business Insider Chief News Editor Steve Russolillo as Philbin and Tyson share how to build trust in self-driving cars, measure readiness for pilot programs, and teach their machines to deal with something human drivers face all the time: bad weather.

The event, which is sponsored by Mobileye, kicks off at 12 pm ET on Wednesday. Additional speakers in the program include Johann Jungwirth of Mobileye, Stephen Hayes of Lyft, and Dr. Deborah Berebichez. You can view the full agenda and sign up for the event here, or watch a livestream of the discussion below.

Tesla's earnings report means another chance to transition it from EV to AI 4:48 AM (3 hours ago)

• A portion of this post originally appeared in the Business Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

It's Tesla's earnings day, which means another chance for Elon Musk's company to trade in its EV label for AI.

From robotaxis to humanoid robots, Tesla has moved well beyond its initial core of just building electric vehicles.

BI's William Edwards has a breakdown on all the big projects Wall Street analysts are keen to hear more about on this afternoon's earnings call.

Tesla has been subtly pivoting its strategy for years, but it's now reaching a tipping point. The end of the federal EV tax credit last month and the undeniable rise of Chinese rivals have made selling EVs difficult, to say the least.

Sure, Tesla just launched an affordable version of some of its models. But the rollout for those long-awaited cars was somewhat subdued, and reactions were mixed.

Meanwhile, despite concerns about a bubble, AI valuations show no signs of slowing down. So swapping "EV" for "AI" makes a lot of sense these days.

There's just one problem: The EV side of Tesla is the one bringing in the real money. As big and promising as many of Tesla's AI plans are, they're just that … plans.

That puts Musk and Co. in a tricky spot. They need to answer tough questions about the portion of the business that keeps the lights on while trying to keep investors' eyes on the big wins they say are just around the corner.

Tesla's AI narrative has been a good pitch so far.

After a brutal start to the year, Tesla's stock is up nearly 100% over the past six months. A big part of that run has been recent, with shares rising roughly 34% since September. Although Musk definitely helped things along when he disclosed the almost $1 billion worth of Tesla stock he bought.

Musk obviously plays a key role in all of this, but he's been noticeably quiet. After a high-profile run at the White House, followed by a spectacular breakup with President Donald Trump, he hasn't made too much noise. True, he did just take a shot at Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, but by Musk's standards, it was pretty mild.

He has good reason to keep his head down. In fact, he's got 1 trillion of them. That's what his new proposed pay package could be worth if he hits certain milestones.

There's no guarantee it'll be approved when it goes to a vote at Tesla's annual meeting on November 6. Some major proxy-advisory firms are coming out against it, warning it's too generous and could shrink shareholder stakes.

But another quarter successfully transitioning Tesla from EV to AI could go a long way in winning him some votes.

My dad worked until he died, and I swore I'd do things differently. Now, at 71, I realize it's important to stay busy. 4:47 AM (3 hours ago)

• My dad worked his entire life and set an example for me to never slow down.
• I ignored his advice and retired, anticipating a life of leisure — rehearsing music and writing.
• But I learned I needed a routine and regular accomplishments to feel fulfilled.

My dad lived 78 years and worked until he died.

I wanted him to retire and relax — to hunt, care for his spaniels, and nap — but he had built his own print shop and wanted it to outlast him, so he went to the office every day. Even when he could no longer drive, my mother chauffeured him.

At the time, I didn't get it. Why not slow down and enjoy his final years?

Over a decade after he passed, I retired from teaching and swore I'd take a different path — planning a long, leisurely vacation from responsibility. However, things turned out differently than I originally planned.

Without structure, I struggled to get anything done

When I pictured retirement, I imagined practicing piano, writing, rehearsing with my music group, and visiting family. At first, I loved the freedom — no appointments, alarms, or deadlines — but soon, the hours felt aimless.

Every day seemed like a good day to procrastinate. I'd play piano for a few minutes, but never learned an entire piece. Or, I'd type a few sentences and attend music rehearsals, but I'd never finish an essay or schedule a performance.

With too much free time, nothing got done, and I felt like a boat unmoored from its dock, drifting wherever the current pulled it.

I missed the gratification of ticking off a task, as well as the camaraderie of students and fellow teachers working together on a project.

I discovered I needed a routine

I realized my free time needed structure, so I started scheduling my days: writing for two hours, then practicing piano before lifting weights and walking.

With each new commitment came new friends. I approached a trumpeter and clarinetist who live in my neighborhood (musicians I'd only waved to before), and we formed an ensemble. Now, we practice twice a week.

I also meet new musicians every Tuesday at a pub's Irish music session, and fresh faces offer fresh ideas in monthly writing workshops.

For the first time since retiring, I sensed momentum. A piece of mine was published in a magazine, my trumpeter friend threw a house party where we performed our sonata, and my music group mastered a set, so we played for the breakfast crowd at a local café. Once again, I felt the satisfaction of accomplishment.

With my packed schedule, I realized why my dad went to work every day. He needed to be busy, to interact with colleagues, and find fulfillment in a job well done. Work gave him a routine and a reason to get up every day.

In that way, I've found I'm a lot like him. I feel satisfaction in being productive, fulfilled when I interact with people, and grounded when my days follow a rhythm.

Now, I've found balance between enjoying the freedom of retirement and still feeling productive

Although I'm continuing to follow my routine, I'm comfortable with it being subject to change because I still want to enjoy the freedom of retirement — something I recognize not all of my contemporaries have access to amid vanishing pensions, high medical costs, and rising life expectancies.

For me, such freedom can look like skipping piano practice to have lunch with a friend or postponing exercise to take a nap. And when I'm traveling, I abandon my routine entirely.

My retirement is not what I imagined, but I've found a life that suits me. Not everyone's choices are the same, and that's the best part of retirement — it's self-directed.

And now I understand: It's not about never quitting. It's about choosing what's worth doing next.

Trump is adding a ballroom to the East Wing. Photos from the 1950s show the last major White House renovation. 4:36 AM (3 hours ago)

• From 1948 to 1952, the White House underwent a complete gut renovation.
• The building had numerous structural issues that made it unsafe for the Trumans to live in.
• Archived photos show the massive renovation in progress, similar to Trump's plan for a new ballroom.

When President Harry Truman took office for his second term, the White House was falling apart.

The East Room floor was sagging 18 inches. The president's bathtub was sinking into the floor. And the structure could no longer support the third level and steel roof that were added in 1927.

In 1948, the Trumans were forced to vacate to the nearby Blair House — the official state guest house of the president — while the White House underwent a massive four-year renovation that cost about $5.7 million, according to the White House Historical Association.

More than 70 years later, another major White House renovation is underway. On Tuesday, demolition work began on the facade of the White House's East Wing to make way for President Donald Trump's planned $200 million ballroom.

The new ballroom will be able to seat 650 people, the White House said, a more spacious alternative to the East Room, which seats 200.

In a statement, the White House called the new ballroom "a bold, necessary addition that echoes the storied history of improvements and additions from commanders-in-chief to keep the executive residence as a beacon of American excellence."

Photos of the Truman renovation, taken by National Park Service photographer Abbie Rowe and preserved by the US National Archives, illustrate how massive the undertaking really was.

National Park Service photographer Abbie Rowe photographed the White House renovations in 1950, halfway through the project.

The renovation cost $5.7 million, or around $76.4 million when adjusted for inflation in 2025.

To support the walls, crews poured 126 new concrete support columns that reached depths of 26 feet.

By 1950, the White House interior was hollow. It measured 165 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 80 feet high.

Workers laid the white oak floor in the State Dining Room during the renovation.

The White House's main stairway was completely rebuilt from scratch.

Sun crept through the bare beams separating a bedroom and a sitting room.

The only clue that this area was once the second-floor corridor of the White House is the arched door frame.

Here are the remnants of the fireplace in the East Room during the renovation.

And finally, this is the second-floor oval study above the Blue Room in 1950.

A similar scene unfolded on Tuesday during demolition work along the facade of the East Wing to make way for Trump's new ballroom.

Editor's note: This story was originally published in March 2013. It was updated in October 2025.

Fire, smoke, and anti-drone nets: Satellite images capture scenes from the fight engulfing Russia's oil industry 4:21 AM (3 hours ago)

• New satellite imagery shows elements of the ongoing fight over Russia's oil industry.
• At one oil refinery, anti-drone netting can be seen, and at another, black smoke rises up from the damaged facility.
• Russia's energy sector is a critical source of revenue fueling its war against Ukraine.

New satellite images underscore how Ukrainian long-range strikes are turning Russia's precious oil industry into a battlefield.

Ukraine has been increasingly targeting Russian energy facilities and has noticeably stepped up its strikes in recent months, with more than two dozen attacks on oil refineries since the start of August. It is part of a campaign intended to put pressure on a key source of revenue for Moscow, one fueling the war against its neighbor.

Images captured this month by Vantor, a US spatial intelligence firm, and obtained by Business Insider show nets stretching over one refinery — part of Russia's effort to defend its oil facilities from drone attacks — as well as the aftermath of a successful Ukrainian strike.

An image taken on October 2 shows anti-drone netting covering three storage tanks at the Kuybyshevskiy oil refinery in Russia's Samara region.

The netting isn't new and was spotted in imagery earlier this year. But it highlights how Moscow is using improvised defenses to protect its critical energy infrastructure from Ukrainian drone attacks. The defensive tactic has been observed at other Russian refineries. Makeshift defenses like these have also been tried to shield vulnerable Russian warships in port from naval drones.

Kyiv attacked the Kuybyshevskiy facility, some 500 miles away from the Ukrainian border, in late August.

Anti-drone nets have become a common defense in the war. Ukrainian soldiers, for instance, have been covering critical front-line logistics routes with netting, and both militaries have added cage-like netting to armored vehicles to protect them from drones.

Kyle Glen, an investigator with the UK-based Centre for Information Resilience who tracks Ukraine's strikes on Russia's energy sector, told Business Insider on Tuesday that there have been 30 attacks on 19 different Russian oil refineries since the start of August.

An attack on October 13 targeted the Feodosia oil terminal in the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula. Long-range drones struck at least five storage tanks, causing a massive fire at the facility, a Ukrainian security source told Business Insider.

A satellite image taken on October 15, two days after the attack, shows a massive plume of black smoke rising from the facility.

Russia's energy sector is a significant source of income, estimated to be worth about 20% of its GDP on average. Oil and natural gas exports fuel Moscow's war efforts in Ukraine, making it a target for Kyiv.

Ukraine's military intelligence agency, also known as the HUR, said in a statement on Tuesday that Russia's fuel and energy sector is an "integral part" of its military-industrial complex.

"Striking key energy facilities limits the production and logistical capabilities of the aggressor, reduces its financial resources, and weakens its ability to conduct a prolonged military campaign," the agency said.

Ukrainian officials have said that the drone attacks are causing fuel shortages in Russia and rendering idle a large portion of its oil refineries. The International Energy Agency assesses that the deep-strike campaign is likely to stifle Russian refinery processing rates well into next year.

The attacks on Russian energy facilities have largely been carried out with domestically produced drones. Ukraine has invested heavily in the development of deep-strike weapons to enforce what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has referred to as "long-range sanctions against Russia."

Russia, meanwhile, continues hitting Ukraine with deep strikes targeting its energy sector and other civilian infrastructure. Nightly attacks are often comprised of hundreds of missiles and drones that overwhelm Kyiv's air defenses.

How Beyond Meat became the market's latest meme-stock darling 3:41 AM (4 hours ago)

• This post originally appeared in the First Trade newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily markets newsletter here.

Good morning and welcome to First Trade. Warner Bros. Discovery is trying to gin up a bidding war, and stock investors seem to think a sale is a great idea. Maybe they want "Westworld" back on HBO Max.

Rundown

• Gold plunges the most in 12 years. It was looking overextended at record highs, but sheesh. To make matters worse, billionaire Bill Gross told us the top is in.
• Tesla reports earnings today. Investors are anxiously awaiting any updates on robotaxis and AI.
• Could a credit crunch hit stocks? BofA thinks so, naming credit "cockroaches" as one of the five top risks to the S&P 500 right now.

But first, a blast from the past.

Love Business Insider? Log into Google and make us a preferred source.

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Market musings

Beyond Meat's got some heat

It's 2019. You get out of an "Avengers: Endgame" screening and pop your earbuds in. You like this up-and-coming artist, Billie Eilish, who seems pretty promising. You fire up a new app called TikTok. You can't figure out how it's different from Vine, but everyone seems to be into it.

You pop into a local eatery and order one of those new plant-based Beyond Meat burgers that everyone's talking about. The company is valued at $14 billion. It doesn't taste great, but you're told it's the future of food.

Fast-forward to the present day. Beyond Meat is worth less than $1 billion, and was a penny stock until very recently. Sales are a fraction of what they were. No, this is not some dystopian reality. The fact is, the competition stacked up against Beyond, and demand for meat alternatives waned.

But something has shifted in the stock this week. Shares surged 128% (to $1.47) on Monday, on trading that was roughly 70 times the average. It followed that up on Tuesday with a 146% increase (to $3.62) on even more volume. Then it soared another 65% on Wednesday, bringing the three-day move to more than 800%. What gives?

Well, it turns out that a retail investor named Dimitri Semenikhin (screen name: Capybara Stocks) has been buying up all the Beyond shares he can find. He says he now owns about 4% of the company's outstanding stock, and he posted about it on Reddit.

Given the fact that Beyond already carried the natural characteristics of a meme stock — a nostalgic brand heavily shorted by institutions — the post was like catnip to Semenikhin's fellow retail traders.

Business Insider's Sam O'Brient tracked down Semenikhin — who is based in Dubai — on Monday, while Beyond stock was ripping. He wanted to find out what was motivating him. Why take such a big position in a downtrodden penny stock down more than 80% year to date?

Semenikhin provided some fundamental reasons. Key among them was the completion of a convertible note exchange, which he says lessens its previously high risk of bankruptcy and greatly strengthens its balance sheet. He said this was incorrectly viewed by some as a negative.

"At the current price that I bought in, the pricing was just way too low for what was happening," he told BI.

In a separate interview on Tuesday, he said that he sees the stock soaring another 66% from current levels, to around $6 per share.

Semenikhin's undervaluation thesis may very well be true. After all, Beyond on Tuesday announced a collaboration with Walmart that — when combined with the lingering retail rocket fuel, and the stock's addition to a meme-stock ETF — sent shares surging more than 100% for a second straight day.

But there's also no denying that Semenikhin is trying to emulate the playbook of Roaring Kitty, the GameStop-obsessed retail investor who was eventually immortalized in his very own movie.

It's also clear he's having a similar effect, with Monday's price surge in Beyond defying fundamental logic.

There's the regular YouTube posting. There's the Reddit activity (although his original post is now deleted). And there's the unrepentant desire to drive a short squeeze.

Will Semenikhin go full Roaring Kitty and start wearing a signature headband? That remains to be seen. But the similarities run deep, and BI will continue to check in with him for updates.

On the move

Look at that V-shaped bounce! Thanks a lot, Dimitri Semenikhin (and Walmart).

Beyond Meat stock is now down just 4% in 2025, compared to the 86% loss through last Thursday's close.

