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Paramount is setting the stage.

David Ellison has turned Paramount from an aging legacy media brand into arguably the biggest threat to streaming juggernaut Netflix in less than a year.

But his work is far from done. In fact, it’s just beginning.

BI’s James Faris, who has been all over Paramount’s rise to power, has a great breakdown of Ellison’s ongoing transformation at Paramount. The moves come as Paramount prepares for the arrival — pending regulatory approval — of its biggest prize: Warner Bros. Discovery.

If anyone is up for the job, it’s Ellison. You don’t get turned down multiple times only to ultimately prevail unless you’re really passionate about something. (Having a father who has an ungodly amount of cash doesn’t hurt either.)

Speaking of cash, that’s another unique part of the deal BI’s Peter Kafka has extensively covered.

When Paramount first started bidding for WBD, it said it was partnering with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds. Now that it’s won, it won’t say if they’re still involved. A key Paramount backer suggested that if the Gulf money is still involved, it would be good for the deal.

Meanwhile, to the losers go some spoils.

Netflix might have missed out on WBD — although, was it really that upset? — but it didn’t walk away empty-handed. The streamer received $2.8 billion for its trouble, which is a hell of a runner-up prize.

To put that in context, Netflix’s reported net income last quarter was just over $2.4 billion.

What will it do with that cash? Netflix loves spending money on content, shelling out roughly $17 billion in 2025, according to its 10-K.

That $2.8 billion is basically found money. Why not have some fun with it? BI Today’s newsletter team has got some ideas:

Professional darts: “Drive to Survive” was a massive success for Netflix. Its spiritual successors on golf and tennis haven’t moved the needle the same way. Luckily, I have the solution: professional darts. Before you laugh, watch this 90-second clip and tell me you’re not hooked. (I’ve even got a name for you: “Nine-darter.”)

Here’s the kicker: It’s another way into live sports! Netflix did a lot of the leg work growing F1’s popularity in the US but didn’t reap the benefits. (Thanks a lot, Apple.) This time it can double up with a series and streaming rights, and at a much lower buy-in.

Love Is Blind … New York: Netflix’s most successful reality series needs to come to the country’s best city. (Yea, I said it.) Historically, NYC is a tough place to shoot reality shows because of the cost. Now that it’s got more cash, it’s worth shelling out to nab NYC’s one-of-a-kind population. (Credit to Amanda Yen for the idea.)

Mindhunter, Season 3: David Fincher’s highly acclaimed thriller got the axe back in 2023 because it cost too much to make without gaining mass appeal. Now feels like the perfect time to bring it back since Netflix’s new biggest rival is about to get hold of the king of prestige TV, HBO. (This one comes from Grace Lett.)

It’s jobs Friday, and we’re about to learn if the labor market’s “deep freeze” continued to thaw in February.

Economists expect the US added 55,000 jobs and the unemployment rate held steady at at a fairly low 4.3%. Last month’s report showed a surprisingly strong job gain in January, but revisions to last year’s data meant 2025 as a whole saw the weakest growth outside a recession in over 20 years.

We’ll be watching to see if the job market keeps heating up, or if January’s strength was just a blip.

Check here for updates as we gear up for the report at 8:30 ET, when we’ll break down all the details you need to know.

• Claude is now atop the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
• Interest in Anthropic has exploded since its CEO, Dario Amodei, defied the Pentagon.
• Download estimates show just how quickly the conversation changed.

OpenAI is paying a price for its rushed deal with the Pentagon.

On Saturday, Anthropic’s Claude dethroned ChatGPT to take the top spot in the US Apple App Store. Data obtained by Business Insider shows just how suddenly the tide turned in the fight for app downloads.

Data from Appfigures, an app intelligence firm, showed that Claude surpassed ChatGPT in the US for the first time on Saturday. Claude’s US downloads were up 240% month-over-month in February, Appfigures estimated, to 1.1 million more than the previous month.

Claude is now the No. 1 free iPhone app in five markets: the US, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Luxembourg. An Anthropic spokesperson previously told Business Insider that as recently as a month ago, Claude didn’t even rank in the top 40 of the US Apple App Store.

Anthropic’s Mike Krieger said on Tuesday that “more than a million people are now signing up for Claude every day.”

“To everyone choosing to make @claudeai part of how they work and think: welcome,” Krieger wrote on X.

OpenAI takes a hit

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged that OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon was “rushed.” On Monday evening, he publicly released an internal message to employees in which he said that OpenAI had reopened the deal to obtain stronger protections.

Altman has also conceded that the deal was bad “optics,” given that it occurred just hours after Anthropic was essentially blacklisted from the US government for not acquiescing to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demands.

“One thing I think I did wrong: we shouldn’t have rushed to get this out on Friday,” Altman wrote in the memo. “The issues are super complex, and demand clear communication. We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that talks with the Pentagon fell apart because the DOD insisted on unfettered access to AI models. Anthropic wanted safeguards to ensure that its AI wasn’t misused in the deployment of fully autonomous weapons or to allow for mass surveillance of American citizens.

In response to Amodei’s refusal to yield, Hegseth said he intended to formally designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a label that the Defense secretary said would ban the AI startup not just from working with the government but also from doing business with any defense contractor.

Amodei said that his company would fight such an action in court. In the meantime, Hegseth’s potential actions could take a bite out of Anthropic’s business with defense contractors and could scare away other companies weary of doing business with a firm on the outs with the Trump administration.

Despite the negative headlines, ChatGPT remains far and away the worldwide leader for AI chatbots.

The same day OpenAI announced its Pentagon deal, the company touted that ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users. In comparison, Google disclosed during its most recent earnings on February 4 that Gemini had 750 million monthly active users.

According to Appfigures, as of the end of February, ChatGPT has been downloaded an estimated 8.7 million times in the US so far in 2026. In comparison, Claude has been downloaded an estimated 2.1 million times.

Near the end of 2025, Altman declared a “code red” to marshal resources to ChatGPT amid concerns that Gemini’s latest update had surpassed ChatGPT’s capabilities.

It remains to be seen whether this current blunder will prove harder to bounce back from.

Appfigures’ estimates are based on firms’ use of trained AI models that turn observed trends in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store into estimated downloads. The estimates do not include re-installs or downloads across multiple devices by a single user account.

• The software-apocalypse is hitting private credit, putting the biggest players on defense.
• Following concerns over Blue Owl’s software exposure, other leaders are talking up their portfolios.
• Execs like Marc Rowan and Jon Gray defended their portfolios against software risk this week.

Months of concern over the private credit industry finally coalesced this year into its first real reputational crisis.

Blue Owl, a buzzy private investor specializing in loans to the software industry, has seen its stock crater following growing redemption requests across its non-traded private credit funds and market jitters over the impact of AI disruption on software companies.

In the fourth quarter of 2025, redemption requests across the industry were up nearly 3 times from the quarter before at 4.5% of fund net asset value, according to Fitch Ratings. Blue Owl’s tech-focused fund had by far the most redemption requests of the non-traded funds tracked by Fitch, at 15.4%, and has become the avatar of private credit’s exposure to the “software-apocalypse.”

With market watchers concerned that generative AI will make many software-as-a-service companies obsolete, the general angst about private credit over the past few months has now found a target in software loans.

During its February earnings call, Blue Owl’s CFO Alan Kirshenbaum looked to assuage concerns by stating that software loans make up only 8% of the firm’s total assets under management.

And this week, at the Bloomberg Invest conference and on CNBC, other private credit bosses had the chance to assuage fears that they were in too deep on software bets. They didn’t mention Blue Owl by name (though interviewers mentioned them to some, like Apollo’s Marc Rowan and Ares’s Michael Arougheti), but they were doing their best to explain why software loans weren’t a risk to their funds.

Here’s what top private credit players said about their software exposure.

Apollo

The headline of Apollo CEO Marc Rowan’s talk at Tuesday’s conference was that he expects a “shakeout” in the industry that will separate the best investors from the rest. One of the main factors that may decide this shakeout is exposure to software, but Rowan chided those who seemed to suddenly realize this.

“Lo and behold, we think that AI might impact software,” Rowan said. “Is that news? Did we just discover that two weeks ago?”

He pointed to the nearly 70% decline in software stock, and made it clear that it is riskier to invest in software equity than in senior lending to software companies. But he also made it clear that software is only a “fraction of assets” that Apollo has lent.

He said software accounts for 30% of the leveraged lending market — roughly in line with its share of the leveraged buyout market. This overrepresentation means software is “subject to attack.”

“If 30% of your portfolio is in one industry and that one industry is being impacted by technology, you have not been a good risk manager,” Rowan said.

On the firm’s February earnings call, president Jim Zelter explained that the firm’s overall exposure to software is less than 2% of total assets under management.

Blackstone

A filing late Monday night revealed that Blackstone’s non-traded private credit vehicle BCRED received a record 7.9% redemptions, which the firm paid out over its typical 5% gate on redemptions.

The next morning, as some of his competitors spoke to Bloomberg, Blackstone’s president Jon Gray sat down with CNBC at the New York Stock Exchange to walk through the firm’s response to private credit concerns.

On software, Gray noted that while some software companies might struggle, many software companies also function as “systems of record” and “infrastructure,” and it will be “very difficult to rip them out.”

Generative AI surely makes performance “vulnerable” for software companies, but he said BCRED’s software portfolio saw double-digit cash-flow growth last year. Similarly, Blue Owl’s software-focused fund continued to perform well even as investors ran for the exits.

Gray expects disruption in software, but said the firm’s software loans were made at “just 37% loan-to-value” — that is, they loan on average 37% of the total equity value of a business — with large amounts of equity that should provide a cushion for their portfolio in case anything goes wrong.

Marathon

Bruce Richards, the CEO of credit investor Marathon Asset Management, which was acquired by CVC Capital Partners in January, recently predicted that the software industry will see a default rate of 15% in the next few years. He compared this coming wave of software defaults in the wake of generative AI to the wave of defaults in the energy industry following the success of fracking in the mid-2010s.

Richards said that many in the industry are “rearranging the furniture right now,” claiming that their software bets are actually “travel and leisure” or “hospitality” bets because they support people in those industries.

“Everyone’s trying to re-rate or recategorize what their exposure is to say, ‘I don’t have that much software exposure,'” Richards said.

He said that 23% of the direct-lending loan marketplace is software, with some managers having even larger exposures.

“Why do you have 23% in that one industry’s sector when only 1% of private companies are software companies in this country?” Richards said, noting his firm only had 1% exposure to software.

Instead, Marathon is focused on HALO assets: Hard Assets, Low Obsolence. Marathon specializes in asset-based lending, where loans are secured to real assets like aircraft, engineers, or cranes, and he said these sorts of loans provide safety through both their collateral and the unlikelihood that they’ll be replaced by technology.

HPS

In 2021 and 2022, software was “pretty highly priced,” said Scott Kapnick, CEO of HPS Investment Partners. Earlier in the decade, many private credit firms were deploying large amounts of investor capital.

“People were trying to grow their businesses, and they now may have some of those loans that they have to make sure are going to be come due,” Kapnick said. “And if they struggle, then those firms are going to struggle.”

At the time, firms wanted “to lean in,” and “to grow,” Kapnick said, but the key was making sure not to be overexposed to risk.

“I think most of the big managers are very good at managing risk,” he said. “And the scaled players are going to continue to benefit from this period.”

HPS now has plenty of scale as it was purchased by BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, in 2025.

KKR

Other industry bosses also stressed the importance of not spending too much when the market is hot. KKR co-CEO Scott Nuttall said that his firm made that mistake in 2006 and 2007 and has since committed to linear deployment, or investing a steady amount of a fund every year, whether the market is hot or cold.

“Don’t overdeploy, don’t underdeploy,” Nuttall said. “You’ve got to focus on portfolio construction, and critically, you’ve got to be diversified.”

Nuttall compared this to firms that “put a lot of money to work in 2021” when asset prices were high, and tech was a hot asset class.

The risk of overdeployment is owning overpriced assets in tanking asset classes, and Nuttall agreed that this cycle will lead to changes in the industry. “There’s some firms that will not be around,” Nuttall said. “There’s some firms that will do the apology tour and the apology fund. So the next fund will be 0.3 times the size of the last fund, but their investors will decide to give them another chance.”

Ares

Ares CEO Michael Arougheti, whose firm has a wide range of software bets, touted the importance of diversification, which hedges its portfolio.

“So, if software disrupts a sector of our portfolio, then our digital infrastructure and data center development business benefits,” Arougheti said. “If software disrupts the portfolio, then our renewable energy business benefits. “

“Those that are more diversified will survive, consolidate, and probably grow disproportionately,” Arougheti said. Blue Owl is also a major investor in data centers through its private equity funds. But those who are too focused on one asset class may face trouble.

“Inevitably, if you are concentrated, whether it’s AI or we saw it with the energy shakeout five-six years ago, there are going to be winners and losers,” Arougheti said.

• Tech giants like Palantir and Citadel have relocated to Miami.
• Miami’s tech workforce surged during the pandemic and maintained stability despite hiring slowdowns.
• Silicon Valley and Miami have now formed a two-way network, sending tech workers in both directions.

For years, Miami has been cast as Silicon Valley’s pandemic-era escape hatch — a sunny refuge for tech billionaires and crypto founders fleeing California.

New data, however, suggests the story is more complicated. Rather than a one-way exodus, the relationship between the two hubs has settled into a steady, two-way exchange of talent and capital.

The pipeline between them first began to gain traction during the pandemic, and the number of tech workers in Miami overall has continued to grow through 2025.

Palantir, which was based in Palo Alto before moving to Denver in 2020, relocated its headquarters to Miami in February. Citadel relocated its global headquarters to Miami in 2022, calling the city “a destination of choice for the global financial industry.” Tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin are also snapping up real estate there.

Business Insider gathered data from Revelio, PitchBook, and LinkedIn to analyze the links between Silicon Valley (including the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas) and Miami. Here’s what we found.

Over the years, Silicon Valley and Miami have established a tech network that goes both ways. While the number of workers moving from Miami to Silicon Valley is smaller, it has remained consistent. So, rather than a one-way migration, it is an ongoing exchange between the two regions.

Revelio’s findings are based on aggregated publicly available profiles and postings, which allow it to track individual employment histories and job postings over time.

Major companies began expanding their footprint in Miami during the height of the tech boom between 2021 and 2022. Small and midsize firms also account for a meaningful portion of overall tech employment, however, suggesting Miami’s tech ecosystem isn’t driven solely by a handful of headline-grabbing corporate relocations, but by a wider range of companies operating in the region.

Even as layoffs mounted and hiring cooled between 2023 and 2024, the overall head count continued to grow. This stability suggests that firms of all sizes are holding onto their Miami operations rather than pulling back when things slow down.

According to LinkedIn hiring data, the overall labor market took a turn for the worse in 2023, and Miami was no exception. Hiring in the area was down 20% from the prior year. In 2024, however, that decrease in hiring slowed to about 10%.

Hiring in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area began to stabilize in 2025, and it posted a positive year-over-year increase in October of last year. It was the first time since mid-2022, LinkedIn found.

San Francisco remains king in terms of both the number of venture capital deals over the last six years and their values, according to PitchBook data. Miami follows a similar pattern to the workforce head count. Seed funding deals in Miami peaked in 2021 before gradually falling.

The findings suggest that Miami and Silicon Valley may not be equals in the tech industry, but both are now hubs in their own right.

• David Ellison has shaken up Hollywood since becoming CEO of Paramount Skydance.
• Paramount employees and TV viewers will see big changes as Ellison looks to build a streaming powerhouse and buy WBD.
• Paramount has already made moves behind the scenes, like reorganizing teams and hiring key execs.

David Ellison is tackling the mountain-sized challenge of transforming Paramount Skydance from a shrinking legacy media company into a Hollywood powerhouse.

The Paramount CEO is starting to unveil his long-awaited game plan: catch up to Netflix’s tech, assemble a crew of top-tier executives, and rethink its news business. That goal — of creating a “next-generation” media company, in Ellison’s words — is all before the planned mega-merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

These steps show how the aspiring media mogul, who took charge of Paramount in August thanks to his tech billionaire father Larry Ellison, is remaking the 114-year-old company. Paramount’s portfolio includes classic brands like CBS, Showtime, and MTV, and it has pledged to ramp up movie production to 30 films per year if its WBD deal goes through.

“I think he is, directionally, spot-on,” said media analyst Rich Greenfield of Lightshed Partners. “They need a lot more content, and they need a much better underlying technology.”

Make it more like TikTok, Netflix, and YouTube

Ellison is out to prove he can beat Netflix at its own game — not just in a bidding war.

That’s why Paramount is bolstering its streaming tech, which six staffers told Business Insider is inferior to industry leader Netflix’s in both features and user experience. Ellison said in a memo he’s focused on changing that by “prioritizing investments in advanced technology.”

Paramount has said the combined subscriber base of its paid streamers and WBD’s would be just under 200 million, compared with Netflix’s 325 million.

“If you want to be successful, you try to copy what the successful people are doing,” said Joe Bonner, a media analyst at Argus Research.

While Ellison didn’t share more details, Business Insider has uncovered some yet-to-be announced features and others that are being workshopped.

Paramount executives are planning a move into short-form video on its flagship streamer to boost engagement by building habits.

“Nobody wakes up in the morning and goes, ‘Oh, let me go see what’s on Paramount+’ the way they check out what’s on YouTube or what’s on Netflix,” Greenfield said.

Paramount+ users could soon flip through TikTok-style vertical clips of “Top Gun: Maverick” or “SpongeBob SquarePants” on the streamer’s mobile app.

Paramount+ product design head Dan Reich emailed product chief Dane Glasgow in mid-January, saying that his team was trying to “jump-start efforts to get a million clips” into its coming short-form platform “as quickly as possible.”

Netflix previously stumbled in short-form video, but is trying again. Disney also plans to add AI-generated short clips from users to its namesake streamer after a deal with OpenAI.