The rally has coincided with unprecedented options-trading volume for the stock, and as daily shares traded broke the 1 billion threshold for two straight sessions.

BI market mix

• A terrible day for gold. Sure, the precious metal has been on a blistering rally to record highs, but the biggest sell-off in 12 years is still jarring. Billionaire investor Bill Gross saw it coming, and told BI the top is in.
• When Elon stays quiet, Tesla stock soars. Shares are up 25% since the CEO stepped away from DOGE in late May. How will today's earnings move the stock?
• Falling oil prices could lower interest rates. Market sage Ed Yardeni says crude prices are correlated with the 10-year Treasury yield. Oil near a five-year low could be signaling that easier borrowing conditions are coming.

Chart of the day

The title of this chart from BlackRock Investment Institute says it all: earnings expectations for companies in the S&P 500 are reaccelerating. This is reflected by the upward slope of the orange line, which shows the 12-month change in profit forecasts.

This aligns with the guidance we've gotten so far from industry bellwethers during the third-quarter reporting season. On Tuesday alone, General Motors, GE, Lockheed Martin, and RTX raised future earnings forecasts.

Culture confidential

The $1,100 shoes Wall Streeters can't get enough of

Business Insider's Will Edwards spotlights a hot trend dominating Wall Street and the finance industry.

They make you feel like you're walking on a cloud. You can wear them with a suit or with jeans. They'll earn you street cred with finance bros.

The catch? They're $1,100.

Zegna's Triple Stitch shoes have unofficially become Wall Street's hottest footwear, exploding in popularity in recent years amid the quiet luxury movement. Apple CEO Tim Cook sports them. CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin told BI he wears them too, and that he sees them everywhere. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed a few years back that they're the most-worn shoes on private jets.

But they're not only popular with the uber-rich. Sales associates at multiple Zegna locations in Manhattan said that they have a wide age range of financial industry clients.

Are they really worth the hype? Eager to see for myself, I went to the brand's global store on 57th Street in NYC to try on a pair.

My review, in short? They're absolutely worth the money. If you're the type of person who is OK with dropping a rent payment on some sneakers, at least. I didn't love their plain look initially, but how they feel on your feet completely changes your perception of them.

I'm usually a size 11.5, but the folks at the store said they recommend going a half-size up. They come in 30 different color options — I went with a black and white scheme. They were easily the most comfortable pair of shoes I'd ever worn.

After being made a convert, I decided to head out and try to spot a pair of them in the wild. Given that it was rainy, I was doubtful I'd find anyone. But within minutes, as I approached Park Avenue, there was a pair walking right at me.

A visitor from Charleston, South Carolina, said he had his custom-made last year and picked up three pairs.

"I love them," he said, before asking: "Are you gonna buy a pair?"

I'll have to save up first, I told him.

Do you own a pair of Zegnas or another quiet luxury item you love? Let us know!

— Will Edwards

The First Trade team: Joe Ciolli, executive editor and anchor, in Chicago. Akin Oyedele, deputy editor, in New York. William Edwards, senior reporter, in New York. Steve Russolillo, chief news editor, in New York.

'Girlboss' Sophia Amoruso says she was too quick to fire people at Nasty Gal. She shared what she learned from the startup's epic rise and fall. 3:30 AM (4 hours ago)

• Sophia Amoruso built Nasty Gal from scratch to a $350 million valuation, but the retailer collapsed.
• Amoruso warned founders about VC money and chasing ever-higher valuations on a recent podcast.
• It's useful to work before starting a company, and founders should be open to acquisition, she said.

Sophia Amoruso learned the hard way that founders who tap venture capital and chase ever-higher valuations can get into trouble. She shared five lessons from the rise and fall of her company, Nasty Gal, on the latest episode of "The Burnouts" podcast.

Amoruso started selling vintage clothing from her bedroom and built the business into a fast-fashion retailer with over $100 million in annual revenue and more than 200 employees at its mid-2010s peak. Her autobiography, "#GIRLBOSS," was adapted into a Netflix series.

Nasty Gal ran into financial and legal problems, filed for bankruptcy in 2016, and was acquired by British rival Boohoo in 2017. Amoruso, 41, launched her own VC firm, Trust Fund, in 2023.

1. Don't be too hasty in firing people

Recalling her mistakes as a boss, Amoruso said she didn't coach or direct her workers enough and "could have given people more chances." She added that she had fired people before finding replacements.

"I just kind of whacked people, and it puts a business at risk when you just remove someone from the company," she told the podcast.

When a worker is abruptly removed, she said, "The people under them are like, 'I got all this responsibility, what the hell?'"

Nasty Gal was sued in March 2015 by a former employee who accused the company of sex discrimination and wrongful termination after she was fired while pregnant, court filings show.

Her complaint cited three other women who, according to the filing, were fired while pregnant, and a man who was set to take paternity leave. The case was dismissed and closed by the court in March 2016 and appears to have been privately settled.

Amoruso didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

2. The valuation race can be dangerous

Nasty Gal's investors pushed Amoruso to raise money at ever-higher valuations, heaping pressure on the business and restricting its access to cash, she said.

"You don't go bankrupt overnight," Amoruso said. Nasty Gal had "opportunities to raise money at a lower valuation" but her investors were against marking down their stakes, she added.

Her advice to founders is to "just be careful with valuation because the expectations are really high for what you need to do to get to the next round."

"I'd rather a company survive than be able to mark it up and look like I'm successful as an investor," she added.

Amoruso said that instead of focusing on valuation, she encourages her founders to "raise a lot of money now" and "extend your runway as far as you can because sentiment shifts, companies go up and down."

3. Most founders don't need VC money

Amoruso said she bootstrapped Nasty Gal from roughly $75,000 in sales in its first year to about $30 million by 2012, when she raised nearly $50 million from venture capitalists. The company's valuation peaked a few years later at around $350 million.

But Amoruso said the vast majority of founders shouldn't raise venture capital. There's "a lot of glamour around raising money, but for most people, you don't need to do it," she said on the podcast.

She said the advent of AI and other digital tools has made it cheaper to start businesses and enables founders to be "scrappier."

4. Be open to a buyout

Many founders turn down offers to sell their companies and prefer to hold out for a better offer. They should consider just accepting the cash and moving on to their next idea, Amoruso said.

Amoruso said that another apparel retailer offered over $400 million for Nasty Gal when she owned 80% of the company, but she turned it down as her investors wanted her to reach a billion-dollar valuation so they could achieve a better return.

"You may not get another acquisition opportunity," she said on the podcast. "You don't have to like build the bazillion-dollar business to be successful," she continued. "Part of me is just, like, take the money."

5. Learning before launching can be a huge help

Amoruso, who founded Nasty Gal at age 22, said the classic "serendipitous founder story" of dropping out of school to build a startup is a "little overglamorized."

She said aspiring entrepreneurs should work before launching their companies and "learn some chops on somebody else's dime."

That way, they can be "paid to do it rather than putting all the risk up front and doing it for the first time after you start your business," she said.

"I really wish I had that foundation," Amoruso said, as it would have given her "a lot more empathy" for her employees and "a lot more chops" to run her business when it became about "more than shipping stuff, or things that I had already done myself."

Amoruso said it's also important to lay solid groundwork for companies. She advised founders to "create processes as early as possible so that when it scales, people can take that and run with it."

"If you're trying to retrofit them into a business, it's really hard," she added.

Buying your first big piece of art can be intimidating. Here's how a Citi art advisor recommends you do it. 3:04 AM (5 hours ago)

• Rebekah Bowling helps advise ultra-high-net-worth clients on their art collections.
• She said visiting "incubator galleries" and a range of venues can help get over the initial hump.
• Transactions at the lower end of the art market boomed last year.

Walking into a gallery as an art world newbie is likely to be a somewhat humbling experience.

Rebekah Bowling, a senior art advisor at Citi who works with ultra-high-net-worth clients in Citi Wealth to manage and build their art collections, knows that it can be "really intimidating" to start buying art. Galleries typically don't list prices, and new buyers often don't know much about the artists or shows they're looking at, she said.

Even asking an employee at the desk about the works on display takes some courage.

"They, in turn, say, 'Let me get a director,' or, 'Are you a collector? Can you share a few details about your collection?'" Bowling said. "There's this vetting that happens at the front door. If you are not a known entity, there's the idea that you're not going to get treated as kindly."

Sales in the global art market fell 12% last year, totaling around $57.5 billion, according to Art Basel and UBS' Art Market Report. Despite the drop, the number of transactions increased by 3%, mainly because of sales in the lower tier of the market.

For those trying to get over the many humps and buy art for the first time, Bowling had a few pieces of advice.

Educate yourself

"Education is the first point," Bowling said. She suggests that anyone seriously interested in starting a collection spend at least six months, or even a year, educating themselves on the market and their own taste. It's essential to become familiar with both the primary and secondary markets, which respectively sell pieces for the first time and as resales, she said.

And though art can be a good investment — Morgan Stanley estimated 4.9% annualized returns on art and collectibles over a 20-year period in a report from earlier this year — Bowling doesn't think buying pieces only for potential profit is a smart strategy.

"If you're buying it for purely speculative reasons, hoping to hold it for a year or two and then flip it for a higher price, I think you will only be disappointed," she said. Bowling advises people to only buy pieces they genuinely love.

Visit a range of venues

Beyond galleries, Bowling said that auctions and art fairs can be "more welcoming" environments. Auctions often list price estimations and a few details about the artist, which can make the buying process less opaque. Art fairs offer new collectors an opportunity to explore a lot of work at once and "immediately see what they gravitate towards," Bowling said.

The Art Basel and UBS report found that the total value of sales at auctions fell by 20% to $23.4 billion in 2024. That said, the number of transactions grew 4%, spurred by growth at the low end, or pieces sold for less than $50,000.

Focus on emerging artists

Though some might only associate the art market with the Picassos and Matisses of the world, Bowling said emerging artists are a great place to start a collection, since their work tends to be less expensive. She advises visiting what she calls "incubator galleries," which might be located in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the East Side of London, or the East Side of LA.

"They're giving them their first, second, third, solo shows, focusing on showing this work to institutions, to curators, to tastemakers within the business," Bowling said. Typically, these galleries are good at keeping prices low initially.

Once a collector builds a relationship with a gallery, the gallerist will likely start keeping them up to date on new shows.

Here is how to use OpenAI's new ChatGPT-powered search engine, Atlas 3:01 AM (5 hours ago)

• OpenAI launched Atlas, a ChatGPT-powered browser with enhanced personalization tools.
• Atlas features a chat-based interface and agent mode that could book appointments for you.
• It remains to be seen whether Atlas could cut into Google Chrome's 3 billion-strong user base.

OpenAI's new ChatGPT-powered browser, Atlas, officially launched Tuesday for macOS users — and it's not just another Chrome clone.

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT is at the core of Atlas, and it blends internet navigation with the capabilities of agentic AI. This browser can take actions such as making appointments and filling grocery carts on behalf of the user.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said on Tuesday during a surprise livestream that he thinks the future of browsing "looks more like a conversation."

"We think AI represents a rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be," said Altman. "Tabs were great, but we haven't seen a lot of browser innovation since then."

How to access Atlas?

At the moment, Atlas is only available for Mac users, and the "agent mode" is limited to Plus, Pro, and Business users.

According to OpenAI's live demo, Mac users can download the app, drag it into their Applications folder, and sign in with their ChatGPT account. Once logged in, Atlas greets users with a series of setup prompts, allowing them to import data from other browsers, grant keychain access, enable "browser memories," or make Atlas their default browser.

How does Atlas differ from other browsers?

That "browser memories" toggle is what sets Atlas apart from traditional browsers, according to OpenAI.

When turned on, ChatGPT can remember the sites you've visited and use that context to personalize searches, suggest relevant pages, or instantly pull up something you looked at days ago.

The browser's "agent mode" takes the idea of personalization further. An AI agent can handle web-based tasks such as researching, analyzing data, planning trips, or even booking appointments. In the live demo, the agent mode in Atlas was able to look at a recipe, break down what was needed for eight people, and automatically fill an Instacart cart from Safeway using prior browsing data.

The browser interface looks similar to ChatGPT, and you type into a chat bar. Except, with Atlas, you can, among other things:

• Pull up websites, like a traditional browser, and use the "Ask ChatGPT" button to pull up a ChatGPT sidebar to chat with
• Use an AI agent to complete a task for you (à la grocery shopping in the demo)
• Have ChatGPT edit your emails directly in the draft
• Or search your past browser history using plain English

The next AI battleground and its risks

Browsers have been quickly emerging as the next AI battleground. Startups like Perplexity's Comet and The Browser Company's Dia are experimenting with similar AI integrations, while Google and Microsoft are racing to integrate their own AI assistants into Chrome and Edge.

The launch of Atlas could also escalate the rivalry between OpenAI and Google. Alphabet's shares sank by more than 2.2% as of market closing time on Tuesday.

ChatGPT has more than 800 million users, which is small compared to Google Chrome's 3 billion-strong user base. Depending on how many choose to make Atlas their primary browser, that could open doors to digital ad revenue for OpenAI and directly compete with Google's profits.

While users of traditional browsers and chatbots alike cede troves of data to Big Tech, an agent-based experience opens a new frontier of privacy risks.

OpenAI product lead Pranav Vishnu addressed some of these concerns during the livestream. Vishnu said that the AI agent only operates on tabs and can't execute code on a user's computer or access other files, and that users could choose to log out of ChatGPT's agent.

"Despite all of the power and awesome capabilities you get with sharing your browser with ChatGPT, that also imposes an entirely new set of risks," said Vishnu.

In the demo, the agent went as far as putting groceries into a cart, but notably, it did not complete the purchase.

Prince Harry, Steve Bannon, and will.i.am join tech pioneers calling for an AI superintelligence ban 2:57 AM (5 hours ago)

• Over 900 public figures signed a statement calling for a halt to superintelligent AI development.
• Signatories include AI pioneers, business leaders, and political figures.
• Concerns over advanced AI include job losses, loss of control, and potential human extinction.

What do Steve Bannon, will.i.am, and Prince Harry have in common? They're all concerned about superintelligent AI that surpasses human intelligence.

They are among more than 900 public figures from business, tech, the arts, and media who have called for a ban on the development of the technology until there's a scientific consensus that it can be done safely.

Two of the "godfathers of AI," Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, are also among the statement's signatures, alongside business leaders such as Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Virgin founder Richard Branson.

Bannon, a former strategist for Donald Trump, joins political figures from the left, such as former Democratic US Rep. Joe Crowley, who added their names to the list, which continued to grow following its publication on Wednesday.

"We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in," the statement, organized by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit, said.

Those concerned about the potential of powerful AI have raised concerns about job losses, the loss of control over AI systems, and the possibility of human extinction. Those concerns have grown in recent years as companies like OpenAI and Google have launched increasingly advanced AI models.

"The future of AI should serve humanity, not replace it," said Prince Harry in a statement. "The true test of progress will be not how fast we move, but how wisely we steer."

However, others say AI superintelligence could take decades to achieve and will be controllable when it does arrive.

Yann LeCun, one of the "godfathers of AI" and chief AI scientist at Meta, said in March that humans would be the "boss" of superintelligent systems.

It's the latest statement organized by the Future of Life Institute, which has published several public statements raising concerns about the development of AI since it was founded in 2014. The nonprofit has previously received financial support from Elon Musk, whose company, xAI, has developed the AI chatbot Grok.

"This is not a ban or even a moratorium in the usual sense," said Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement accompanying his signature.

"It's simply a proposal to require adequate safety measures for a technology that, according to its developers, has a significant chance to cause human extinction. Is that too much to ask?"

A member of the US Witness Protection Program since age 7 explains how the experience changed her life for the worse 2:35 AM (5 hours ago)

• Jackee Taylor has been in the US Witness Protection Program since she was 7.
• Now 51, Taylor is opening up about how difficult her life has been because of the program.
• She didn't ask to be a part of witness protection, and her situation has affected her children, too.

More than 19,000 people have been relocated and given new identities under the US Federal Witness Protection Program since it began in 1971. Jackee Taylor, born Jacquelyn Angelique Crouch, is one of them, but not by choice.

Her father, Clarence Crouch, was a member of the Cleveland chapter of Hells Angels, but left and turned to the government for protection in exchange for information in the early 1980s. "He did rat everybody out," Taylor told Business Insider's Matthew Ferrera.

The family was whisked into hiding shortly after: When Taylor was 7, she said that men in black suits pulled her, her 5-year-old sister, and her 2-year-old brother from bed in the middle of the night.

Taylor has been trying to prove she exists ever since.

The government refused to issue her a birth certificate under her new name. "I did obtain my old birth certificate," Taylor said, adding, "but I can't use it. That's a federal offense. I can't go back to my old identity."

Without a valid birth certificate, she said she struggled to get married, enroll in college, and apply for loans. Her children's Medicaid was once canceled because she lacks a valid birth certificate, she said.

Now 51, Taylor is fighting to shed light on a system she describes as "more secretive than the CIA."

From the Hells Angels to the Marshals' safe house

Taylor was born into outlaw biker culture. Her father helped found the Bandidos Motorcycle Club in Houston before joining the Cleveland, Ohio, chapter of the Hells Angels.

"I thought it was normal for every man to have a blade on their belt," Taylor said. "I thought it was normal for them to all have pistols in their boots."

In 1975, a Hells Angel member bombed a Cleveland home, killing three people, including a baby around the same age as Taylor. That violence fractured the club and her father's loyalty. By 1981, Crouch had left the Angels and turned himself in to the government.

He confessed to killing a man years earlier and was sentenced to many years in prison, Taylor said.

Taylor's mother chose their new surname after the actress Elizabeth Taylor. After initially spending time in a government safe house, Taylor, her siblings, and her mother were eventually relocated from Florida to Montana.

Taylor's father spent about a year with them in Montana, traveling to testify in trials, before eventually going to prison. Taylor said she didn't speak to him again until she was an adult.

Life in Montana was nothing like the Hollywood version of witness protection. The family was given about $1,261 a month to survive on, no winter clothes to brave the harsh Montana winter, and no counseling to cope, Taylor said.

After moving to Montana, Taylor changed

As Taylor grew up, she struggled with the lies.

"I got in trouble for lying as a child," she said. After entering witness protection, however, she said, "I'm told that I have to lie to every person I know, or I could be killed or my family could be killed."

"Now that messes with a kid. Of course, I felt like I was different," Taylor said. By her early teens, she was drinking and doing drugs. While intoxicated, she'd tell her friends the truth about her situation, but no one believed her, she said.

"I got in a lot of fights. I was stealing from cars. I was shoplifting, I went to rehab when I was 14, and then I was put in a psychiatric hospital when I was 15," Taylor said. When she tried telling her psychiatrist in the psych hospital that she was in witness protection, they didn't believe her either, she added.

"I remember lying in bed one night in this psychiatric institution, thinking to myself, I'm going to just have to figure out how to deal with this by myself," she said. Years later, her situation began affecting her kids.

A spokesperson for the US Marshals Service told BI over email that it "does not comment on the sensitive security practices regarding individuals subject to witness protection."

Fighting for 'the others'

When her children's Medicaid was canceled, Taylor spent two days on the phone trying to find help to no avail.

"That's what propelled me and threw me into the media. My mom always said something that stuck with me. If all else fails, go to the papers," she said. "That's what I've done, and I'm not going away. I'm just going to get louder."

In 2020, Taylor released a 10-episode podcast called "Relative Unknown" detailing her family's ordeal, which drew others out of hiding. She's now working on a second season, "The Others," to tell their stories.

We're a mother and daughter who were planning to move to Texas, but this small-town, affordable community kept us in California 2:19 AM (5 hours ago)

• A mother an daughter chose to stay in California rather than Texas after discovering Silverwood.
• Silverwood offers affordable, multigenerational living with amenities like parks and trails.
• The community promotes neighborly interaction and requires a kindness pledge from residents.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tracy Smith, 67, and Clair Mattig-Smith, 42, a mother and daughter who had plans to move from California to Texas for a more affordable and intentional lifestyle. However, they decided to stay in the Golden State after visiting Silverwood, a new affordable living, multigenerational community in Hesperia, where they bought a home earlier this year.

Clair: We're mother and daughter, and we're both widows. We're from California originally, but my mom had been living in Arizona for the last couple of years.

I didn't want my mom to be alone there, so a few years ago, I said to her: Why don't you sell your house, come live with me and my kids (24, 21, 18, and 13) for a bit, and then we'll just move to Texas together.

Tracy: I didn't really care where we lived; I'm not picky. But the idea of having a multigenerational homefront where we're all together was so nice. It's amazing to watch my grandkids grow from babies into adulthood.

Clair: I always liked to vacation in Texas. I feel like life in general is a little slower there than it is here in California.

It feels like there's more of a sense of community in Texas. People know their neighbors, whereas in California, I feel really disconnected. I only know one of my neighbors, and I've lived in my current house for the last six years.

Affordability was another factor. We really were planning to move to Texas, but that obviously didn't happen.

We fell in love with Silverwood right away

Clair: I had heard rumblings that a new development was coming to the high desert area about 15 minutes from where we currently live in Apple Valley.

I was scrolling on social media earlier this year, and I saw a local news story about Silverwood's grand opening. We decided to go take a look.

Tracy: As soon as we drove up the road to the property, we could see that they were paying great attention to details and aesthetics. The neighborhood looked open and clean with beautiful pools and hiking trails. We knew right away that Silverwood would be a really nice place to live.

Clair: During our visit in April, we toured 21 available home models. But the minute we walked into the model we ended up buying, we just knew. We fell in love with our home, and that was it.

The downstairs has a great open floor plan. There's also a bedroom downstairs with a bathroom, so my mom doesn't have to go up and down stairs.

When we saw the kitchen, we looked at each other and just fell in love. I'm a big cook and I love to entertain, especially during football season. The kitchen is fabulous with a giant island and a butler's pantry. There's bar seating at the center island that can easily fit 14 people.

The base price with no upgrades was $575,000, but we upgraded just about everything we could, so our final price was $642,000 for a 6-bedroom, 3-bathroom house at 2,800 square feet.

That's a pretty incredible price for California, but to be quite honest, we could have gotten the same house in Texas on a couple acres of land for close to half the price.

But we like California. We've been here all our lives. Silverwood is 100% the only reason we decided to stay in the state.

We started paperwork that same day. Silverwood did have some stipulations — they wouldn't even talk to anyone who wasn't pre-approved with a lender or realtor. But Silverwood's sales agent was fantastic. They pre-qualified us that day.

Our final walk through is this week. We sign final papers on October 27, and then we'll move in the next day.

The intentional community aspect of Silverwood is great

Tracy: They're doing so many things to enhance residents' lifestyles. There are outdoor activities like parks and hiking trails, entertainment options, and best of all, camaraderie with your neighbors.

Clair: Even though we haven't moved in yet — nobody has — they're already getting us all together to promote a sense of community.

Tracy: The neighborhood welcome center has already been developed. There are green spaces and parks and hiking trails and sidewalks for us.

They have a 15-year map of future development, and down the line, we'll have our own schools and a shopping center.

They even held a neighbor get-together a few weeks ago. I went and introduced myself to several people who have already bought or are on the waiting list to buy. Kids were running around playing with their parents, there were families, and older couples. I got smiles all around. It was so lovely.

The community aspect gives me a reason to get out of the house and mingle as a retired person.

Clair: In order to become a Silverwood resident, you have to sign a kindness pledge. I think that sort of thing is much needed in today's society.

Growing up, I knew every neighbor on the street. That's just not the case anymore.

I think Silverwood's intentional sense of community will eliminate a lot of the negativity we see in other areas of life and encourage people to get out and actually interact with one another.

Multigenerational living has its pros and cons

Clair: Mom and I have been living together for the last two-and-a-half years. There are so many benefits: I have someone to come home to when I get off work, plus extra assistance around the house. I work all week about an hour away, and I'm lucky that she picks up my slack and helps with the kids. If there are dishes in the sink or laundry in the basket, she takes care of it.

Tracy: At my age, I want to be useful and help whoever needs my help in any way I can.

I'm lucky too. When she comes home from work every night, she cooks for us all. I love that about her.

Clair: It's a delicate balance! My kids and I are loud, and we're constantly on the go. My mom, on the other hand, is quiet and likes her peace.

Tracy: There are always dynamics to deal with, but at the end of the day, love wins. Both sides have to make compromises, but we're willing to do that.

We're just so excited to start this next chapter. I feel so lucky to get to enjoy the last quarter of my life with my family.

A 3rd proxy firm broke ranks on Elon Musk's $1 trillion Tesla pay plan — giving it a partial thumbs-up, with a catch 2:16 AM (5 hours ago)

• Egan-Jones partly backed Elon Musk's $1 trillion Tesla pay plan, breaking with other proxy firms.
• The advisor said Musk's payout aligns with performance but warned of governance and equity risks.
• Tesla's chair urged investors to "vote yes to robots" and reject "robotic" advice from proxy firms.

A third major proxy advisor has weighed in on Elon Musk's proposed $1 trillion Tesla pay package, giving it a partial thumbs up, but with some serious caveats.

Egan-Jones Proxy Services said it would recommend shareholders vote for the 2025 CEO Performance Award, but only under its "Wealth-Focus Policy," which prioritizes shareholder returns and pay-for-performance alignment.

Under all its other policy frameworks, including ones focused on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles and broader corporate accountability, the firm urged investors to vote against the deal.

The split stance makes Egan-Jones the first major proxy firm to partly back Musk's record-breaking compensation plan, setting it apart from Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis, which both told Tesla shareholders to reject it outright.

A plan entirely built on performance

Under the wealth-focused framework, Egan-Jones argued Musk's massive potential payout is justified because it's fully tied to performance.

To unlock the full $1 trillion, Tesla would have to hit 12 operational milestones, including reaching an $8.5 trillion market capitalization, generating $400 billion in adjusted earnings, delivering 20 million vehicles, and reaching 10 million active Full Self-Driving subscriptions.

"If Mr. Musk fails to meet the specified milestones, he will receive nothing," Egan-Jones wrote in its analysis.

"If he succeeds, both Mr. Musk and shareholders stand to benefit significantly," it said.

The firm estimated that, if all targets are met, Tesla shareholders' stock value could rise by about 800% over 10 years.

Governance and fairness concerns

But under its other policies — the Blended, ESG, Catholic, and Taft-Hartley policies — Egan-Jones flagged major governance and fairness risks.

These policies are designed for investors who value strong corporate oversight, equitable pay, and social responsibility alongside profits.

The firm cautioned that if Musk hits every target, his total ownership could climb to 28.8%, potentially giving him greater control over Tesla and reducing other shareholders' influence on company decisions.

It also pointed to the massive gap between Musk's potential earnings and employee pay, saying that if his proposed equity stake were shared evenly among Tesla's 125,000 workers, each would receive about $8 million in stock.

Egan-Jones said that such a vast disparity could eventually hurt morale and pose long-term risks to Tesla's workforce and reputation.

Those concerns echoed warnings from the other proxy firms.

ISS said Musk's plan could undermine shareholder rights and governance standards, while Glass Lewis called it "excessively dilutive," arguing Musk could earn billions in stock awards even if he hits just one of the 12 performance tranches.

Tesla fired back — and its chair stepped in

Tesla has fiercely disputed the proxy firms' criticism, calling their analyses "misguided" and "robotic."

In a series of posts on X this week, the company accused ISS and Glass Lewis of relying on "one-size-fits-all checklists" that ignore Tesla's unique business model and history of defying industry norms.

Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm doubled down in an open letter to shareholders, which Tesla shared on X on Tuesday, urging them to "vote yes to robots, and reject robotic voting."

She said ISS and Glass Lewis use a "simplistic, one-size-fits-all framework" that can't assess a company as unconventional as Tesla, and argued that Musk's 2025 play plan is meant to "supercharge Tesla's next phase of exceptional growth and value creation."

"Elon gets nothing unless shareholders enjoy exceptional investment returns," Denholm wrote.

She dismissed concerns that the plan would shrink existing investors' stakes, saying the package should be seen as "an investment, not dilution," since shareholders would only give up value if Tesla's market capitalization grows more than sevenfold.

Denholm closed by challenging investors to make a choice: "If you prefer that Tesla turn into just another car company mired in the ways of the past, then you should follow ISS and Glass Lewis."

But if you believe in Tesla, "under the visionary leadership of Elon," she added, "then you should vote with Tesla."

I went to Cursor's New York café. I saw coding bros, custom merch, and a potential job interview 2:14 AM (5 hours ago)

• I went to the AI code editor Cursor's café pop-up. It was packed full of tech bros sharing GitHub profiles.
• Cursor gave out free coffee, pins, and stickers. Some attendees took home a branded bag of coffee beans.
• The event was a networking hub. I watched one attendee say he was hiring before launching into questions.

For one day, New York's biggest Cursor fans gathered to eat, drink, and vibe code.

Over the last two years, Cursor has grown from a cult hit to one of the most popular AI code editors in software development. The tool's developer, Anysphere, has raised over $1 billion and was recently valued at $9.9 billion, per PitchBook.

On Tuesday, Cursor hosted a one-day café at The Lost Draft in SoHo. It's one of several in-person events that AI companies have created to satisfy loyal customers and increase their social media hype.

"People like meeting each other in real life," Ben Lang, who helps lead Community at Cursor, told me. "Any excuse to come and meet people with similar interests and similar values is a win."

Here's what I saw at Cafe Cursor:

Good luck finding a seat at Cafe Cursor

The first thing I noticed was how packed it was.

The Lost Draft is a big coffee shop — there are bar seats, many tables, and even a secluded back area. And yet, every single seat in the coffee shop was taken.

The excitement in the air was palpable as I listened to conversations about startup raises and coding tools.

This isn't Cursor's first in-person café. The company put one up in September in San Francisco, which Lang said had a similarly warm reception.

"Some people emailed me afterward saying they got a lot done, they were able to build a bunch while they were there," Lang said. "They were really happy to meet each other and the team."

Espresso drinks were on the menu (for free)

Café Cursor's menu was entirely espresso drinks, but off-menu ordering was easy. Cursor bought out the coffeeshop, so drinks were on the house.