Another first-quarter priority for Paramount in streaming is its sports multiview feature. Paramount debuted this feature last fall for UEFA soccer matches. A streaming tech staffer said a potential expansion could let people view multiple angles of a live event, such as a UFC match, simultaneously. While Netflix has live events, it doesn’t have a multiview feature.

Paramount is also brainstorming streaming features like interactive shopping and user-generated content, which are the backbone of YouTube and TikTok, Business Insider reported. Netflix introduced shows with interactive storytelling as early as 2017, but has since scaled back. And while Netflix has added podcasts, it doesn’t have user-generated content.

Reorganizing to be a ‘tech-forward media company’

As Paramount prepares to jazz up its streamer, it’s also working to become more like a tech company.

Paramount is merging the technical pieces of Paramount+ and Pluto TV, its free streamer. This process, known internally as “convergence,” could help Paramount become more efficient. The company also plans to put Paramount+ and WBD’s HBO Max into a single offering, assuming the acquisition closes.

As Paramount+ and Pluto TV come together, Ellison’s company is joining key technical teams across the streamers, Business Insider reported. The reorganization will support “AI enablement and automated testing,” according to a memo sent last week to staffers affected by the move.

Ellison has also put an emphasis on analytics by expanding the role of the data and insights team led by EVP Jason Kim.

This decision is central to “David’s vision of trying to transform ourselves” into “the most tech-forward media company in this space,” said Domenic DiMeglio, Paramount’s head of streaming data, insights, and marketing.

Ellison execs are in, the old guard is out

When a new CEO takes over, leadership changes are rarely confined to the very top.

The same is true at Paramount. After taking the helm in early August, Ellison brought on former Netflix original content exec Cindy Holland to oversee the streaming business and, in October, picked polarizing editor Bari Weiss to lead CBS News.

Paramount also scored a personnel win by poaching Danielle Carney from Amazon’s video and live sports sales team to lead its US ad sales group. It’s also bringing on Chris Brady of Tribeca Enterprises as an EVP of its ads business. Both will report to revenue chief Jay Askinasi, who joined Paramount from Roku in November.

There have been high-profile departures at Paramount in recent months as well. Chris Simon, an EVP of agency partnerships who spent over three decades at Paramount, is stepping down, Business Insider reported last month, though he hasn’t yet left the company.

Paramount’s streaming product and tech, Vibol Hou, announced his departure via Slack weeks earlier, Business Insider reported.

A battle over Ellison’s influence

While Ellison reorganizes and assembles a team to take Paramount to the pinnacle of Hollywood, the road ahead remains steep. Paramount will take on $79 billion of debt to finance the WBD purchase, putting pressure on the company to quickly perform for shareholders.

Ellison is also reshaping Paramount’s news business, which may soon include WBD’s CNN, and has faced criticism over how his political alliances could influence the company.

The 43-year-old CEO said on CNBC that he wants CBS News to be in the “truth business” and the “trust business” by serving the “70%” of people who are politically center-left or center-right.

Some analysts aren’t sure Paramount can carve out that niche.

“Does that mean: make CNN less liberal? I don’t know. That’s a very fuzzy concept to me,” Bonner said.

As Ellison puts his thumbprint on the news, some wonder who’s influencing him. Ellison has built rapport with President Donald Trump, who called the Paramount CEO “great.” He attended Trump’s State of the Union speech with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who then posted a photo with the Paramount CEO.

And Weiss, the anti-establishment leader Ellison appointed to shake up CBS News, has faced staff questions about how her political views could impact the news operation. Weiss said she wasn’t “a mouthpiece for anybody” when defending her choice to delay a “60 Minutes” story critical of the Trump administration.

Another potential influence is Middle Eastern wealth funds, which Paramount won’t confirm or deny are helping back its bid for WBD. Critics worry that even if Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi don’t have direct governance rights at Paramount, they could still try to informally sway Paramount management if they are investors.

“We do expect to syndicate with strategic domestic and foreign investors,” said Gerry Cardinale, a leading Paramount investor of RedBird Capital, said on a podcast while sidestepping the question of potential Middle Eastern backers. “But at the end of the day, that alchemy shouldn’t matter, because it’ll be done in the right way.”

Have a tip or Paramount-related story idea? Contact this reporter via email at jfaris@businessinsider.com or Signal at @jamesfaris.01. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• A version of this story is in the BI Tech Memo newsletter this week.
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Anthropic‘s feud with the Department of Defense is more than a contract dispute. It’s a preview of a looming power struggle between elected governments and increasingly powerful AI companies.

CEO Dario Amodei refused to let the Pentagon use Anthropic’s AI for “any lawful purpose,” worrying it could enable domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. That stance could have barred certain military uses even if the government deemed them legal, according to Jessica Tillipman, a government contracts expert at George Washington Law School.

This is an example of a potential future in which AI CEOs, not democratically elected leaders, decide what’s acceptable.

“It does not sound crazy to a Silicon Valley executive that maybe they could be in charge instead of you,” AI alignment researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky warned politicians during the dispute. “If they actually could control superintelligence, they’d discard you like used toilet paper.”

Here’s the concern: In a democracy, voters can remove an elected official who makes bad decisions. But if a CEO makes a harmful choice, especially one that boosts revenue or profit, the public has little recourse. Shareholders, not voters, determine whether CEOs keep their jobs.

Whatever Amodei or other AI leaders say, corporations exist to generate returns. Investors pour billions into Anthropic, expecting enormous future profits. Lofty rhetoric about safety and ethics may be sincere, but it also helps win customers and recruit talent. As former product manager Aakash Gupta quipped, “Dario is a better marketer than people give him credit for.”

Anthropic’s own decisions reflect these tensions. In late February, it scrapped a prior commitment to pause scaling or delay deploying models if safety measures lagged behind capabilities — a striking shift for a company whose CEO frequently warns about runaway AI risks.

Amodei also reversed course on taking Middle Eastern investment when the company needed a massive funding round. And this year, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic applied to compete for a $100 million Pentagon prize to design autonomous drone swarm technology.

The pattern isn’t unique. When Google acquired DeepMind, cofounder Demis Hassabis insisted its AI couldn’t be used for military purposes. Google agreed and the deal closed. But by early 2025, Google updated its AI Principles, removing a pledge against weapons and surveillance uses.

Early AI startup Clarifai followed a similar arc, according to former employee Michal Wolski: “We had the same stance at Clarifai in 2014, then it was time to pay back all the money that we raised.”

The result of this inevitable backsliding: In July, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI each signed Defense Department contracts worth up to $200 million. So, if you’ve been using Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok as your chatbot, you’ve already been supporting AI companies that help the US wage war.

Tech blogger Ben Thompson argues the right answer is new laws and accountable oversight — not cheering for unelected executives to decide how AI should be used. That’s “the road to an even more despotic future,” he wrote this week.

Democracy is messy. But it’s preferable to outsourcing the levers of power to CEOs whose primary duty is to shareholders — and whose tools may soon be the most consequential ever built.

Anthropic spokespeople didn’t respond to a request for comment on Wednesday morning.

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

• Economist John A. List said AI is exposing who truly understands their own work.
• Overreliance on AI answers is increasing the value of deep expertise and judgment, he said.
• Claude’s recent outages showed how quickly some professionals have become dependent on AI tools.

AI might make our work sound smarter, but what happens when we are actually asked to explain it?

Writing on X on Wednesday, economist John A. List said that while he was initially worried that AI might make critical thinkers — and therefore economists — less valuable, his “fears are now assuaged.”

Having spent the past six months working with nonprofits, corporations, and government agencies, he has watched professionals present AI-generated material that sounded polished and persuasive.

List, a Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and chief economist at Walmart, said the key problem is that they didn’t fully understand what they were presenting.

“The words sound right,” he wrote. “But when someone pushes back just a little bit, the sand castle crumbles.”

Human expertise matters more than ever

List said he observed that AI often produces outputs that are either “very wrong” or “nearly right.”

Spotting the difference requires the same critical thinking skills that created the underlying knowledge in the first place, he said.

Being able to defend a conclusion under scrutiny also requires a deep understanding. “It is quite difficult to defend what you didn’t build,” he wrote.

That dynamic, he now believes, strengthens the case for human expertise. The people who can distinguish “nearly right” from “right” are more valuable than ever, he added.

“Creating knowledge still matters,” he said. “Maybe now more than ever.”

Overreliance on AI

AI researchers and some tech CEOs have warned about the risks of overreliance on AI, citing, among other things, co-dependency with large language models and a gradual loss of work skills and critical thinking over time.

Software developers have had a taste of it when Anthropic’s Claude AI models suffered several outages this week.

Some told Business Insider the disruptions laid bare how reliant they had become on AI tools.

“I never realized how people (including myself) have become so dependent on AI in such a short time until the Claude outage happened,” Sathika Hettiarachchi, an IT student and software developer, posted on X on Tuesday.

• Microsoft says Anthropic’s products will remain available to its customers, except for the Defense Department.
• Its lawyers have “studied” the supply chain risk designation, a Microsoft spokesperson said.
• Microsoft’s statement comes as the Pentagon’s Anthropic designation raises questions across Big Tech.