I picked myself up a cold brew, but not before almost toppling over a coder who had propped up his laptop on the coffee bar. While New York seems to run more and more on matcha, I couldn't spot any of the grassy green drink in the café.

"We brought together Cursor users to come build, cowork, and grab some coffee," Lang said.

Cursor had custom whole-bean coffee bags

The café was dotted with bags of whole bean coffee branded for the pop-up.

The bags were made in partnership with Terminal, a tech-themed coffee brand. One of Terminal's frequently asked questions is, "Will Terminal coffee make me a better developer?" (Its answer: "Legally, we cannot guarantee that it will, but…")

In an X post before the event, Lang posted a photo of a wagon full of coffee. On the ground, they were in high demand; attendees had to ask to take one home.

It was decorated with Lego dogs and Cursor tab keys

Café Cursor mostly sported neutral colors like black and gray. Spinning around to view the full pop-up, my eye was instantly drawn to a bright red Lego dog. Below it, Cursor displayed some ornate keyboards.

Cursor also showed off its stand-alone tab keys, a limited-release piece of company merchandise. Within Cursor, users can press tab to autocomplete lines of code.

"I really like the tab key," Lang said. "It's very unique to Cursor."

Attendees could pick up a free sticker or pin

Cursor stickers and pins were free for the taking. I spotted multiple attendees sporting pins on their shirts.

Wearable merch for AI companies has been a big hit, especially Anthropic's "thinking" caps, which I spotted multiple of at the pop-up.

The café's attendees were mostly men

Silicon Valley has a somewhat off-balance gender ratio — and the Cursor pop-up was no exception.

On my scan of the coffee shop, I spotted five women. One of the five was doing sign-ups at the door, and another was the PR person walking me around.

The rest of the roughly 70 attendees, when I was there between 10 and 10:30 a.m. ET, were men.

Cursor staff were on-site with name tags

For Cursor, the café was also an opportunity for customers to meet the team. A few staff members were on-site with name tags, and more planned to come as the day went on.

Cursor's bookshelf had the Silicon Valley hits

I took a second to browse Cursor's bookshelf.

Among the offerings: Ben Horowitz's "The Hard Thing about Hard Things," Tae Kim's new book about Nvidia, and a reader on the basics of nuclear fission.

Nobody seemed to have a book in their hand, though. Almost everyone was networking or coding. While reading the spines, I overheard what could have become an impromptu job interview.

One attendee said that he was hiring, before quizzing his conversation partner on which tools they'd used before.

I left with my Cold Brew in a branded cup

After about 30 minutes, it was time to head out. I'd had enough of watching attendees share GitHub profiles.

With my branded cup in hand, I headed back to the office.

Cartier watches are having a moment with Gen Z, new pre-owned watch data shows 2:00 AM (6 hours ago)

• Gen Z buyers are driving a surge in Cartier watch sales on the secondary market, a new report said.
• Cartier's share of Gen Z purchases on watch marketplace Chrono24 rose over the last seven years.
• Some young investors look at luxury watches as assets.

Gen Z watch lovers are all about Cartier right now.

The luxury brand's Swiss-made watches are hot commodities among Gen Z buyers on the secondary market, according to a new report by watch marketplace Chrono24 and publication Fratello that was shared with Business Insider.

Cartier's share of the total purchases by Gen Z on Chrono24 rose from 1.7% to 6.8% over a seven-year period as of the first half of 2025, according to the report.

That share outpaces the brand's overall growth on the site during the same period.

Three models are driving the interest from Gen Z: the entry-level Tank, the sportier Santos, and the dressy Panthère.

The Tank is often considered an entry point to Cartier's luxurious offerings, with a starting retail price of around $3,500. New Santos and Panthère lines, depending on the material, can easily go for well over $10,000.

"The unyielding demand for the Tank and Santos fuels desire for the brand, with the hard-to-get factor driving lots of newcomers to the secondary market — many of those skewing younger, enticed by a more accessible way to reach luxury," Balazs Ferenczi, Chrono24's head of brand engagement, told Business Insider.

Cartier didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Dress watches overall are having a moment among young adults. The report describes them as smaller in size, often in gold, and paired with a leather strap — more elegant than the rugged look of stainless steel sports watches. Cartier's Tank model, for example, often comes with a leather band in an array of sizes.

Gen Z's interest in secondhand dress watches is stronger than any other demographic, the report said, with 12% of all watch purchases during the first half of 2025 being dress watches.

These days, luxury watches are more than fashion statements. One recent study found that high-end watches can appeal to investors seeking to diversify their portfolios with potentially lower-risk investments.

Pop icon Taylor Swift also appears to be a fan of Cartier. The singer was spotted wearing a Cartier Santos Demoiselle in her engagement announcement photos in August.

Chrono24 said in August that searches for the Cartier Santos Demoiselle surged 2000% in the two days after Swift's engagement compared with the days before.

The report's findings show it's more than Swift's star power driving the interest in Cartier.

A new autonomous fighter jet just broke cover. It's powered by the same AI brain that flew an F-16 through a dogfight. 2:00 AM (6 hours ago)

• Shield AI unveiled what it called a fully autonomous multirole fighter jet.
• It uses Hivemind, the AI pilot it previously used to pilot an F-16 through a dogfight.
• The company says the jet can take off without a runway, from container ships and remote islands.

The AI that powered an F-16 in a dogfight against a manned aircraft is powering a new, fully autonomous fighter jet, its maker said as it unveiled the new aircraft design.

US defense tech unicorn Shield AI unveiled its new X-BAT fighter aircraft on Wednesday. The company says that it can operate without human pilots and without runways. It said it can take off from islands and ships — not just warships, but also container ships.

Armor Harris, Shield AI's senior vice president of aircraft engineering, told Business Insider that the brain for the new aircraft is the company's Hivemind, "the same combat-proven AI pilot we used to fly a modified F-16 through a dogfight," a reference to a landmark 2024 test.

Last year, during a testing exercise, the AI-driven X-62A Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft (VISTA), a modified F-16, went head-to-head with a crewed fighter aircraft in aerial combat. The military never said which aircraft emerged victorious.

In other simulations, the AI beat the human pilot, but this was a different kind of test involving aircraft in the real world. The then Air Force secretary, Frank Kendall, was riding in the back of the pilotless fighter aircraft.

Powered by Hivemind, the new X-BAT can complete missions without human pilot involvement and can advance without GPS or reliable communications, Shield AI told Business Insider. Artificial intelligence-enabled systems are considered necessary developments to break through contested areas that traditional crewed aircraft may be unable to navigate safely, or at all.

Pilotless fighters are also not bound by the same design limitations meant to protect a human pilot.

Shield AI said that "unlike legacy crewed aircraft, X-BAT frees human aviators for missions that demand critical human judgment — an essential advantage in today's fast-moving and unpredictable conflict zones."

A pilotless fighter aircraft

Harris said that the X-BAT can also act as a drone wingman, working closely with crewed fighter jets to protect them and expand their overall combat power.

Very interested in what autonomous uncrewed assets can bring to the force, the US Air Force has been investing in Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCAs, that can fly alongside crewed aircraft.

For Increment 1, the Air Force selected General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and Anduril Industries to develop two prototypes, both of which have received unique "fighter drone" designations. Additional CCA designs are being presented.

Harris said that the X-BAT was built for "what comes after" the Increment 1 development phase.

He said that this phase of the program has "played a foundational role, and now X-BAT is pushing the envelope with advanced electronic warfare capabilities, greater payload capacity, and extended range that gives combatant commanders geographically distributed long-range fires and effects." This is an area that the military recognizes it needs to catch up on.

Part of the desire for CCAs is affordability. These are attritable warfighting platforms that can support and, if needed, be sacrificed for crewed fighters, which are more expensive and will ultimately be far fewer in number.

Shield AI said that the new X-BAT design "delivers high-end capability for a fraction of the cost of traditional fighter jets."

Filling the fleet with this kind of aircraft makes for a larger, more resilient fleet that can take hits without suffering severe pilot losses or budget-breaking plane losses, a necessity for high-intensity peer-level combat. Shield AI said uncrewed aircraft like these are "reshaping how future conflicts are fought and sustained."

Kendall said last year that "the AI competition is essentially going to determine who's the winner in the next battlefield." And he told BI that the F-16 dogfight was "a transformational moment" that marked the transition from when autonomous air-to-air combat was only "a distant dream" to its emergence as reality.

The company said the X-BAT was developed "to ensure the US and its allies keep pace on the battlefield amid rapid technological change."

Deploying from anywhere

Key to the X-BAT design is its flexibility. Shield AI said it has vertical takeoff and landing with a 2,000-nautical-mile range, "letting it launch from ships, islands, or austere forward sites without carriers, runways, or tankers." That kind of range could prove valuable at overcoming the "tyranny of distance" in the vast Indo-Pacific amid a growing concern about conflict with China.

Shield AI said it was the "only platform in its class" to combine those features.

Big-deck amphibious warships could host up to 60 X-BATs, Harris said, but these aircraft, which have a small footprint and don't require a runway, could also be launched from atypical vessels, like a container ship, he added, "giving commanders the power to project combat airpower from almost anywhere."

It can be used by the US Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Army, or allied forces, Harris said.

The X-Bat was unveiled in front of military leaders and politicians in Washington, DC, on Tuesday

It's unclear if the X-BAT will be the future for US or allied militaries, but forces are increasingly interested in autonomy. European aerospace and defense giant Airbus has also tested its H145 helicopter with Shield AI's Hivemind, which has also been used on a number of other aircraft.

Dollar stores are filling a surprising niche in your weekly grocery shopping routine 1:47 AM (6 hours ago)

• Dollar General has gained ground among shoppers as a destination for fill-in grocery trips.
• The chain has grown its share of grocery trips that last under 10 minutes, Placer.ai found.
• It points to another niche that dollar stores are filling in the US retail landscape.

For some shoppers, Dollar General is becoming like a local corner store.

Data from Placer.ai released this month shows that Dollar General has become a destination for shoppers looking to pick up a snack, a gallon of milk, or other quick groceries. Many customers are shopping at the chain in addition to more traditional supermarkets.

Dollar General stores were the destination of 28% of quick visits, or shopping trips that last less than 10 minutes, during the second quarter of 2025, according to Placer.ai's data. That's up from 24% during the same quarter in 2019.

"Consumers are visiting Dollar General, and probably all dollar stores, for that matter, as a sort of fill-in opportunity," Elizabeth Lafontaine, the director of research at Placer.ai, told Business Insider.

Traditional grocery stores still received about 61% of those quick trips in the second quarter of 2025, Placer.ai found. But the data shows that Dollar General has carved out another niche for itself, Lafontaine said.

Dollar stores, particularly those operated by Dollar General and Dollar Tree, have opened thousands of new locations in the US over the past several years.

The chains have gained a reputation for setting up shop in small rural communities where Walmart and other retailers can't make a store work. In those areas, shoppers might spend most of their weekly grocery budgets at dollar stores.

Placer.ai's data, though, shows how dollar stores function in more densely populated areas, where shoppers tend to have many shopping choices. In those areas, many consumers aren't spending most of their budget at Dollar General, but they are turning to the chain for those quick trips, Lafontaine said.

Between 2022 and 2025, for example, more Aldi shoppers also began shopping at Dollar General, according to Placer.ai data. At the same time, more Dollar General shoppers turned to Aldi.

That means that shoppers, especially those who are looking for good deals, are "likely to visit both of those retailers and not necessarily exchange one trip for another because they see them as probably complementary visits to one another," she said.

Dollar General has also bolstered its quick delivery options through partnerships with DoorDash and Uber Eats. Three-quarters of delivery orders at the chain are filled within an hour, and many contain grocery items, CEO Todd Vasos said on an earnings call in August.

Do you work at Dollar General or another dollar store and have a story to share? Reach out to this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com

I was a young mom and thought mom friends were overrated. Then, I made one. 1:47 AM (6 hours ago)

• I was 26 when I had my son, and I didn't realize how important it was to have mom friends.
• I tried to make some at first, but when nothing stuck, I sort of gave up.
• Then, a good friend of mine had a child, and I saw the benefits of being friends with other parents.

When my son was born, I was 26. I was a new mom, and not only did none of my good friends have kids yet, but they also didn't live close by. I didn't have anyone my own age to talk to about all of the mom things that would come up. Every time I needed parenting advice, I called my aunt, and she was patient with me.

But talking to my aunt was not the same as talking to someone going through parenting milestones at the same time. She had her son 10 years prior to me having mine. Often, she didn't remember what she had done in any given situation, and she would tell me I needed to "try to make some mom friends."

When my son was born, I tried to make mom friends at first

I went to story times at the library, popular playgrounds, and local swim lessons for moms and babies, but I never hit it off with anyone. Many of the moms were older and married, and I felt like I was in a different territory as a younger single mom.

After a year of failed attempts, I stopped trying so hard. That's when one of my good friends had a son, and we slowly became closer over the shared experience of being a boy mom.

We had been good friends in college and ever since, but becoming moms at around the same time took our friendship to a new level. I think we each care a lot about being a good parent, and that brings even more mutual respect into the relationship. I've found it so helpful at times to put our brains together and break down different parenting issues with her.

My son is now almost 12, while her three boys are all younger. My son's whole life, I've given them the clothes and toys he outgrows. It's really special when I recognize them wearing something like one of his old shirts. It feels like we're all more connected.

I didn't realize how many benefits there were to being friends with other moms

I went on for the first three years of my son's life without any other friends who were also parents. Before then, I envisioned the main benefit as being someone to talk to about your kids. However, being friends with someone who recognizes me as the person I am, not just as a mom, is actually the greatest benefit of having friends who are also mothers.

Now that I've experienced the support that comes with being friends with other moms, I'm really sad that I missed out on that when my son was at his youngest. Being a new mom, I felt totally isolated. It would have been really helpful to have more allies, and to cheer each other on.

Having friends who are also moms and understand how all-encompassing it can be helps me feel understood and makes me feel connected to myself again. My friends and I have also made a habit of checking in on each other, because we just…get it.

I have individual relationships with a few moms now who are close friends. Besides them all being in my wedding, I mostly spend time with each of them separately. I love that with any one of them, we can hang out with our kids, which is our preference, or do something together kids-free, like go out for coffee. Either way, I'm sure we're talking about our kids half of the time.

I had told myself it wasn't important to be friends with other parents

During the years I was navigating parenthood alone, I had honestly given up on the idea of finding any mom friends. I had family and child-free friends, and told myself I didn't need anything else. But once I experienced bonding with another mom, I realized just how valuable it is to find someone who understands that experience.

I believe being a parent is the most important job I'll ever have. Finding such a good friend in someone who feels the same way has actually made me even better at it, because I no longer feel alone. It feels like I'm part of a team that just wants to do a really good job at being a mom.

Workers are back in offices — and so are the bedbugs 1:45 AM (6 hours ago)

• Google's Chelsea campus underwent bedbug treatment over the weekend.
• A pest-control company said bedbug sightings in commercial spaces have increased as employees return to offices.
• Bedbugs pose an icky problem for employers, who should have protocols in place to avoid legal issues.

More workers are heading into the office with laptops, lattes — and, in some cases, bedbugs.

Google sent a memo over the weekend informing New York City employees that it was treating its Chelsea campus offices for the pests.

The company's Real Estate & Workplace Services team "was recently informed of a possible bed bug issue at our Chelsea campus," the Sunday memo, acquired by Business Insider, said. "Today, exterminators inspected the NYC-9TH, Chelsea Market, 8510, and Pier 57 buildings with a sniffer dog and found credible evidence of their presence. Initial treatment has been completed on the affected floors of the Chelsea campus."

The news of Google's bedbug memo was earlier reported by Wired.

For a time during the pandemic, workers logging on from home didn't have to worry about creepy-crawlies in their cubicles. Now, as more employees return to the office, bedbugs are coming along for the ride.

"These are what we tend to call 'take-your-bedbug-to-work events,'" said Gil Bloom, an entomologist who is president of Standard Pest Management in New York. "They're primarily hitchhiking, unfortunately, from home environments" via items like backpacks and clothing.

Bedbug issues in New York haven't reached the level they were prior to the pandemic — but there's been an uptick in sightings at commercial locations since life began returning to normal, Bloom told Business Insider.

Offices aren't immune

Google isn't the only employer to deal with this issue. Earlier this year, bedbugs were discovered at the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation office, and staff from the affected area had to leave while the building underwent treatment, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

In 2017, BuzzFeed's Manhattan headquarters similarly had to get bedbug treatment. Hotels and airlines have also had to deal with the wingless insects.

New York City ranked second among the most bedbug-infested cities in 2018, dropped to fifth place in 2021, and climbed to third in 2023, based on data from 300 Terminix branches in the US. As of June, New York is back in second place.

Bloom said when companies suspect bedbugs are in a workspace, exterminators typically bring in detection dogs to confirm their existence and identify affected areas. While an employee might accidentally bring bedbugs into work, offices usually lack the ideal infrastructure for the insects to settle in.

"There's no great hotspot," Bloom said, referring to the lack of beds in most offices. "So it's like finding a bedbug in a haystack."

Identifying the location of the outbreak allows companies to narrow down the treatment area and resolve the problem, Bloom said. He describes such instances as "introductions," rather than full-blown "infestations."

A liability issue for companies

While bedbugs might be unpleasant, Jerome Goddard, a medical entomologist at Mississippi State University, told Business Insider that there is little to no transmission of disease from the pests. Often, the biggest challenge is dealing with the ick factor.

"The main effects are emotional and psychological," Goddard said. "And I'm not saying that's not real."

Companies, however, could face legal consequences if they don't take steps to kill the bugs.

Employers have a duty to provide a safe workplace per OSHA requirements, and failing to protect workers could create a liability, said Andrea Whalen, a senior HR business strategist at consulting firm Clark Schaefer Strategic HR.

Bloom said companies don't usually provide extermination services to individual employees unless there's a repeat situation and the office is trying to find the source to avoid future introductions to the office.

Whalen told Business Insider that companies should establish clear, written rules that cover different kinds of infestations or outbreaks. Those policies could include considerations about paying workers if they have to be sent home while pest-control professionals treat a worksite.

Because employees have a "moral and an ethical responsibility" to tell their employers if they have bedbugs, policies should include a way for employees to report an issue confidentially, she said.

"You want a way for an employee to come forward and say, 'I have this issue,' so that it protects the rest of the team," Whalen said, adding that it should be addressed with "empathy and discretion."

After all, she said, places where people often think of outbreaks occurring — like hotels, schools, and hospitals — are themselves workplaces.

"It can happen to anyone," Whalen said. "It can happen to any place."

Have a tip? We want to hear from you. Reach out to the reporters via email at aaltchek@insider.com and tparadis@insider.com, or via the secure messaging app Signal at aalt.19 or tparadis.70.

This year is shaping up to be the worst seasonal job market since 2009. Here are the major retailers hiring — and pulling back. 1:36 AM (6 hours ago)

• Retailers are hiring fewer seasonal workers this year, but more people want the jobs.
• The mismatch has an economist drawing comparisons to the Great Recession.
• Here are the different hiring approaches major retailers are taking for the holidays.

America's annual holiday shopping rush is usually preceded by a hiring sprint as retailers beef up their front-line workforces to meet the masses.

But this year, there aren't as many jobs available at major retailers as there have been in years past. Retail hiring rates are at their lowest since 2009, according to analysis by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

"The cautious pace of announcements so far suggests that companies are not betting on a big seasonal surge," the firm's senior vice president, Andy Challenger, said in its report.

Data from the jobs site Indeed also shows that retail listings at the beginning of October were lower than the same point in each of the prior four years.

"Things have really slowed down in the seasonal hiring space in the last couple of years," Indeed economist Cory Stahl told Business Insider. "Even of the postings that remain, we're seeing that they're not pushing as hard to get people into these jobs as quickly."

While employers are slowing down, Stahl has found that more people are looking for jobs — a lot more.

Searches on Indeed for seasonal jobs are already well outpacing last year's rate, which was notably higher than prior years, according to Stahl's analysis.

With the broader US labor market in a quasi-frozen state, seasonal jobs look increasingly like a lifeline for workers who are trying to earn some income and get moving with their careers. Retail jobs typically represent about two-thirds of seasonal hiring each year, Indeed found.

"Employers are just not hiring," Stahl said. "The best comparison we have is the years immediately following the Great Recession in terms of hiring — and that's not a comparison you really want to draw."

To be sure, some major retailers are still adding seasonal staff.

Bath & Body Works plans to hire 32,000 people; Dick's Sporting Goods is adding 14,000; Kohl's has a few thousand seasonal listings on its careers page.

And there's Amazon, which said it is picking up some 250,000 full-time, part-time, and seasonal positions across its US transportation and fulfillment network.

But others are notably absent from what might otherwise be the tidy list of big, round-numbered hiring targets of yore.

Target said it plans to primarily rely on a combination of additional hours for existing staff, a "flexible workforce" of some 43,000 people who are available to pick up additional shifts, and an unspecified number of seasonal members across its fleet of stores.

A Walmart spokesperson similarly told Business Insider that instead of a massive hiring push, the retail giant intends to offer most of its additional hours to existing staff, like it did last year.

"There may be some hiring on a store-by-store basis, but the majority will be giving those hours to current associates," the spokesperson said.

Macy's and UPS, which have previously staffed up big during the holidays, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

"There's been a real shift more broadly in the labor market towards saying, 'Hey, we're not going to bring new people in. We're going to make do with the people we have,'" Indeed's Stahl said. "It's not surprising to then potentially see that carrying through into some of these seasonal hiring decisions as well."

That may be of some comfort to those who have jobs already, but those who were hoping for a holiday hustle might be disappointed with the limited options.

The $1,100 shoes Wall Streeters can't get enough of 1:30 AM (6 hours ago)

• This post originally appeared in the First Trade newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily markets newsletter here.

They make you feel like you're walking on a cloud. You can wear them with a suit or with jeans. They'll earn you street cred with finance bros.

The catch? They're $1,100.

Zegna's Triple Stitch shoes have unofficially become Wall Street's hottest footwear, exploding in popularity in recent years amid the quiet luxury movement. Apple CEO Tim Cook sports them. CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin told BI he wears them too, and that he sees them everywhere. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed a few years back that they're the most-worn shoes on private jets.

But they're not only popular with the uber-rich. Sales associates at multiple Zegna locations in Manhattan said that they have a wide age range of financial industry clients.

Are they really worth the hype? Eager to see for myself, I went to the brand's global store on 57th Street in New York City to try on a pair.

My review, in short? They're absolutely worth the money. If you're the type of person who is OK with dropping a rent payment on some sneakers, at least. I didn't love their plain look initially, but how they feel on your feet completely changes your perception of them.

I'm usually a size 11.5, but the folks at the store said they recommend going a half-size up. They come in 30 different color options and range in price from $1,100 to more than $4,000 — I went with a black and white scheme. They were easily the most comfortable pair of shoes I'd ever worn.

After being made a convert, I decided to head out and try to spot a pair of them in the wild. Given that it was rainy, I was doubtful I'd find anyone. But within minutes, as I approached Park Avenue, there was a pair walking right at me.

A visitor from Charleston, South Carolina, said he had his custom-made last year and picked up three pairs.

"I love them," he said, before asking: "Are you gonna buy a pair?"

I'll have to save up first, I told him.

Do you own a pair of Zegnas or another quiet luxury item you love? Let us know!

Dealmaking is heating up again. Goldman Sachs breaks down what founders should do after they cash out. 1:17 AM (6 hours ago)

• Goldman Sachs published a new 25-page guide for founders generating life-changing wealth.
• Among the report's primary takeaways: Plan early to structure deals and capital considerations.
• Goldman partner Kerry Blum says founders "only get one first sale"—so it's critical to get it right.

Dealmaking is heating up again, and founders eyeing an IPO or sale are facing a new kind of challenge: what to do with the sudden wealth that follows.

A new 25-page report published by Goldman's private wealth and investment banking professionals lays out the decisions founders need to prepare for once they cash out. It outlines six steps that company leaders should take: be clear about your business's future, consider tax structures, set up a family and estate plan, organize liquidity, factor in existing loans and liabilities, protect your assets and family, and develop a philanthropic strategy.

The message is especially important for founders right now: mergers were up this past quarter, and the IPO market was regaining steam before the government shutdown. But the bank didn't generate the report because of the hot merger market; instead, its findings are meant to be educational for founders anytime, Kerry Blum — global head of the firm's equity structuring group, which helps some of the world's wealthiest business people structure their portfolios — told Business Insider.

The report — "Beyond the Build: A Wealth Planning Guide for a Business Exit or IPO" — walks readers through how to structure a deal, manage new liquidity, and prepare the next generation for a sudden influx of wealth.

"When I look at the work that we do with founders and entrepreneurs, we really have to think about the entire life cycle" across the corporate and personal lenses, said Blum, a Goldman partner.

Here's a look at four of their top takeaways.

Start planning early

Founders should consider "personal planning" — how they'll handle their newfound assets — around the time they begin diligence on potential acquirers or even before. Why? "The timeline of a delay could be derailed entirely by delays stemming from personal planning objectives missed in the early stages," the bank warns.

Founders should be upfront about their goals — including the selling price and ongoing ownership structures — and should be deliberate in selecting the right exit plan. A merger? A private sale? Sales and public offerings can convert years of illiquid equity into cash, the report says, suggesting that the sudden liquidity landslide can be overwhelming without support.

Each path comes with its own tax considerations, as well as the level of control, cash, and future influence the founder will maintain. "I've seen entrepreneurs who very much want to maintain a sense of control as part of the exit," Blum said, adding: "I've seen entrepreneurs who have decided that maybe in their next phase they want to pass off some of the operational elements."

Get the right team together

Assembling a strong team well before a transaction closes can help crystallize such decisions, the bank says. At Goldman, "in many cases, it will be that the banking team is well engaged with the client, and they think there's an opportunity for the client to benefit from the expertise that we can offer on the wealth management side. And so they will introduce a two-way dialogue," Blum said.

To that end, Goldman urged, do not delay in appointing these trusted advisors. CEOs need to bring together not just their C-suite counterparts, but also personal advisors, including wealth managers and trust officers. The questions this team can help you answer are manifold: Should you sell to a strategic or a financial sponsor? Is a public offering really the right route?

"We try to make sure founders carefully evaluate how their day-to-day would be different and the type of scrutiny they'd face if taking their company public, compared with selling to a sponsor or strategic buyer," Alekhya Uppalapti — a managing director in the investment bank's global technology, media, and telecommunications group — says in the report.

Tackle tax and estate planning

The report's most technical section delves into different kinds of business structures that founders should consider: an S-corporation doesn't pay federal taxes at the corporate level, whereas a C-corporation pays taxes on its profits.

Navigating the thicket of this jargon can be confusing, so the firm suggests using an estate planning attorney to "align" immediate-term goals around tax efficiency with long-term needs like setting up a professional trustee to protect newfound wealth. Trusts such as grantor-retained annuity trusts or charitable lead trusts can help transfer wealth and reduce tax exposure.

Blum said tailoring those choices to each client's objectives is one of the most complex steps in the process. "That is certainly one where understanding the individual's goals and objectives," she said, "whether it's regional or generational wealth planning, philanthropy, et cetera, is incredibly important. And matching that with the jurisdictional considerations is key to getting it right."

Beyond that, entrepreneurs should consider organizing a will, a revocable or living trust, a healthcare proxy, and guidance for end-of-life medical instructions, the bank added.

Prepare yourself for the new realities of wealth

It is not only the founder's life that changes after a major sale or IPO, the report suggests, but also the lives of family members. Goldman's guide devotes an entire section to preparing the next generation.

"Regularly scheduled family meetings, which can be facilitated with the support of your financial advisor, can help effectively convey lessons on the responsibilities of wealth and philanthropy," it says. Blum said Goldman brings clients together in small forums where they can share insights and experiences, a think tank of sorts for those about to step into a new way of life.

Privacy is also a consideration. "Different types of transactions bring different levels of visibility," Blum added. The report recommends consulting your financial advisor about a wide range of topics, including physical and digital security protocols, as well as private aviation.

Jeffrey Epstein accuser says memoir didn't name some abusers because they threatened to bankrupt her with lawsuits 1:16 AM (6 hours ago)

• Virginia Giuffre said she was afraid to name some of her abusers in her memoir.
• Some of the men threatened to ruin her financially with litigation, Giuffre wrote in her book.
• She feared a person she identified as a "former Prime Minister" would hurt her if she named him.

In a memoir written before her suicide, Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre wrote she was afraid to name some of the men she was sexually trafficked to.

Some of those men, she wrote, threatened to ruin her financially by keeping her tied up in court.

"There are other men whom I was trafficked to who have threatened me in another way: by asserting that they will use litigation to bankrupt me," she wrote.

"Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice," written with the journalist Amy Wallace and published Tuesday by Knopf, details Giuffre's years in Epstein's orbit.

According to Giuffre, Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sexually abused her and trafficked her to "scores of wealthy, powerful people" in the early 2000s, when she was a teenager.

While Giuffre's book names some of those people — like Prince Andrew — the identities of others are not made clear.

Giuffre said she was particularly frightened of a man she called "the former Prime Minister," who she believed "will seek to hurt me if I say his name here."

"He repeatedly choked me until I lost consciousness and took pleasure in seeing me in fear for my life," Giuffre wrote of the former head of state. "Horrifically, the Prime Minister laughed when he hurt me and got more aroused when I begged him to stop."

Giuffre also said she was terrified of one man whom she saw having a sexual encounter with Epstein.

"I have the same fears about another man whom I was forced to have sex with many times — a man whom I also saw having sexual contact with Epstein himself," she wrote. "I would love to identify him here. But this man is very wealthy and very powerful, and I fear that he, too, might engage me in expensive, life-ruining litigation."

Giuffre, who died in April, said some of the men who sexually abused her issued threats to her lawyers.

"One of those men's names has come up repeatedly in various court filings, and in response, he has told my lawyers that if I talk about him publicly, he will employ his vast resources to keep me in court for the rest of my life," she wrote in the book. "While I have named him in sworn depositions and identified him to the FBI, I fear that if I do so again here, my family will bear the emotional and financial brunt of that decision."