Microsoft said Anthropic’s AI tools aren’t going anywhere on its platforms despite the Pentagon blacklisting the startup.

The Pentagon on Thursday formally told Anthropic that “the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the designation effectively bars companies with defense contracts from doing business with Anthropic.

Anthropic has said it plans to challenge the decision in court.

The designation follows a dispute between the AI startup and the Pentagon over how its Claude models could be used. Anthropic has said it will not allow its technology to be deployed for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Business Insider on Thursday that the company’s “lawyers have studied the designation and have concluded that Anthropic products, including Claude, can remain available to our customers.”

Claude will still be available to customers through platforms such as M365, GitHub, and Microsoft’s AI Foundry, except for the Department of War, the spokesperson said in a statement.

“We can continue to work with Anthropic on non-defense related projects,” it added.

Microsoft has deepened its ties with Anthropic in recent months. In November, the companies said that Anthropic would spend $30 billion on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, while Microsoft agreed to invest up to $5 billion in the startup.

Microsoft also said in September that it was integrating Anthropic’s models into Microsoft 365 Copilot alongside systems from OpenAI.

The Anthropic-Pentagon saga

In a statement published on Thursday evening, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the company is in talks with the Defense Department even as it is preparing for court.

“I would like to reiterate that we had been having productive conversations with the Department of War over the last several days, both about ways we could serve the Department that adhere to our two narrow exceptions, and ways for us to ensure a smooth transition if that is not possible,” Amodei wrote.

However, Emil Michael, a Department of War official, said in a post on X following Amodei’s statement that negotiations are off the table.

“I want to end all speculation: there is no active @DeptofWar negotiation with @AnthropicAI,” Michael wrote.

Amodei also offered an apology in his statement after The Information reported that he had privately blasted the White House in a memo to staff after talks with the Pentagon fell apart.

In the memo, Amodei wrote that the administration disliked his company because he had not offered “dictator-style praise to Trump.”

“Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences,” Amodei said on Thursday.

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei confirmed that the Pentagon has effectively blacklisted the AI startup.
• Amodei said Anthropic has had “productive conversations” with the Defense Department.
• He also apologized for a private memo in which he reportedly blasted the Trump administration.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei isn’t walking away from the table with the Pentagon, even as his company could sue the Defense Department.

“I would like to reiterate that we had been having productive conversations with the Department of War over the last several days, both about ways we could serve the Department that adhere to our two narrow exceptions, and ways for us to ensure a smooth transition if that is not possible,” Amodei wrote in a lengthy statement published on Thursday night.

Amodei’s statement came after the Pentagon confirmed that it formally notified Anthropic that “the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately.” It means that Anthropic is effectively blacklisted after Amodei and the company refused to acquiesce to the department’s demands.

For all of the talk of reconciliation, Amodei said Anthropic is prepared to sue the Pentagon over the designation. In particular, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that the effective blacklisting means that any company that has defense contracts cannot do business with Anthropic.

“The language used by the Department of War in the letter (even supposing it was legally sound) matches our statement on Friday that the vast majority of our customers are unaffected by a supply chain risk designation,” Amodei wrote of the letter the Pentagon sent Anthropic.

Microsoft, which offers Anthropic models to its customers, said it will continue to work with the AI startup

“Our lawyers have studied the designation and have concluded that Anthropic products, including Claude, can remain available to our customers — other than the Department of War — through platforms such as M365, GitHub, and Microsoft’s AI Foundry and that we can continue to work with Anthropic on non-defense related projects,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider.

The fight with the Pentagon has sparked interest in Anthropic, making Claude the top free app in major US app stores. Still, the standoff carries risks for the AI startup given its focus on enterprise business.

Amodei said that Anthropic continues to disagree with the Pentagon’s position on the sweeping nature of the ban.

“With respect to our customers, it plainly applies only to the use of Claude by customers as a direct part of contracts with the Department of War, not all use of Claude by customers who have such contracts,” he wrote.

Amodei also offered a public apology after The Information reported that he wrote harshly critical comments about the White House in a private memo to staff after talks with the Pentagon fell apart on Friday. In the memo, Amodei wrote that the administration didn’t like his company because he hadn’t “given dictator-style praise to Trump.”

“It was a difficult day for the company, and I apologize for the tone of the post. It does not reflect my careful or considered views,” Amodei wrote on Thursday. “It was also written six days ago, and is an out-of-date assessment of the current situation.”

Claude has shot up in popularity since Friday, but Amodei’s statement makes clear that the AI company wants to de-escalate the situation.

“Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences,” he wrote.

• Costco CEO Ron Vachris said the company is committed to returning tariff refund value to members.
• The company is one of hundreds suing the US government for refunds of Trump’s IEEPA tariffs.
• “We always want to be the first to lower prices and the last to raise them,” Vachris said.

Costco CEO Ron Vachris said the company is committed to returning tariff refund value to members.

“Regarding tariff refunds, it is not yet clear what the process will be, what refunds, if any, will be received, and when this will happen,” Vachris said during the wholesale clubs’ quarterly earnings call on Thursday.

“When legal challenges have recovered charges passed on in some form to our members, our commitment will be to find the best way to return this value to our members through lower prices and better values,” he added.

Costco is one of hundreds of companies suing the US government for refunds of Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, which were struck down by the Supreme Court last month.

Vachris said the company has also taken several steps to manage the impact of tariffs on its pricing, including shifting countries of origin for certain items, consolidating global purchases, and leaning into its own Kirkland Signature brand.

Those steps will give the company an advantage as the replacement global tariffs take over from the overturned IEEPA rules, he said. “We believe our expertise in buying and our limited SKU-count model puts us in a position to manage this as well as anyone.”

The timing and layering of different tariff rates throughout the year have also made it difficult to track the exact impact on specific items, Vachris said, but the company has lowered prices on items like textiles, bedding, and cookware as some tariffs have decreased.

“At Costco, we always want to be the first to lower prices and the last to raise them,” he said.

• Uber and Lyft fares rose nearly 10% on average in 2025, a new report found.
• A majority of riders said they’re cutting back on their use of the apps as a result, Gridwise found.
• The ride-hailing companies also increased the share they take of each fare, according to the report.

Catching a ride on Uber or Lyft got more expensive last year, and some riders are cutting back as a result, new data and a survey show.

The prices that customers paid on these apps rose 9.6% in 2025, according to an annual report on gig mobility from data analytics company Gridwise. The report analyzed information about 1 billion tasks over the past year on apps for ride-hailing, delivery, and other kinds of gig work.

It found that the average ride price rose to $23.66 at the end of 2025, up from $21.58 in December 2024.

Over the same period, a majority of ride-hailing customers surveyed — 60.4% — told Gridwise that they’ve reduced their usage of the apps due to price. That’s a jump of 16.6 percentage points over 2024.

The company conducted two surveys, one in December 2024 and the other in January 2026. Each asked 1,000 ride-hailing and delivery customers about their app usage.

The belt-tightening hasn’t translated into financial trouble for Uber and Lyft. They have been able to keep growing — and even turn a profit — by expanding their businesses to new markets. Uber has said that it’s growing its ride-hailing and delivery operations in less-dense suburbs, for instance.

“People are stating that they are sensitive to prices, but we’re seeing growth in the industry overall,” Ryan Green, CEO of Gridwise, said in an interview.

For years, many consumers have been cutting back their use of ride-hailing apps and other app-based services, such as Airbnb, which grew out of Silicon Valley and built customer bases with loss-inducing discounts — colloquially known as the “millennial life subsidy.”

How fast ride-hailing prices increased depended on which app riders used. On average, Lyft priced its rides about 14% below Uber’s, according to Gridwise’s data.

The gig-work drivers behind those rides saw their earnings rise, though not nearly as fast as fares: Gridwise found that gross driver pay increased by 3.6% per trip and 4.1% per hour.

Ride-hailing customers also took more trips using premium services, such as black-car rides and XL, which pairs riders with SUVs and other large cars, Gridwise found. Those kinds of trips tend to cost more than standard Uber and Lyft rides.

The companies also took a bigger share of each fare on average in 2025. Average platform fees per trip rose about 33% in 2025, Gridwise found.

An Uber spokesperson said that Gridwise’s report “relies on a very small fraction of drivers and delivery workers, and doesn’t accurately reflect the facts.” In January, Uber said that while “prices have gone up significantly over the last few years,” the portion going to Uber has remained largely flat.

Lyft did not respond to requests for comment on Gridwise’s findings.

That’s good news for Uber and Lyft’s bottom line, Green said.

“At the end of the day, it’s telling us that these companies are becoming much more profitable on a per-trip basis,” he said.

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The credit might be private, but the problems are becoming pretty public.

A once-wonky corner of Wall Street that’s exploded in recent years is facing increased scrutiny.

But what even is private credit? Why are people nervous? And, most importantly, why should you care?

Let’s break it down:

People are freaking out about private credit. What gives? PE giant Blackstone saw a bunch of withdrawals from its main private-credit fund for retail investors. The redemptions (7.9% of shares, totalling $1.7 billion) actually exceeded the fund’s quarterly limit of 5%. Blackstone still honored it, but not before asking its executives to kick in some of their own money to help the fund.