Giuffre was among the most prominent Epstein accusers who publicly told her story, speaking out against the wealthy and well-connected financier.

She received settlements from Epstein and Prince Andrew in civil lawsuits, and filed a defamation lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell that spilled much of Epstein's sex-trafficking operation into open view.

Giuffre had several high-powered lawyers on her side, including David Boies and Sigrid McCawley of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, Florida-based attorney Brad Edwards, and former federal judge Paul Cassell.

Epstein killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for trafficking girls to him for sex.

In her book, Giuffre wrote she was trafficked to "a gubernatorial candidate who was soon to win election in a Western state and a former US senator," and that she had sex with a billionaire while his pregnant wife slept in an adjoining room, among others.

Giuffre previously named individuals fitting some of those descriptions in court documents, but they are not all named in her book.

I work for Melinda French Gates at Pivotal Ventures. Here's a day in my life and the greatest lessons she's taught me. 1:05 AM (7 hours ago)

• Erin Harkless Moore leads investments at Pivotal Ventures, focusing on social progress.
• Moore values work-life balance, exercise, and aligning personal values with professional work.
• Working with Melinda French Gates has taught her to invest in and nurture her relationships.

I became the managing director of investments for Pivotal Ventures in August 2020 after more than a decade of working in finance and investing at Cambridge Associates, Goldman Sachs, and Summit Rock Advisors.

As part of Melinda French Gates' company focused on accelerating social progress, my work centers on getting more resources and capital to those who need it most, especially women.

I start my day by setting goals and catching up on the news

I'm up between 5:30 and 6 a.m. I take a few quiet moments to reflect, review my calendar, set goals, and plan what I need to accomplish. I exercise three to four times a week.

I usually have about an hour to myself before my two kids get up, so I read the news, catch up on the headlines of the day, and go through my inbox.

I'm subscribed to way too many newsletters — tech and venture investment news and mailing lists from prominent fund managers — just to get a sense of the macro environment. I tee up a bunch of emails so when I do get to the office, I can schedule or fire those off and head straight into meetings.

When my kids and spouse get up, we have breakfast together, and I hear about what they're looking forward to in their day. I walk them to school, which gives me a nice bridge from morning into work mode.

No two days are the same, but they typically involve meetings

I travel a lot for work, so I don't always spend time in D.C., but I typically arrive at the office around 9 a.m. and take the first 30 minutes to get my coffee, check in with my team, and feel the energy of the office.

My day often includes internal meetings with the team of over 150 people, where we might review our pipeline of deals, companies we're tracking, fund managers in the market, and portfolio construction.

I also meet with fund managers and founders, hearing about their visions for their firms and businesses. I have a lot of conversations with peers, other investors sharing notes and intel on what they're seeing in the market, what funds they're tracking, and how they're thinking about the current environment.

Melinda's taught me a lot about the value of trusting your team and building and nurturing relationships

Melinda is busy, so we don't get to work together every day, but she sets and is very much involved in setting the strategic frame for our work and the strategy. I really respect that she puts a lot of trust in her team. Once we've landed on where we want to go, she gives us a lot of trust to execute.

She wants to understand who the founders are that Pivotal is working with, what the fund managers are building, and what they're doing. We're updating her monthly and quarterly with insights from the portfolio and what we're hearing and seeing. She's really collaborative.

I've learned valuable leadership lessons from Melinda, particularly how much she invests in relationships. We were recently at the Upfront Summit for investors, entrepreneurs, and leading technology voices, where she spoke. Melinda carved out time to meet with some of our partners. She could've easily given her remarks and headed out to the next thing, but she made space and time to ask questions and get to know the fund managers deploying capital for Pivotal.

This approach strengthens our bonds, and I've taken something from how she shows up in the world — the importance of relationships and listening to understand what motivates people.

I wrap up my day at 5 p.m. to be present for my kids and personal relationships

I'm intentional about locking the 'work' and 'home' puzzle pieces together as best as I can. I've found that if you don't do that, then you'll look up at the end of the year and say, "Wow, I didn't take a trip for myself, or with my family, or to go see friends."

I try to wrap up my day by blocking my calendar from 5 p.m. for transition time to close out emails. I'll sometimes check emails when the kids are in bed.

When traveling for work, staying connected with my children is a priority. I'm intentional about making time to call them.

Exercise and fitness are important to me

Through exercise, I built a community. I would go to Solid Core and see the same people, who would become friends.

I also like to carve out time to go for a walk. I have some very good friends from both college and other parts of life who live in D.C., so we'll go for walks together.

Reading is also important to me. I read both fiction and nonfiction. I carve out time for that in the evenings or on the weekends when I'm traveling.

My husband and I try to host a dinner party every other month. I'm also known as the brunch captain among some of my girlfriends, as I just love food, too. It's equal parts about the food as well as the fellowship. I get a lot of joy from being in community, so even if it means I have to plan it, I'm happy to plan.

I'm always on a journey to harmonize my values with my work

After nearly 20 years in finance and investing, I've been on a journey to harmonize my values with my work.

At one of my first jobs, a pretty senior person told me, "That's great, but you can do the impact later." That just never resonated with me.

It's important to be authentic to yourself. If you really know what you're good at and what you like, try to get to that overlap in the Venn diagram; that's when you'll accelerate and really have success and meaning in your career.

His firm doesn't promote partners. Here's how he got promoted anyway. 1:00 AM (7 hours ago)

• Slow Ventures keeps a small team and doesn't promote from within.
• The early-stage venture firm made an exception by elevating Yoni Rechtman to partner.
• Rechtman is a generalist investor who's helped source deals like SuperDial and Heave.

In 2022, when Yoni Rechtman's boss asked where he wanted to be in five years, the newly hired venture capitalist told him, "Not here."

What might have sounded like defiance was exactly what Kevin Colleran, managing director of Slow Ventures, wanted to hear. The firm doesn't promote from within. It keeps funds small — "easier to return many multiples of success," Colleran said — and so the firm needs fewer investors.

This month, Slow made an exception to its rule, giving Rechtman, 30, a seat at the partners' table.

The firm, now nearing $1 billion in investor capital, has four partners investing out of its core seed funds. Colleran says Rechtman is the first principal to be promoted to partner for those funds in 10 years; Megan Lightcap made partner in 2024 to co-lead the firm's creator-focused fund.

It's a precarious time for junior venture capitalists. Many came of age during the frothy post-pandemic boom, when deal flow was brisk, valuations soared, and portfolio companies seemed to double in value every few months. Then the market cooled and funds pulled back.

Suddenly, midlevel investors had fewer chances to prove themselves, and some of their once-glittering deals now looked painfully overpriced. The path to partnership, already murky, became even narrower. Some disillusioned investors left the industry altogether.

Back in 2022, Rechtman assumed he'd eventually leave Slow to raise his own fund. Plans changed, and not, he says, because the market soured. Through September, 68 debut funds closed, versus 183 in all of last year, per PitchBook. Emerging managers are also taking twice as long to raise their next funds — a headwind that would give any investor pause.

Rechtman says he's staying for a simpler reason. The job's not finished.

Early on, Slow general partner and early Facebook executive Sam Lessin gave Rechtman this advice: "Fish in waters where other firms aren't fishing." Rechtman took it somewhat literally.

This year, he grabbed a last-minute flight to Tampa to reconnect with a startup billing itself as "Uber for heavy-equipment repair." Founded in 2020, Heave has quietly assembled a network that it claims covers nearly a third of the country's heavy-machinery mechanics.

Rechtman closed a handshake deal with the founder over smoked fish, and Slow joined its $7 million seed round, which was announced in August. It's the kind of off-beat, unsexy bet that has become Rechtman's calling card.

That approach has nudged Slow into areas it might have otherwise overlooked, such as healthcare, growth buyouts, and what Rechtman calls "real-world businesses." This spring, Slow backed SuperDial, which builds voice agents for healthcare organizations and has already handled more than 1 million calls. Colleran said Rechtman also worked with him to close Journey, a travel rewards platform created by Brian Kelly, founder of The Points Guy.

Slow doesn't vote by unanimity. It runs on a simple rule: any two partners can greenlight a deal. Decision-making power is flat. "Because we are small and we trust each other, if two people like an idea, that's good enough," Colleran said.

Colleran, now in his forties, calls Rechtman a "younger and hungrier" network-builder. Rechtman hosts a twice-yearly mini-conference for young partners, principals, and emerging managers, and says a meaningful share of his deals now come through that circle.

He's also built an audience by publishing. He's written a weekly Substack for more than a year and says he has roughly 15,000 subscribers. Rechtman said if investors want credibility with founders on weird, non-consensus ideas, they have to put their thinking in public. "Frankly, I have a style that either attracts or repels founders," he said.

Instead of leaving Slow to raise a debut fund, Rechtman says he now sees a path to help build a differentiated franchise from inside a partnership.

As a Brooklyn native, he wants to do it from New York. The city is awash in seed checks, he says, but starved for growth capital to scale the most promising hometown companies.

Slow has raised three opportunity funds, totaling $295 million, to join later rounds for its top performers. This gives Rechtman a way to keep backing breakouts rather than watching them migrate to out-of-town investment firms.

"When something takes off in New York, other people make the money," Rechtman said. "I see an opportunity to change that."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at mrussell@businessinsider.com or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

Amazon admits it's missing the next wave of AI startups for its cloud business 1:00 AM (7 hours ago)

• AWS struggles to identify early stage AI startups led by solo founders or with unusual funding.
• Generative AI has sparked rapid growth of single-person startups with little or no outside funding.
• AWS plans to add a more data-based prediction model to its VC-driven approach to address this issue.

The generative AI boom has fueled the growth of single-person startups and companies operating without external funding.

For Amazon Web Services, these "solopreneurs" and bootstrapped startups have emerged as a "blind spot" in its customer discovery process, which heavily relies on connections with venture capital firms, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider.

This has caused AWS to miss out on several high-growth startups as early customers, including SurgeAI and Base44. SurgeAI grew to $1 billion in revenue without outside funding, while Base44, once solely owned by its founder, was acquired by Wix for $80 million.

"This blind spot poses increasing risk to cloud market share," Amazon employees warned in the internal document.

Amazon became the dominant cloud provider by working with early startups. Some of these nascent businesses grew into huge tech companies that spent heavily on compute, which drove demand for Amazon Web Services.

The rise of generative AI is messing with this successful formula. This new technology helps some startups get going with fewer employees. That means they sometimes need to raise less money. These smaller, often self-funded, businesses look from the outside like less interesting cloud customers, when in fact they may retain the ability to grow into substantial enterprises.

This is part of a broader challenge for AWS, which is seeing a "fundamental" shift in how AI startups spend on cloud computing, Business Insider previously reported.

An Amazon spokesperson said it's "not true" that the company is missing early signals of fast-growth startups, adding that the company continues to "engage founders as early as we can, in collaboration with VCs, via programs like AWS GenAI Accelerator and AWS Activate."

Being 'out-hustled'

To tackle the issue, AWS intends to adjust its VC-driven discovery approach to add a more data-driven prediction model designed to spot promising startups at an earlier stage, according to the internal Amazon document obtained by Business Insider.

AWS can't risk losing this market. A growing number of startups are run by a single employee, driven by AI's efficiency gains. Replit's CEO Amjad Masad previously said the era of solo software creation has arrived, saying anyone can build an app in a few hours with the right AI prompt. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted last year that a "one-person billion-dollar company" would emerge because of AI.

David Levy, a former manager on AWS' startup business development team, wrote in a blog post this week that AWS intentionally focused on founders early in their journeys to secure them as long-term customers. That approach accelerated AWS growth and led to roughly 70% adoption among startups backed by top-tier venture capital firms, he noted.

But that's beginning to shift. Levy wrote that AI startups are now directing their initial spending toward GPUs, AI models, and inference tools, rather than traditional cloud compute or storage services, citing Business Insider's earlier report. Those are areas where no single cloud provider holds dominance, creating fresh challenges for vendors such as AWS.

"AWS built an empire by chasing startups everyone else ignored," Levy wrote. "Now they're the ones being out-hustled by the next wave of builders."

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From 'sandwich bots' to 'omakase' — a guide to the weirder lingo in the crypto fraud trial of two MIT-educated brothers 1:00 AM (7 hours ago)

• A NYC jury is hearing evidence in the complex crypto fraud trial of the Peraire-Bueno brothers.
• Jurors are getting a three-week master's class on how $25M can be diverted in just 12 seconds.
• For the rest of us, here is a quick glossary of the trial's weirdest terminology.

So Snoopy6353 and Curious Rabbit are brothers, OK?

And they're on trial in Manhattan because back in April 2023, they unleashed their omakase strategy on some sandwich bots in the Ethereum mempool.

Huh?

The $25 million wire-fraud trial of James Peraire-Bueno and Anton Peraire-Bueno, two MIT-educated brothers, has been underway in a federal courtroom since mid-October. And what a crypto-lingo-larded trial it has been.

It's high time for a helpful glossary of some of the trial's more colorful terms. Good luck to us all, and don't let the sandwich bots hit you on the way out of the mempool.

Snoopy6353

Crypto is all about privacy.

It's a world of pseudonyms and cryptographic account numbers. The anonymity is so tight that after two years of investigation, the feds still do not know the identity of two of the three alleged victims, who never came forward.

The brothers on trial have been accused by prosecutors of pulling off a gutsy and unprecedented heist in the roiling crypto trading arena known as the Ethereum blockchain. The pair had oddly guileless online names.

James Peraire-Bueno, 29, went by Snoopy6353. Prosecutors say that in April 2023, he and his brother pulled a classic bait and switch that left three traders holding a bag of essentially worthless crypto — "shitcoins," as prosecutors say the brothers laughingly gloated.

The brothers, meanwhile, pocketed $25 million in stablecoins. It's a crypto bounty their lawyers attribute to the clever pair's "wildly successful" and perfectly legal "trading strategy."

Both sides agree that this small fortune changed hands in the time it takes to add a new block of transaction data to the ever-growing blockchain — 12 seconds.

Curious Rabbit

Anton Peraire-Bueno, 25, who lives with his parents in the Boston area, also used an adorable screen name, as defense lawyers have repeatedly told the highly educated, eight-woman, four-man jury.

(Defense lawyers said "Curious Rabbit" at least five times during opening statements, as in "Anton, the Curious Rabbit," and "As you will find out, Curious Rabbit is really a perfect way to describe Anton.")

Curious Rabbit's curiosity is part of the case. Prosecutors have described a number of his Google searches, including "how to wash crypto."

Also: "Is prison or jail worse?"

And also: "what is the statue of limitations?"

Both defendants are graduates of MIT, where Snoopy was on the sail team, Curious Rabbit was a rower, and their father was and remains a professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

Legal terms may not have been on the curriculum.

The mempool

Now that we've got our toes wet, it's time to dive into the mempool.

The mempool is a publicly-viewable waiting room. It's a kind of limbo where transactions — crypto buy orders, sell orders, software updates — sit and wait to be bundled into "blocks" of data so they can be added to the blockchain.

(A block can contain hundreds of carefully-ordered transactions. A new block is added to the blockchain every 12 seconds — the precise window of the alleged fraud.)

The mempool, this crypto-transaction holding area, isn't very inviting. There's no actual water, no lifeguard, and, sadly, no swim-up bar.

It is, however, infested with metaphorical sharks, also known as "predatory bots." These are crazy-fast bits of pre-programmed software with one purpose in life: to take money from unwitting crypto traders and make money for the traders who turn them loose.

Sometimes smaller bots in the mempool get eaten by bigger bots, as happened here. We'll get to that in a bit.

Sandwich bots

Sandwich bots are a plague on everyday folks who just want to buy some crypto — and the Ethereum mempool is swarming with these little guys, according to testimony.

Here's how they work. Let's say one of these everyday folks — "Joe Crypto," we'll call him — risks a chunk of his life savings on a big cryptocurrency purchase.

Joe's buy order gets kerplunked into the mempool, where it sits in plain sight, waiting to be bundled into a block with other transactions and added to the blockchain.

That's when the sandwich bots attack. In milliseconds, a bot places a trade immediately before and immediately after Joe's big juicy trade — surrounding it like the bread in a sandwich.

The sandwich bot's first piece of bread? That's a big buy order — sometimes for millions of dollars — for the same kind of crypto Joe is buying. The bot's buy order drives the price of Joe's trade up, meaning Joe will now pay more.

The second piece of bread? That's the bot selling everything it bought in that first slice of bread, but at that now-higher price — for a profit. The bot bought low, at the price Joe had hoped to pay, then sold high, all in the blink of an eye.

In crypto parlance, Joe Crypto is now the victim of a sandwich attack. He has been "sandwiched."

According to trial testimony, this is perfectly legal under the rules of the Ethereum blockchain. No proprietary or private data has been breached. The bots merely took advantage of pending-transaction data that anyone can see by peering into the mempool.

Which takes us back to the Peraire-Buenos, and their big appetite for sandwich bots.

The omakase strategy

The Peraire-Bueno brothers spent the first three months of 2023 planning, coding, and running decoy trades with one goal in mind: outwit the sandwich bots and make millions.

They called their multi-step plan the "omakase strategy," and whether that strategy was fair play or fraud is the central question of the trial.

The name comes from the style of Japanese restaurant "where the chef sets the menu," Katherine Trefz, an attorney for James Peraire-Bueno, told the jury.

In this context, the chefs — block "validators," in Ethereum parlance — are the Peraire-Buenos.

In very simplified terms, the brothers set out some tempting, sandwich-meat bait in the mempool and waited for the bots to come. In milliseconds, three snapped at the bait, each building one of those buy-buy-sell sandwiches.

As these three sandwiches moved with lightning speed through the block-building process, the brothers' bigger bots attacked.

Prosecutors say the brothers, with their validator chef's hats firmly in place, were able to exploit a software glitch that let them type in a "poisonous," fraudulent row of zeros — the primary "misrepresentation" in the indictment.

The zeros gummed up the works, letting the brothers switch in three new sandwiches.

The sandwich bots' initial, $25 million buy order? Those three bottom pieces of bread? That bread went straight into the Peraire-Buenos' pockets.

The "meat" of the sandwiches? Well, that cryptocurrency bait had always been in the brothers' control. Prosecutors say the brothers drained this crypto of its liquidity, turning it into "shitcoins."

And that final top piece of bread? The sandwichers' "sell" order, through which they'd hoped to gain a profit? That trade became invalid. It disappeared. These were open-faced sandwiches, in the end.

Low Carb Crusader

Hungry yet?

There's just one more food metaphor here, and we'll make it quick so we can all get something to eat.

According to trial testimony, the omakase attack became public immediately, prompting a mix of criticism and hero worship in crypto circles.

Around two weeks later, the Peraire-Buenos lobbied to clean up their image. They sent an email to Bert C. Miller, head of products and engineering at Flashbots, the company that had designed the otherwise highly regarded software that accidentally let the brothers type in and weaponize those "poisonous" zeros.

Hiding their identities, the brothers noted in their email that they didn't like their negative press. From now on, they told Miller, they wanted to be known as "Low carb crusaders."

It was a "cheeky" reference, defense lawyer William Fick, who represents Anton Peraire-Bueno, explained to the jury during openings.

"Because, you know, sandwiches are made of bread."

The Peraire-Bueno brothers face a potential 20-year sentence for each of the charges against them, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering; their trial is set to continue into early November.

It's not just Florida. Real estate boomtowns are going bust. 12:34 AM (7 hours ago)

Just a few years ago, housing markets in the warm, sunny parts of the US looked, well … warm and sunny. In the halcyon days of 2021 and 2022, cities like Austin, Tampa, Phoenix, and Atlanta attracted swarms of movers. Home listings reliably drew multiple offers above the asking price, and buyers plunked down all-cash offers to fast-track their purchases.

Flash forward to today, and the big "winners" of the work-from-home reshuffle — metros that drew hordes of footloose workers and disaffected coastal dwellers — have turned into losers. Fewer people are moving to so-called Zoomtowns. Home listings are piling up on the market. Prices are dropping. The anxiety has shifted from buyers trying to elbow their way in to sellers just trying to offload their properties. A new report by the real estate analytics firm Parcl Labs, shared exclusively with Business Insider, shows that home sellers in the lower half of the US, also known as the Sun Belt, are the most desperate in the country.

Housing markets in the Midwest and Northeast, on the other hand, are going strong. Inventory in those parts of the country remains tight, and prices are up. Homes are selling at a brisker pace than in the rest of the US. These cities didn't garner much attention during the pandemic (how many glowing headlines did you see about Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, or Detroit?), but sellers there have quietly held onto their bargaining power. By practically any measure, the country's real estate leaderboard has flipped.

"We are in a two-tiered housing market," Mike Simonsen, the chief economist at the brokerage firm Compass and the cofounder of Altos Research, tells me. "It's really stark."

At first glance, this might seem like a simple tale of supply: Builders flocked to the Sun Belt and put lots of shovels in the ground, setting the stage for an inevitable drop in prices when all those new houses hit the market. Sure, that's part of it. But this is also a story about even bigger shifts in the labor market, migration trends, and affordability — why people are (or aren't) moving, and where they're choosing to put down stakes. The Sun Belt isn't drawing movers like it used to, while the Midwest and Northeast are holding onto more people than they did during those peak pandemic years. Even more troubling, many Americans aren't moving at all. They're stuck in place, scared to quit their jobs or trade their cheap mortgage rates for more expensive ones. With no signs of a reversal on the horizon, the new housing-market winners could stay on top for years to come.

Americans move in predictable patterns. Over the past few decades, the Northeast and Midwest hemorrhaged people to the Sun Belt, where jobs were plentiful, the weather balmier, and homes cheaper. Between mid-2018 and mid-2019, the last full year of Census data before the pandemic set in, the Northeast lost a net 294,000 residents to other parts of the country, while the Midwest lost nearly 162,000. The South, on the other hand, gained almost 408,000 people, and the West saw an uptick of 48,000.

"We've been moving from the North to the South for many years," Simonsen tells me. "We build the houses in the South. We sell our homes in the North."

Housing demand surged early in the pandemic — the country's homeowning ranks swelled by a whopping 2.2 million people between the first quarter of 2020 and the same point in 2022, an analysis by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies shows. But for all the talk of upheaval, movers more or less stuck to those pre-pandemic flight patterns — just at warp speed. People kept migrating from big-city centers to the suburbs and from the North to the South. Sun Belt states, including Florida, Texas, Arizona, and North Carolina, experienced the largest population gains from domestic migration between mid-2020 and mid-2021, per a Harvard analysis of Census data. The Dallas metro, for example, gained around 63,000 people from other parts of the country that year, a huge jump from just 19,000 the year prior. Phoenix, Tampa, Austin, and Charlotte recorded similar increases. Expensive states with large urban areas, including California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts, saw the biggest losses.

While migration may follow long-held trends, the idea of a "national" housing market is really a myth — every city, town, even ZIP code, has its own quirks. The chaotic reshuffle of the pandemic's early days, however, resulted in the closest thing we've seen to local markets around the country moving in the same direction: Prices went up, and inventory went down. Even if some states saw far more new arrivals than others, buyers all over the place jumped into the market in search of cheap mortgage rates, more space, and the promise of generational wealth, even if the move was just down the street. This led to higher prices practically across the board (with the exception of big cities that lost a ton of people, like San Francisco). Now, though, the country is splitting into two distinct markets. If someone's looking to sell a home these days, their prospects look a lot different depending on whether they're in Boise or Buffalo.

In the Sun Belt and Mountain West, homebuilders saw the demand signals from the national moving moment and got busy. "There's a herd mentality, for sure," says Ryan McKeveny, a managing director at the housing research firm Zelman, a Walker & Dunlop company. Homebuilders, he tells me, "all gravitate to the same exact markets." The Census estimates that the housing stock in the South region surged by almost 3.3 million between 2020 and 2024, compared to just 750,000 in the Midwest and a measly 483,000 in the Northeast. Despite the rush to break ground, those homes didn't materialize all at once. It usually takes a couple of years for new homes to crop up. In the meantime, prices in the Sun Belt spiked.

Take Austin. The Texas capital was the fastest-growing large metropolitan area from 2020 to 2022, Census data shows, adding a net 120,000 people for a population increase of 5.3%. Even with a surge in homebuilding, supply simply could not keep up: The typical home price in Austin jumped by more than 60% in that same time period, Zillow found. Eventually, though, the builders made up some ground. By last fall, Austin's for-sale housing stock had climbed by more than 76,000 units, or 8.34%, since 2020, Parcl Labs found, a monumental feat for a city that large. At the same time these new units came onto the market, however, the flow of people to Austin started to abate. Net domestic migration totaled less than 14,000 from mid-2023 to mid-2024, still positive but well below the high of 44,000 in 2021. Buyers were also pulling back in the face of higher mortgage rates, which translate into vastly more expensive monthly payments. Fewer buyers, more homes up for sale — you can imagine what happens next. Austin home values have dropped more than 23% from their peak in the summer of 2022, Zillow data shows.

A recent Zelman analysis shows that pandemic-era hot spots like Denver, Austin, Memphis, Tampa, and Dallas have seen big upticks in active inventory, or the number of homes available for sale, while median prices are down year over year. In Denver, for example, inventory is up almost 50% from the same point in 2019, while the median price is down slightly from a year ago. Dallas prices are down almost 2% year-over-year, while inventory is up more than 20% from 2019. Net migration to Florida and Texas remains positive, according to a Zelman analysis, but is lower than in 2019. The Dallas metro added just 25,000 people via domestic migration in the 12-month period ending June 2024, down from 91,000 a couple of years prior. Tampa's increase of 11,000 was a fraction of its 54,000-person gain during the height of the relocation bonanza.

A comedown from the pandemic-era frenzy may not come as a surprise. More interesting are the markets where sellers undeniably have the upper hand. These metros in the Northeast and Midwest mostly weren't subject to the huge price run-ups that were commonplace in the Sun Belt, but they didn't get a ton of new supply from homebuilders, either — those guys were focused on carving out new home communities down south. Inventory levels in places like Buffalo, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland are still below their 2019 watermarks, per Zelman's analysis, while prices have increased by anywhere from 4% to 8% compared to a year ago. People aren't exactly rushing to move to these areas — it's just that the decades of migration losses have seriously slowed. The Cleveland metro lost just 3,500 people on net in 2024, compared to nearly 10,000 in 2021. Same story in Milwaukee. The Minneapolis-St. Paul metro notched a slight increase last year after bleeding a whopping 14,000 residents via net domestic migration in 2021.

The North-to-South movement still holds, but the North is losing fewer people, and the South isn't gaining like it once was. The most recent numbers, for the yearlong period ending in mid-2024, show net domestic migration to the South was down almost 38% compared to the first year of the pandemic. Domestic migration to the Midwest, on the other hand, is up about 60% in that same period, though it's still negative in absolute terms. The Northeast's net loss was down to 192,000 in the latest tally, compared to a loss of 390,000 at the height of the pandemic. With the migration tide receding, sellers in once-hot metros are getting real. In Denver, Charlotte, Jacksonville, and a smattering of other Sun Belt markets, more than half of single-family homes for sale have seen a price cut, Parcl Labs data shows. In the Boston, Philadelphia, and Buffalo metros, the share of listings in that bucket drops to fewer than a third.

That's just one metric. To gauge sellers' desperation these days, Parcl Labs created what it calls the Motivated Sellers Index, which combines four factors: the number of price cuts on home listings, the time in between those cuts, the size of the price decreases, and the length of time homes are spending on the market. The higher the score, the greater the homeowners' urgency to sell. The lower half of the US, with the exception of much of California, is awash in high scores, indicating sellers are ceding negotiating power to buyers. Same goes for much of the West. The Midwest and Northeast, on the other hand, registered some of the lowest scores in the nation: Sellers there are sitting pretty by comparison.

"We have declining home prices in many of these pandemic-winning housing markets," Jason Lewris, a cofounder of Parcl Labs, tells me. "The sellers in many of those markets are very motivated to get out."

That index, Lewris says, is a "pretty good proxy for where home prices may go." In other words, an abundance of motivated sellers today likely spells more price drops in the future. If homeowners are dropping their prices to meet the market, it shows they're not just testing the waters and hoping to get their dream amount.

In the summer of 2024, sellers appeared content to hold out for top dollar. This past summer, though, marked a notable uptick in seller motivation, says Lucy Ferguson, another executive at Parcl Labs.

"Not only is there more stuff on the market, but there's a lot more price cutting," Ferguson tells me. "It's kind of like sellers meeting reality. That's the big theme."

With mortgage rates still well above their pandemic-era lows, millions of households are playing the waiting game. Existing homeowners are unwilling (or unable) to give up their plum mortgage rates, so they're delaying moves that they'd otherwise be making. Renters are hanging tight until the affordability math tilts in their favor. This helps explain why the relative level of demand is so much higher across the Midwest than somewhere like Texas or Florida. When people are stuck in place, the typical migration patterns break down. The South adds fewer new buyers, and the North holds onto more of them. The result is weaker price growth — or even falling prices — in places that were once dependable strongholds of rising home values.

"If I'm a young family in suburban Chicago or upstate New York, I would have bought my house from the guy who moved to Orlando," Simonsen tells me. "But they didn't sell, and I still need to buy."

The labor market also points to a stuck-in-place economy. Unemployment is low, but hiring is way down. The "quits rate," or percentage of workers voluntarily walking away from their jobs, is lagging. People are wary of making big life moves that could leave them in the lurch if things go wrong. To look for signs of thawing in the housing market, Simonsen tells me he'll be watching for a pickup in the quits rate — if people are confident that they can leave their job and find a new one, it's a good sign that they're up for other major changes like a cross-country move. Until then, expect this reversal of the Covid-era winners and losers to hold.

"In a lot of these markets where home prices are kind of flat to lower, I don't exactly see a reason why all of a sudden home prices are going to reaccelerate meaningfully," McKeveny, the researcher at Zelman, tells me.