Ok, but what is private credit? (I totally know, but I’m asking for a friend.) It’s when investors loan money directly to businesses without involving traditional lenders. While it has existed for decades, private credit’s breakthrough came after banks had to pull back on lending following the financial crisis.

If that description is too simple, check out Apollo’s 125-page slide deck about private credit that was published just in time for Christmas. (Personally, I’d just take coal.)

So, Blackstone had a bad quarter in private credit. Now everyone’s nervous. It’s not just Blackstone. Blue Owl, another major player, also recently froze withdrawals from a private-credit fund. Now its stock is down more than 32% this year, and people are reportedly shorting the stock like crazy.

For critics, it’s confirmation of what they’ve been warning about: private credit is a bubble waiting to pop.

Private credit is bad and dangerous. Got it. Whoa, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Private credit still plays an important role. It’s an alternative for businesses that might need money fast or on more flexible terms than banks can offer.

But when a space quickly explodes — private credit’s grown to roughly $3 trillion — there are bound to be people who get in over their heads. Even Apollo’s Marc Rowan, a private credit evangelist, acknowledged that a “shakeout” is coming.

This all sounds like Wall Street mumbo jumbo. Why should I even care? Because Wall Street wants you to invest in these types of assets. In search of new capital, firms have launched private-credit funds for a broader audience.

It’s part of a bigger trend of giving everyday investors access to private markets previously reserved for institutional investors and the ultrawealthy.

Bottom line: Is private credit bad or good? It’s not as simple as that. The lack of transparency around private credit is both a feature and a bug. It offers borrowers confidentiality while also raising concerns about unseen risks.

Add in the fact that less-sophisticated investors are being pitched such a complex product, and panic can quickly snowball.

Honestly, I’m just happy to be talking about a market risk that doesn’t involve AI. Well … about that.

Dude. I know.

• Target will open its 2,000th store in March in a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina.
• The 148,000 square-foot location is the first of 30 openings planned for this year.
• The company is doubling down on physical retail as it looks to reverse a trend of declining sales.

Fresh on the heels of unveiling its new growth strategy, Target is set to cross a key retail milestone.

The company said Thursday it will open its 2,000th store later this month in Fuquay-Varina, a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina.

“Every time we open a new Target store, we’re planting roots in that community,” chief stores officer Adrienne Costanzo said in a statement.

The 148,000 square-foot location is the first of 30 new Target stores planned for this year, and the company has a goal of 300 new locations by 2035.

By comparison, Walmart currently has more than 4,600 stores and over 600 Sam’s Club warehouses in the US. Costco has 634 US locations and another 290 internationally.

In addition to new stores, Target says it will renovate some 130 existing locations this year as part of a $5 billion capital budget that is $1 billion larger than last year.

Physical stores have always been central to Target’s retail strategy, and CEO Michael Fiddelke is doubling down on improving the shopping experience in hopes of reversing a trend of declining sales.

Target says the newest batch of stores will feature several hallmarks of Fiddelke’s turnaround strategy, including a bigger emphasis on groceries, curated experiences, and digital order fulfillment.

Also opening in March will be new Target stores in Bakersfield and Delano, California; Springfield, Missouri; Jersey City and West Orange, New Jersey; and Dallas.

“Even more neighborhoods will get the full Target experience: trend-forward style and value, technology that makes the trip effortless, and awesome teams who deliver easy, inspiring, and friendly moments,” Costanzo said.

• Taproot Management, run by David Lin and ex-Two Sigma exec Jason Beverage, has lost money since launching.
• The firm aims to deliver multistrategy-like returns without the high costs that come with a large staff.
• Kevin Merritt, the firm’s director of research, is also leaving the fund, Business Insider learned.

Taproot Management is hoping to bring a new investing model to the $5.2 trillion hedge fund industry. So far, though, the young firm and its innovative structure haven’t made money.

The manager, which received $250 million in backing from massive Canadian pension CPPIB, launched in the third quarter of last year and lost roughly 1% in its first six months of trading, two people close to Taproot told Business Insider. The firm has also lost money through the first two months of 2026, though the exact amount of the drawdown is unclear.

Taproot is run by founder David Lin, previously of Tamridge and Glenview Capital, and by Jason Beverage, its chief investment officer, a former executive at quant giant Two Sigma. They manage the alpha capture fund with the aim of recreating the steady returns of multistrategy managers like Citadel and Millennium without the high costs that come with dozens of human portfolio managers.

The computer-driven fund has battled a tough quant environment since launch; July was described as a part of “a long, slow bleed” for quant funds, and the start of 2026 saw managers like Renaissance Technologies and Engineers Gate lose money.

The fund has also lost its onetime director of research, Kevin Merritt, who was also a partner at the firm. Merritt’s LinkedIn states he began his garden leave in March. He joined the firm before it began trading last July and previously worked at Wedbush and the now-shuttered Aptigon stockpicking unit at Citadel. His responsibilities have been subsumed by Ted Orenstein, a former investor for several big-name funds, including SAC, Millennium, and, most recently, Walleye, who joined Taproot after launch as head of equities.

The manager and Merritt declined to comment.

At Taproot, experienced investment analysts feed their investment ideas into the firm’s internal platform, where an algorithm ultimately makes investment decisions. Hiring analysts instead of PMs helps keep the fund’s costs down.

It’s similar in many ways to the central books run by large funds, which invest the best ideas from their PMs, as well as to the original alpha-capture fund, Marshall Wace’s well-known TOPS strategy. TOPS, however, is created by taking in external investment ideas and research from sources such as sell-side analysts, not by internal investment professionals.

Multistrategy managers have become increasingly attractive to large institutional investors like pensions and sovereign wealth funds because of their reputation for strong returns regardless of the market environment. But the industry’s war for talent has driven up costs for end investors, creating demand for a cheaper, multistrategy-like offering.

Doug Haynes, Point72’s former president, set out to create something similar to Taproot in 2024, but Norias Research, the launch, never got off the ground. Meanwhile, David Stemerman’s Centerbook Partners now runs more than $1 billion and relies on a network of external managers for its investment ideas.

• Major trade groups in the US are trying to hasten tariff refunds to small businesses.
• They argue that the refunds are “existential” for small businesses and startups.
• The Supreme Court ruled in March that Trump’s tariffs were illegally imposed.

US trade groups are pressing President Donald Trump and his administration to quickly pay tariff refunds to small businesses.

In a joint press release, the Consumer Technology Association and the US Chamber of Commerce said they had filed a brief on Wednesday in V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump, a lawsuit by small businesses seeking refunds from Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

“The brief argues that an efficient, orderly process to deliver refunds is in the best interest of all parties — the Administration, the courts, and American businesses,” the press release wrote.

“On behalf of the hundreds of thousands of businesses, especially small businesses, that are now owed refunds, the Chamber and CTA are asking the court to establish an efficient, orderly process to deliver refunds en masse,” Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s executive vice president,  said in the release.

He added that the trade organizations were concerned that other parties might try to benefit from the refund process, and “the last thing our system needs is for the trial bar to be profiting off refunds owed to small businesses.”

“While this matters for every American company, refunds are existential for the many smaller businesses and startups who shouldered the tariff burden,” Ed Brzytwa, CTA’s vice president of international affairs, said in the release.

The trade groups’ filing comes after the Supreme Court ruled, in a 6-3 decision in February, that Trump’s tariffs were illegal and that his justification for invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was invalid.

And on Wednesday, Judge Richard K. Eaton of the US Court of International Trade ruled that US businesses that were subjected to tariffs are “entitled to the benefit” of the Supreme Court ruling.

Even before Eaton’s ruling, companies had started demanding refunds. Major companies like Costco, Toyota, BYD, and FedEx filed lawsuits against the administration, seeking billions of dollars in tariff duties since they were imposed last April.

Representatives for the Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Morgan Stanley is reducing 3% of its global workforce, Business Insider has confirmed.
• The firm is reducing roles in all three corporate business lines.
• Key drivers of the cut include performance reviews, location, and business priorities.

Morgan Stanley is reducing its global workforce by 3%, Business Insider has confirmed.

The reductions are expected to impact some 2,500 positions out of the roughly 83,000 the firm reported at the end of 2025. The Wall Street Journal first reported Morgan Stanley’s cuts on Wednesday afternoon. A person familiar with the situation confirmed the cuts to Business Insider, saying they are expected to occur throughout the early part of March.

The exercise is global in nature, spanning the firm’s three primary business units: Institutional Securities, Wealth Management, and Investment Management. The rationale for the reduction is a combination of shifting business priorities, a revised global location strategy, and individual performance reviews, the person added, saying that the action is set to affect both front-office, revenue-generating roles and back-office support positions.

Notably, the person said that, while the firm’s respected wealth management division is affected, the cuts in that business line are focused on “home office” corporate roles. Financial advisors in field offices are not affected by this round of layoffs, the person continued.

The move follows a similar round of cuts last spring, when the bank reportedly trimmed approximately 2,000 roles. However, the current reductions come at a more optimistic moment for the firm’s bottom line. In its most recent earnings report, Morgan Stanley posted record full-year 2025 revenues of $70.6 billion, with investment banking revenues surging 47% in the final quarter of the year.

The layoffs come as the broader financial industry prepares for an anticipated windfall in corporate dealmaking, and some rivals are touting how they’re bulking up — not pulling back — on head count to meet the moment. Still, while Morgan Stanley is reducing head count in specific areas, the person with knowledge of the bank’s thinking said, it’s still planning for long-term growth and intends to add resources in some sectors while trimming in others.

• A group of tech leaders signed the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” at the White House on Wednesday.
• Under the pledge, tech companies will cover a greater share of the energy costs for data centers.
• It’s a bid to prevent rising electricity bills for regular consumers.

Data centers have been driving up electric bills. Now, some tech companies are working to change that.

At a White House event with President Donald Trump on Wednesday, representatives from several major tech firms signed the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge.”

“They’re going to be making their own electricity,” Trump said of the tech companies. “They’re not going to be taking from the grid.”

Tech leaders in the room included Google President Ruth Porat, Microsoft President Brad Smith, Meta President Dina Powell McCormick, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman, Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, and Gwynne Shotwell, the President of SpaceX, which is in the midst of a merger with xAI.

According to Trump, the pledge includes five commitments, including:

• Providing or paying for all power generation and electricity needed for their AI projects, including building new power stations;
• Covering the costs of upgrading existing power delivery infrastructure;
• Negotiating separate rate structures with utilities;
• Providing workforce development and jobs in local communities;
• Using their infrastructure to contribute backup power to local grids.

Trump originally previewed the plan during his State of the Union address last week.

“We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs,” Trump said at the time.

As tech companies have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, massive data centers have popped up in communities across the country.

While that new construction has brought jobs and other economic opportunities, it’s also led to higher electric bills in many instances.

“They need some PR help, because people think that if a data center goes in, their electricity prices are going to go up,” Trump said at the event.

Some companies have already started building their own energy-generating facilities at data centers, and companies like Microsoft have already announced steps to reduce consumer electric bills.

During the event, leaders from some of the companies detailed ways in which they were seeking to comply with the pledge.

Shotwell said that xAI was committing to developing 1.2 gigawatts of power at the company’s supercomputer site near Memphis, Tennessee, and that the facility would provide enough backup energy to power the city of Memphis. She also said that xAI would build “state-of-the-art water recycling plants.”

“Ultimately, this is not a negotiation where one side wins and one side loses,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at the event. “We have the same interests.”

Jill Tauber, Vice President of Litigation for Climate and Energy, at EarthJustice, asserted that more needed to be done to address “increasing costs and pollution for communities across the country” caused by data centers.

“More than a pledge, we urgently need strong policies and protections to ensure that data centers pay their way, disclose and mitigate their impacts, and are powered by clean energy,” Tauber said.

• Amazon shed employees in its robotics division this week.
• Overall, the company has eliminated more than 57,000 corporate roles since 2022.
• CEO Andy Jassy is trying to reset Amazon’s corporate culture and reduce bureaucracy.

Amazon cut jobs inside its robotics division this week, the latest reductions in a sweeping cost-cutting campaign.

In a message to employees on Tuesday, seen by Business Insider, Amazon Robotics VP Scott Dresser described the changes as “difficult but necessary.” He stressed that robotics remains a “strategic priority” even as the company restructures and pares back certain efforts.

It’s unclear how many employees were affected by Tuesday’s cuts. However, the decision underscores that Amazon is still trimming its ranks, even after slashing more than 57,000 corporate roles since late 2022, including rounds of layoffs in October and January.

In parallel, Amazon has been winding down underperforming initiatives, recently closing its Fresh and Go grocery chains after years of experimentation.

An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider that the company eliminated a “relatively small number of robotics roles” this week. Amazon continues to “hire and invest in strategic areas,” the spokesperson added.

“We regularly review our organizations to make sure teams are best set up to innovate and deliver for our customers,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We don’t make these decisions lightly, and we’re committed to supporting employees whose roles are affected with severance pay, health insurance benefits, and job placement support.”

Amazon’s vast fulfillment network relies on thousands of robots to shuttle goods across warehouses. But the team recently pulled back on Blue Jay, a warehouse robot project that launched just a few months ago, and is shifting toward a new robotics system, Business Insider previously reported.

After January’s broader layoffs by Amazon, which eliminated 16,000 corporate roles, HR chief Beth Galetti said the company was not aiming to establish “a new rhythm” of sweeping job reductions every few months, though she did not rule out further cuts.

As of the end of last year, Amazon employed about 1.58 million people worldwide, the bulk of them in warehouse and logistics positions. Roughly 350,000 of those workers are in corporate and technology roles.

Amazon has been shrinking its workforce since a pandemic-era hiring spree that dramatically expanded headcount to meet surging demand for e-commerce and cloud services.

CEO Andy Jassy has pushed to strip out layers of management and reshape Amazon’s culture to function more like the “world’s largest startup.” He has set internal goals to flatten the organization and introduced a “no bureaucracy” email alias to crowdsource ideas for operating more efficiently.

Even as it trims staff, Amazon is ramping up spending. The company has projected that capital expenditures could reach $200 billion in 2026, fueled by aggressive investments in AI data centers.

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• Warner Bros. Discovery has agreed to sell itself to Paramount Skydance instead of Netflix.
• The media mega-merger still needs the thumbs up from regulators in the US and Europe.
• Business Insider’s James Faris answered questions about the Paramount-WBD deal.

Paramount Skydance outbid Netflix for Warner Bros. Discovery, but the Hollywood-shaking agreement isn’t a done deal.

WBD had planned to sell its studio and streaming assets to Netflix. Paramount wouldn’t give up its pursuit of WBD, including its cable networks, however. After 10 offers, WBD’s board finally said Paramount’s latest bid was better, and Netflix decided to bow out.

Still, Paramount and its CEO, David Ellison, need regulatory approval in the US and abroad, which WBD CEO David Zaslav told employees could take six to 18 months, Business Insider reported.

In the meantime, everyone from actors to zealous fans of TV and movies has questions about the deal. Business Insider set out to answer them by hosting an Ask Me Anything Q&A session on the r/MediaMergers subreddit.

Below are some of the top questions, along with Business Insider senior reporter James Faris’ answers, based on reporting, company statements, and informed analysis. The Reddit Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

What are the biggest risks to this deal collapsing? Also, what are the chances it will spill into next year before closing (if it does)?

The biggest risk to the Paramount-WBD deal now is regulatory. David Ellison and his father, Larry, the billionaire Oracle cofounder helping backstop the $110 billion deal, certainly aren’t backing out. And neither are WBD shareholders, since they’d lose a lot of value if they didn’t take this deal with Netflix out of the picture.

As far as the timing, WBD’s Zaslav told staffers during a town hall last Friday that the Paramount-WBD deal approval process could last six to 18 months.

Paramount has agreed to pay a so-called “ticking fee” of $0.25 per share, or about $650 million, every quarter that its deal doesn’t get regulatory approval, starting on September 30.

Is this deal going to be held up in court?

While many analysts and insiders expect the US regulatory process for this deal to be relatively painless, Paramount may face harder challenges at the state level and abroad, including in Europe.

Even if regulators don’t block the Paramount-Warner deal, they could slow it down, costing the Ellisons time and money.

What is the biggest financial risk that the Ellisons are taking on?

The biggest risk here is that the combined Paramount-WBD doesn’t grow earnings fast enough and gets crushed by the massive debt load it’s taking on. (This was also an issue faced by WBD.)

Paramount-Warner will have tens of billions in debt it must pay down, in part by cutting costs, as WBD did. However, growing earnings is also crucial, and it’s very difficult to “cut to growth,” so that’s a challenge ahead of Ellison.

Was it ever an option for Warner Bros. to remain independent after the potential split with Discovery? Alternatively, was there an attempt to sell Discovery to Paramount while Warner Bros. maintained its independence?

No, there was never a realistic plan for Warner Bros. to be independent, since it controls the highly coveted studio and HBO assets that Paramount, Netflix, and Comcast were fighting over.

WBD’s cable networks would have become their own company if Netflix had won the bidding war, since the streaming giant only wanted the studio and streaming side.

Paramount, on the other hand, wanted to buy all of WBD before it broke itself apart.

WBD was formed when Discovery CEO David Zaslav believed that joining forces with Warner Bros. would create a media powerhouse. He took on a ton of debt and promised investors billions of dollars in cost cuts and earnings growth.

WBD’s revenue declined instead of growing, and its stock sank. Zaslav then tried a different strategy by formulating a plan to split off the company’s declining cable TV assets.

As a public company, WBD had to sell itself to the bidder the board believed would deliver the highest value to shareholders. WBD was worth about $10 per share before all the split-and-sale rumors began. So when someone eventually offers to buy the company at $31 per share, the board essentially has to sell.

What are they going to name the new company? Warner Skydance ParaBros? Mount Discovery sounds like a mouthful.