The Sun Belt is still a long way from "market crash" territory — even places like Austin are still adding people on a net basis, albeit at a much slower pace. But the price cuts represent a serious reality check. With the rise of Zoomtowns now a distant memory, buyers across the South and Mountain West benefit from more bargaining power than they've had in years. Their counterparts up north, on the other hand, still face stiff competition and rising prices. You can count on the pendulum to swing in the other direction once people start moving again. In the meantime, places like Cleveland and Buffalo will continue to enjoy prime position atop the housing-market heap.

James Rodriguez is a correspondent on Business Insider's Discourse team.

ICE agents are getting a 'super check' today. Here's who is and isn't getting paid as the shutdown drags on. 12:02 AM (8 hours ago)

• The White House is paying law enforcement during the shutdown, including ICE and border patrol.
• Funds for the "super checks" will come from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
• Military personnel are also receiving pay, but most other federal workers are not.

Select federal law enforcement officers will see a "super check" in the bank by Wednesday, while most of their colleagues in government are approaching their fourth week without pay during the government shutdown.

The Department of Homeland Security plans to pay some employees at Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secret Service, and the Transportation Security Administration by October 22. A spokesperson for DHS confirmed to Business Insider that paid employees will include over 70,000 border patrol agents, deportation officers, special agents, and air marshals.

"President Trump and I will always stand by law enforcement, and today we are keeping our promise to always support them by making sure they are paid during the Democrats' shutdown, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said, adding, "DHS remains deeply grateful to our law enforcement for their continued professionalism, vigilance, and service under challenging circumstances."

The selected law enforcement employees will receive a "super check," DHS told Business Insider, meaning they will be compensated for the current pay cycle, in addition to the first few days of the shutdown at the end of their last pay cycle, plus any overtime.

Trump is paying federal law enforcement and the military

The plan to pay law enforcement builds on pre-shutdown contingency plans. DHS estimated that around 19,626 of 21,028 total ICE employees would continue working either with or without pay until the shutdown ends. Similarly, around 63,243 of CBP's 67,792 workers were expected to be on the job.

The funds to pay DHS workers are being drawn from the Trump administration's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a department spokesperson told Business Insider. The law allocates billions toward "activities in support of the Department of Homeland Security's mission to safeguard the borders of the United States" to be available between 2025 and 2029. The move to pay employees during the shutdown comes alongside the administration's deployment of ICE agents to US cities, such as Chicago and Portland.

Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, likened the usage of that funding to keep paying workers to the agencies having a credit card that doesn't expire until 2029, with very broad funding language from the legislation itself.

Military personnel also began receiving paychecks in mid-October. Trump approved the White House and Pentagon to use funds left over for the current fiscal year for payroll, likely from the standard research and development testing and evaluation budget. The administration did not provide more information on what funding is specifically being used or how long that money will last, and Congress has not greenlit troop pay.

"In such a dire circumstance as this, where there is no other appropriation providing for payment of military salaries, and where failure to pay our troops directly undercuts the effectiveness of other appropriations," the White House wrote in an October 17 memo to lawmakers. "The President may, as Commander in Chief, direct that such appropriations be used to cover military salaries."

In past shutdowns, legislation has specifically passed either ahead of or during other funding lapses that stipulated troops would be paid. This time around — despite bipartisan entreaties from lawmakers to pass legislation — the administration unilaterally decided that troops would be paid, a move that stoked some ire among lawmakers.

Employees at most agencies are furloughed or working without pay

Since the government ceased normal operations on October 1, Business Insider has spoken with over two dozen federal workers across agencies about how the shutdown is impacting their jobs and financial security. Hundreds of thousands remain furloughed or are working without pay, and many told us they're anxious about paying bills.

"Gas stations don't take IOUs," Johnny Jones, a TSA worker and president of local 1040 for the American Federation of Government Employees, said last week. "I talked to a couple employees, and they said, 'this is my last fill-up and I won't have any money,' because they don't have credit cards. They're literally like, this is the last tank of gas I'm going to have until I get paid again."

Staff at agencies like the Social Security Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration aren't receiving paychecks. These employees received a prorated check earlier this month for their days worked immediately prior to the shutdown, and the White House has hinted they may not receive back pay for hours worked after October 1.

Most government contractors and employees at federal buildings, such as those who work in food service and janitorial jobs and staff museums and historical sites, are also not being paid. Members of Congress are receiving normal salaries.

Without a Senate budget agreement, the government shutdown will continue without an end in sight, and Americans could continue experiencing disruptions at the post office, national parks, and airports. The longest-ever shutdown in 2018 lasted 35 days.

Ukraine says UK-made Storm Shadow missiles joined its long mission to destroy Russia's war machine from the rear 21 Oct 10:40 PM (9 hours ago)

• Ukraine said it used Storm Shadow missiles to strike a gunpowder facility in Russia on Tuesday.
• Kyiv is repeatedly striking Russian industry, trying to whittle down Moscow's ability to wage war.
• Now, it's adding the UK-made missiles to its list of weapons against Russia's war economy.

Ukraine officially said on Tuesday that it used Storm Shadow missiles to strike a production facility in Russia, adding the Western-made advanced munition to its arsenal against the Kremlin's key war industries.

The Ukrainian General Staff of the Armed Forces wrote on Telegram that it had conducted a "massive combined missile and air strike" on the Bryansk Chemical Plant in southern Russia, a facility that manufactures gunpowder, explosives, and rocket fuel components.

It added that the salvo included air-launched Storm Shadows, subsonic cruise missiles jointly developed by France and the UK that can carry a 1,000-pound explosive payload.

"The Defense Forces of Ukraine continue to strike strategic facilities of the military-industrial complex on the territory of the Russian Federation, thereby weakening the offensive potential of the aggressor state," the post said.

Ukrainian officials said the results of the strikes were "being assessed."

Russia's defense ministry said it had destroyed 57 Ukrainian drones over Bryansk on Tuesday evening, but did not say if Storm Shadow missiles were detected in the attack.

Bryansk's governor, Alexander Bogomaz, also said that Kyiv had attacked the region with fixed-wing drones. While he later issued two missile alerts, Bogomaz also did not mention the Western-made cruise missiles.

Russian and Ukrainian Telegram channels circulated clips of a large fire breaking out in what appears to be an industrial facility, saying that a power substation in Bryansk had been hit. Business Insider could not independently verify the authenticity of the footage.

Tuesday's attack comes as Kyiv ramps up its campaign of deep strikes on Russian industry complexes to undermine the Kremlin's ability to pay for and manufacture arms.

Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on October 8 that "long-range sanctions against Russia," referring to attacks on Russian energy facilities, are achieving "truly significant results" and have forced Moscow to tap into its diesel reserves.

That effort has relied mainly on Ukraine's homegrown fixed-wing drones and missiles, which were used to strike dozens of oil facilities and weapons factories in the last year.

The latest use of Storm Shadow missiles indicates that Kyiv is now officially adding these Western weapons as an offensive option against Russian industry.

Russia previously said that it had shot down three Storm Shadow missiles over the Rostov region in December, and that a fourth missile struck a building in a chemical plant after being deflected.

But Ukraine has, until now, been evasive on whether it's used Storm Shadow missiles to target Russian infrastructure.

The Storm Shadow can strike targets 155 miles away and fly at low altitudes to avoid detection. The UK and France delivered an unspecified number of these missiles to Ukraine in 2023, but limited Kyiv to using them against Russian targets in occupied territory.

In November, Ukraine was permitted for the first time to launch Storm Shadows against military targets in Russia.

Using these Western weapons against Russian industry points to Ukraine receiving more explicit backing from the UK amid Washington's waning and inconsistent support.

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump was reported to have urged Kyiv to submit to Russia's demand of surrendering eastern Ukrainian territory, after months of publicly voicing displeasure with Moscow.

Representatives for Russia and Ukraine's defense ministries did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Startups should only get new hires when things start to break, Y Combinator partner says 21 Oct 10:24 PM (9 hours ago)

• YC partner Gustaf Alströmer advises startups to hire only when they are at a breaking point.
• Hiring should not be seen as a success metric but a necessity to avoid failure, he said.
• Across tech, leaders are emphasizing efficiency and AI usage over head count growth.

Head count is no longer the hot success indicator, says a Y Combinator partner.

"It's the right time to hire when things are so busy that you can't even find a slot in your calendar to do an interview with a candidate," YC partner Gustaf Alströmer said in an episode of YC's "Office Hours" podcast released on Tuesday.

He said this is when things are at their "breaking point" and the cofounders must work beyond their regular schedules to keep things running.

Alströmer, who worked as a product lead at Airbnb from 2012 to 2017, added that hiring can take about three months, and founders should look out for early signs.

"An early indicator of that moment is that there's a specific thing in the company that's breaking or about to break. It's either engineering or it's sales or onboarding," he said. He added, "You have to be honest with yourself. Are these early indicators, or are they just my hopes that they're going to be early indicators?"

Y Combinator is a San Francisco-based startup accelerator and venture capital firm that provides seed funding and mentorship to early-stage companies. It has funded over 5,000 companies, including Airbnb, DoorDash, and Instacart.

On the podcast, Alströmer said head count growth should not be confused with startup growth.

"It's a dangerous thing to start thinking about hiring as a success metric. Hiring is not a success metric at all," he said. "It's sort of like a way to not go under or have a functioning company fail."

He said that many YC startups now say they want to be a billion-dollar company with 10 people.

YC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Startup founders and venture capitalists are joining the Big Tech bandwagon of wanting to do more with less, especially in the age of AI.

Across the industry, executives are touting the use of AI agents, which can perform tasks like taking customer service calls or booking travel instead of human employees.

Executives have also highlighted "vibe coding" tools that allow software engineers to write code faster and with fewer human resources.

Tech giants like Intel, Meta, and Amazon are embracing the "great flattening" — cutting middle-level management in favor of more streamlined teams and fewer hierarchy tiers, which they say should lead to less bureaucracy.

In May, Business Insider reported that at least 12 AI startups valued over $1 billion have teams of 50 people or fewer. These include OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence and Magic, which is backed by Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt and Sequoia Capital.

Alströmer's idea of keeping things lean with a low head count echoes the memos the CEOs of Amazon and Shopify sent their employees in the past year.

"We want to operate like the world's largest startup," Amazon's Andy Jassy wrote in a letter last September. "That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it's a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration."

In a memo to employees that Shopify's Tobias Lütke shared on social media in April, he wrote: "Before asking for more head count and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI."

Gold's rally just cracked, but one private Swiss bank says it's not over 21 Oct 10:20 PM (9 hours ago)

• Gold just had its worst day in 12 years, snapping a record-breaking rally.
• But investors may not be giving up yet, with inflation fears and global turmoil fueling demand.
• Central banks are set to keep piling in, helping to put a floor under prices, according to Lombard Odier.

Gold's record-breaking run snapped on Tuesday, tumbling in its worst single-day drop in 12 years after a historic rally.

Still, the yellow metal's underlying supply-and-demand dynamics remain solid — even at "significantly overbought" levels in the short term, wrote analysts at Lombard Odier, a Swiss private bank, in a note on Tuesday.

"Technical signals are challenged by today's more fundamental environment of accelerating demand and constrained supply," wrote Kiran Kowshik, a global foreign exchange strategist, and Luca Bindelli, the bank's head of investment strategy.

Spot gold was trading around $4,140 per ounce at 1:09 a.m. ET on Wednesday, down from a record $4,381.21 per ounce on Monday, according to LSEG data.

Prices have climbed as much as 60%, as investors — from central banks to private funds — sought protection from persistent inflation, widening fiscal deficits, and geopolitical risk. At the same time, supply remains constrained.

That dynamic will likely support prices, with official-sector demand a key stabilizing force for gold.

"Central banks still create a higher gold 'floor,'" the strategists wrote, adding that the institutions have steadily built up their gold holdings since 2008.

"Over many centuries, gold has offered — and continues to offer — currency-like characteristics: it serves as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value," they added.

Those qualities are particularly attractive now, given the high US government debt, which is weighing on Treasurys — a key reserve asset for central banks.

"As gold's value will either be left unaffected by fiscal uncertainties, or benefit in the context of broad US dollar depreciation, we believe there is still scope for central banks to further diversify their reserve holdings in gold," Kowshik and Bindelli wrote.

The analysts also cited nervousness about US financial sanctions, broader geopolitical risks, and unpredictable tariff policies under the Trump administration as additional drivers of central-bank demand.

"Macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties are likely to remain conducive to further gold demand," they wrote, raising their 12-month gold price target from $3,900 to $4,600 per ounce.

The bank's assessment landed as gold prices slumped, as investors locked in profits after a blistering rally in one of the year's most crowded trades.

The massive run-up and abrupt pullback in gold prompted Bill Gross, the Wall Street billionaire known as the "Bond King," to tell Business Insider that gold was "exhibiting characteristics of meme and momentum stocks."

Travis Kelce is building a business empire off the football field. Here's what the NFL tight end's been dabbling in. 21 Oct 9:23 PM (10 hours ago)

• Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce is a busy man.
• Kelce, 36, is engaged to Taylor Swift and is managing a growing portfolio of investments.
• Besides playing football, Kelce has opened a new restaurant and invested in Six Flags.

Travis Kelce is busy on the football field, but that hasn't stopped the Kansas City Chiefs tight end from building his business empire.

Kelce, 36, has seen his fame grow since he began dating Taylor Swift in 2023. The couple announced their engagement in August.

Besides focusing on his football career, Kelce has expanded into acting, hosting, and investing. The three-time Super Bowl winner has an estimated net worth of $70 million, per Forbes.

Representatives for Kelce did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Here's a look at the new retail and entertainment ventures Kelce has added to his growing portfolio.

Launching the "New Heights" podcast in 2022 with Jason Kelce

In September 2022, Kelce launched the "New Heights" podcast with his brother, Jason Kelce.

The podcast has featured several celebrities and sports stars, such as Brad Pitt, LeBron James, and, most recently, Swift, when she revealed details about her latest album "The Life of a Showgirl."

The "New Heights" podcast won the podcast of the year award at the 2024 iHeartPodcast Awards. In August 2024, the brothers signed a three-year deal with Amazon's podcast network, Wondery. That deal was worth more than $100 million, per multiple media reports.

Cofounding the 1587 Prime steakhouse with Patrick Mahomes

In September, Kelce opened 1587 Prime, a steakhouse located in Kansas City. Kelce had entered into the venture with his Kansas City Chiefs teammate and quarterback, Patrick Mahomes.

Kelce and Mahomes cofounded the restaurant in partnership with Noble 33, a fine-dining brand. 1587 Prime started taking reservations in August, and tables have been fully booked through late October, per Business Insider's reporting.

Investing in the Six Flags theme park brand with hedge fund Jana Partners

On Tuesday, Kelce said in an Instagram post that he was partnering with hedge fund Jana Partners to invest in the Six Flags theme park brand.

"To all my fellow theme park and amusement park lovers. I have some exciting news!!! Couldn't pass up the opportunity to continue the tradition and make Cedar Point and Six Flags even more special for the next generation of families!" Kelce wrote on Instagram.

Jana Partners said in a statement on October 21 that they now own about 9% of Six Flags' stock, which is worth about $200 million. Six Flags' share price went up by nearly 18% on Tuesday.