Ellison hasn’t said yet, but there are four names between the two companies: Paramount, Skydance, Warner (Bros.), and Discovery.

If I were Ellison, I’d call the new company “Paramount Warner.” I get the sense they want to make Paramount a household name, and Warner is what many call the WBD assets anyway.

And if Ellison wants to keep the Skydance name alive, the official company name could be: “Paramount Warner, A Skydance Corporation.”

Do you think the studio is viable? Or will it be sold off again in a few years?

Paramount has said that it’s planning to keep Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Studios brands separate, with an ambitious goal of producing a combined 30 movies a year.

As to whether there will be another sale in a few years, that will likely depend on whether Paramount can successfully grow earnings while paying down the debt load it’s taking on.

That’s no easy task — just ask WBD.

Netflix has been the clear winner of the streaming wars. Does this deal change its strategy at all?

Netflix is also widely seen as a winner in this deal since it’s collecting a $2.8 billion breakup fee, while driving up the WBD purchase price for an emerging rival.

Netflix could invest that money — and the tens of billions it was planning to put into Warner Bros. — into original and licensed content.

While Paramount-WBD tries to play catch-up in the fight for engagement, Netflix is looking to extend its lead over other paid streamers. Netflix also wants to close the gap with YouTube and take attention from free streamers and social media apps like TikTok and Instagram.

And if in a few years the Paramount-WBD deal doesn’t work out, Netflix could potentially swoop in and buy assets.

Do you think Zaslav and other WB officials are annoyed that Netflix bowed out? It seemed like they wanted Netflix, but Ellison finally raised his bid.

Before WBD floated its split plan last December, the stock was trading around $10 per share. Paramount has agreed to pay more than 3x that amount.

So while the purchase price could have gone even higher if Netflix decided to bid again, WBD execs can’t complain about the hundreds of millions of dollars they’re set to rake in.

Both studios have a lot of movies that are in development. What are the risks to those movies? Are TV shows more at risk compared to movies?

In the near term, not much, since this deal won’t close anytime soon.

The bigger question is whether Paramount-WBD will spend as much on content as company leaders have said they would.

What’s going to happen to the studio lots? Will they work from both or consolidate to one campus?

Ellison highlighted the combined “real estate footprint” as one of the five main areas of cost savings in the WBD deal, so offices will definitely get consolidated.

As for the lots, that’s still an open question. If one studio lot goes up for sale, would Netflix be a buyer?

What kind of involvement does Saudi Arabia have? Will there be any concerns about the content side?

My colleague Peter Kafka has been asking that question. Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar were financial backers in earlier versions of Paramount’s bid, but Paramount won’t say whether they’re still involved.

• Pricey US stocks are long overdue for a painful correction, Michael Burry wrote on his Substack.
• He warned that a return to historical valuations would require the S&P 500 to be cut in half.
• The “Big Short” investor said the index-fund and buyback booms have supported stocks but may falter.

US stocks could suffer a devastating crash as the forces propping them up falter, Michael Burry has warned.

The investor of “The Big Short” fame, who reinvented himself as a newsletter writer late last year, sounded the alarm on a historically expensive market in a Substack post on Tuesday.

Burry, one of the few people to predict and profit from the collapse of the mid-2000s housing bubble, laid out why stocks are overdue for a painful correction.

He noted that as bull runs lose steam and bear markets set in, valuation multiples have always returned to historical averages. Yet that hasn’t happened for a record 34 years now, he continued.

Using the S&P 500’s level at the start of this year, he calculated it would have to crash 32% to around 4,700 points for its Shiller cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio to fall from 40 to its average level of 27 since 1990.

The benchmark would have to collapse by 52% to about 3,300 points to return to its long-term average of 19, he estimated.

Burry said declines of that scale “might be expected from an extreme disappointment of exuberant speculation on a capital asset buildout,” referring to Big Tech companies spending eye-watering sums on data centers to power an AI revolution.

The market stool could lose its legs

Burry explained why he believes stocks have resisted a reversion to the mean for so long.

He pointed to the boom in passive investing via index funds, partly fueled by baby boomers swapping bonds for stocks in recent decades.

He underscored that market-cap-weighted indexes like the S&P drive capital to the most valuable companies, helping them to become even more valuable.

He also nodded to companies’ stock buybacks shoring up their market capitalizations, and authorities intervening to curb any major sell-offs.

Burry said those forces have interacted with other trends, such as the rise in high-frequency trading and pod shops, to make markets less liquid and more vulnerable, which exacerbated the COVID-19 and Liberation Day downturns.

“I believe stock market crashes will continue this trend: becoming more severe, more correlated, and, ultimately, more consequential and of greater length,” he added.

Burry cautioned that stocks could lose some of their support. He pointed out that Big Tech companies have shifted from ramping up stock buybacks to borrowing cash for their data-center buildouts.

Moreover, baby boomers are poised to pull money out of stocks en masse over the next few years as required minimum distributions from their retirement accounts kick in at age 73.

The reversal of those drivers is one thing, but that occurring in a historically expensive market that is “structurally becoming more fragile, more prone to correlation and cross-asset contagion is another,” Burry wrote.

Throw in rising geopolitical risks, and tech giants shifting from throwing off cash to pouring it into data centers, and that’s a recipe for trouble, Burry said.

The trigger for a crash might not be “much of anything,” Burry wrote, suggesting it could be disillusionment with “VC unicorns,” tech titans’ free cash flow “disappearing,” or simply “because it is time.”

“My point is that the next one is likely to be even more violent than Liberation Day,” he wrote, adding that the “gloom might stick” at some point and prevent a swift recovery.

• Several restaurant chains have revealed plans to close locations in 2026.
• Wendy’s will close up to 350 US restaurants in the first six months of the year.
• Pizza Hut intends to shutter 250 US locations in the first half of the year.

Some fast-food and fast-casual chains across the US are shrinking their footprints, with several planning to scale back locations in 2026.

Restaurant chains, including Wendy’s, Papa John’s, and Pizza Hut, have announced plans to close locations in 2026.

The planned closures come amid a challenging few years for restaurant chains, driven by factors such as inflation, rising labor costs, and changing customer preferences. Some brands have leaned on value meals and innovations in an attempt to bring more customers in the door.

“What’s really worked within quick service hasn’t been value, as much,” TD Cowen analyst Andrew Charles previously told Business Insider. “Value is important, but you look at when McDonald’s, Burger King, etc, have done well — it’s really when they have great menu innovation or great marketing that they really see customers respond.”

Several restaurant chains have announced plans to close locations, while others have suddenly shuttered locations since the start of the year. Here’s what to know.

Wendy’s plans to close up to 350 US restaurants in the first six months of the year.

Wendy’s, founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 1969, is best-known for its square beef patties and signature Frosty dessert, as well as fan-favorite menu items such as the Baconator, Dave’s Single, Spicy Chicken Sandwich, and chicken nuggets.

In February, Wendy’s said it intends to close roughly 5% to 6% of its US footprint — about 298 to 358 restaurants — in the first half of the year as it grapples with sliding sales and profits.

Interim CEO Ken Cook said the brand’s focus was now “to strengthen our foundation and position Wendy’s for long-term success.”

The Associated Press reported that Wendy’s shuttered 28 restaurants in the fourth quarter of 2025, leaving it with 5,969 locations across the US at the end of the year.

Company data shows systemwide US sales dropped 5.2% in 2025, while same-store sales declined 5.6% compared with the previous year.

However, Wendy’s international sales are growing, with systemwide sales up 8.1% and same-restaurant sales up 1.3% year over year.

Pizza Hut intends to shutter 250 US locations in the first half of the year.

Pizza Hut, founded in 1958 by brothers Dan and Frank Carney in Wichita, Kansas, and best-known for its pan pizza, has more than 6,000 locations in the US.

In a February earnings call, its parent company, Yum! Brands, said Pizza Hut intends to shutter 250 US locations in the first half of the year.

Yum! Brands announced late last year that it was exploring a potential sale of the chain, after reporting a 1% decline in same-store sales during the third quarter, the eighth consecutive quarterly drop.

“The Pizza Hut team has been working hard to address business and category challenges,” Chris Turner, chief executive of Yum! Brands said in November. “However, Pizza Hut’s performance indicates the need to take additional action to help the brand realize its full value, which may be better executed outside Yum! Brands.”

A list of locations was not shared, but the closures will impact “underperforming” locations, Yum! Brands said. The chain has faced tough competition from other chains, especially with the rise of value meals.

Internationally, it is faring better, with same-store sales increasing by 1% last year.

Jack in the Box plans to close up to 100 locations this year.

Jack in the Box — the fast-food chain that’s been flipping burgers since 1951 — has built a following at its more than 2,100 locations with a menu that includes curly fries, tacos, chicken sandwiches, and milkshakes. But even this drive-thru staple has hit some bumps in the road.

In 2025, the company rolled out its “Jack on Track” turnaround plan to boost performance and strengthen its finances. Part of this was selling off Del Taco for $119 million, which was completed in December.

Jack in the Box finished Q1 of the fiscal year 2026 with 2,128 restaurants. By the end of June, the brand expects 50 to 100 closures and around 20 openings, QSR Magazine reported in February.

Customers online have had mixed reviews about the food quality, while others lamented the disappearance of their go-to lunch spots.

Same-store sales across its restaurants dropped 6.7 percent in Q1 year over year, the company reported, according to QSR Magazine.

The goal this year is to focus on innovation, customer service, cosmetic updates, and fewer, stronger limited-time offers.

“2026 is about laying the foundation for sustainable long-term growth, which requires doing a lot of hard work right now,” CEO Lance Tucker told QSR, adding, “We are beginning to see early results that reinforce that we are on the right path.”

Papa John’s plans to close approximately 200 stores in 2026.

Papa John’s announced in a February 26 earnings call that it plans to close about 200 restaurants in 2026 as part of a broader effort to shut down 300 underperforming locations by the end of 2027.

The closures will primarily affect franchise-owned stores that are more than 10 years old and do not indicate long-term profitability, Ravi Thanawala, Papa Johns’ CFO, said on the call.

CEO Todd Penegor said, “We are taking action to better align corporate and field resources with our transformation priorities and optimize spans and layers in our organizations.”

Papa John’s was founded in 1984 by John Schnatter in Jeffersonville, Indiana, when he began selling pizzas out of a converted broom closet in his father’s tavern. The brand quickly grew into one of the largest pizza chains in the world, known for its “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza.” slogan.

Red Robin has abruptly closed some restaurants nationwide.

Some Red Robin locations in Illinois, California, and New Jersey abruptly closed this year, The Independent reported.

The company, which has nearly 500 locations across the United States, said in February 2025 that it intended to shutter roughly 70 underperforming restaurants as part of a plan to pay down debt, USA Today reported.

Later in the year, executives shared during an earnings call that turnaround efforts at several locations had been more successful than expected, reducing the need for as many closures.

“Building on this momentum, Red Robin delivered strong financial results in its third quarter of 2025, including beating expectations of comparable restaurant revenue, restaurant level profitability, and traffic,” the company said in a January statement. “Red Robin expects to report results for fourth quarter and full year 2025 in its first quarter of 2026.”

Red Robin did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on the recent closures.

Red Robin was founded in 1969 in Seattle, Washington, when local restaurateur Gerry Kingen expanded and renamed a neighborhood tavern that had originally opened in the 1940s.

The company grew into a national casual-dining chain known for its gourmet burgers, its Bottomless Steak Fries, onion rings, and thick, hand-spun milkshakes.

Some Denny’s have also closed without advance notice.

Denny’s, which operates more than 1,650 locations globally and is recognized for comfort-food staples, confirmed in January that it had completed its plan to close 150 restaurants by the end of 2025.

Since the start of 2026, there have been reports of restaurants closing without advance notice, including locations in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, Michigan, as well as Midland, Texas, per Mashed.

Denny’s did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on the recent closures. It has not said if there will be others this year.

It comes amid broader corporate shifts at the company. In January, $620 million acquisition by TriArtisan Capital, Yadav Enterprises, and Treville Capital was completed. The company reported that CEO Kelli Valade would leave in February.

Denny’s was founded in 1953 in Lakewood, California, by Harold Butler and Richard Jezak, originally operating under the name Danny’s Donuts before evolving into a full-service coffee shop and eventually rebranding as Denny’s.

Noodles & Company expects to close between 30 and 35 locations in 2026.

Fast Company reported Noodles & Company plans to shutter more restaurants as part of a broader effort to shore up its finances.

In a January announcement, the fast-casual chain said it expects to close between 30 and 35 locations in 2026 to improve profitability and strengthen its overall performance.

By the end of 2025, the brand operated 340 company-owned restaurants and 83 franchised locations. The company had already downsized its footprint the previous year, closing 42 restaurants, including 33 corporate locations and nine franchise units.

“Decisions like this are made thoughtfully and with a long-term view of the business,” CEO and President Joe Christina said, adding that fourth-quarter results showed stronger performance when resources were focused on higher-opportunity restaurants. He said the moves are designed to bolster the brand’s financial position and support long-term, profitable growth.

Noodles & Company was founded in 1995 by Aaron Kennedy in Denver, Colorado. The chain is known for its diverse menu that spans flavors from around the world, including Wisconsin Mac & Cheese, Pad Thai, Japanese Pan Noodles, and Pasta Fresca. In addition to noodle bowls, the restaurant offers soups, salads, and shareable sides, positioning itself as a quick-service spot for comfort food with an international twist.

• The VC firm TRAC developed a model that uses AI to predict which startups are likely to become unicorns.
• Unicorns are startups valued at more than $1 billion.
• TRAC says startups on the list have a 1-in-5 chance of becoming unicorns.

For decades, venture capital has run on instinct as a relationship-driven business built on gut calls and insider access to Silicon Valley’s hottest startups. Now, in the middle of the AI boom, one firm is trying to turn startup investing into a data science.

San Francisco-based TRAC has used a proprietary AI model to generate a fresh list of early-stage startups it predicts are most likely to become unicorns, or companies valued at more than a billion dollars. And two companies from its last list have already exploded into $11 billion juggernauts.

In 2023, TRAC first revealed 30 of the startups its model identified exclusively with Business Insider and also pulled back the curtain on its methodology.

The list included two relatively unknown companies at the time that are now among the hottest startups in venture: Harvey, a legal tech startup, and Kalshi, a prediction market, both valued at $11 billion.

TRAC’s model, which the firm calls “Moneyball for venture capital,” is based on over 30 sources of both public and private data. The model starts by identifying the many startups unlikely to succeed rather than picking winners.

“We don’t look for needles in the haystack,” explained Joe Aaron, TRAC’s cofounder and managing partner. “We remove the haystack.”

TRAC has found that a company’s founders do not predict success. Instead, its algorithm prioritizes 286 top investors.

“These extraordinary investors make a profit on two-thirds of their positions and one in five of their investments returns over 10X,” Aaron explained.

Less than 2% of all startups attract these elite investors, so that eliminates over 98% of all startups from TRAC’s formula.

How accurate is the algorithm? Venture investing is typically judged after a decade or more, so it is too soon to know for sure.

The firm says the companies it identifies have a one-in-five probability of becoming a unicorn. Advances in AI make this year’s list more accurate than ever, but that is not necessarily good news for investors.

“It is easier today for our AI to identify future unicorns than ever before,” said Fred Campbell, TRAC’s managing partner. “Conversely, it is harder than ever to secure allocation in funding rounds of the fastest-growing future unicorns.”

That is because so many VCs are chasing the hottest companies. The hard part is not identifying the companies, but getting founders to accept a check.

“Competition to invest in the ‘hot’ companies is as fierce as we’ve seen in decades,” Campbell said. “TRAC is seeing investor demand exceed round sizes by 10X, meaning for every $1 the company wants to raise, investors are offering $10.”

Companies are raising so quickly that, in the weeks Business Insider was working on the list, five companies fell off because they raised new funding at valuations above $1 billion.

Before any more startups graduate, here is the updated list of 30 companies in 2026, identified by TRAC’s model, in alphabetical order.

Allara

What it does: A Virtual care platform for women’s health, covered by insurance

When it was founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $145 million, according to Pitchbook

Total raised: $46.99 million, according to Pitchbook

Founder and CEO: Rachel Blank

Select investors: Index Ventures, GV, Vanterra, Maggie Sellers

Anara

What it does: Helps researchers find, understand, and produce scientific content faster by deeply integrating AI into every part of the research workflow.

When it was founded: 2023

Last post-money valuation: $70 million

Total raised: $13 million

Founder: Naveed Janmohamed

Select investors: Pioneer Fund, Rebel Fund, Y Combinator, Preston-Werner Ventures

Blueprint

What it does: AI Operating System for Mental Health Clinicians

When it was founded: 2019

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $32 million

Founder and CEO: Danny Freed

Select investors: Lightbank, Bonfire Ventures, Ensemble VC, LGVP

Browser Use

What it does: Enables AI agents to interact with websites. Leading open source library and infrastructure for intelligent browser automation.

When it was founded: 2024

Total raised: $17 million

Last post money valuation: Undisclosed

Cofounder and CEO: Magnus Muller

Select investors: Y Combinator, Felicis Ventures, A Capital, Nexus Venture Partners

Created By Humans

What it does: Develops an artificial intelligence-based rights licensing platform that connects human creators with AI companies.

When it was founded: 2024

Last post money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $12 million

Cofounder and CEO: Trip Adler

Select investors: Floodgate, Giant Ventures, Daft Capital, Garry Tan

Crosby

What it does: A hybrid law firm that uses AI and human lawyers to review and negotiate business contracts.

When it was founded: 2024

Last post-money valuation: not disclosed

Total raised: $25.8 million, according to the company

Founders: Ryan Daniels and John Sarihan

Select investors: Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Index Ventures

Draftwise

What it does: Develops a knowledge management and intelligence platform that assists clients with technology and compliance needs.

When it was founded: 2020

Last post money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: $25 million, according to Pitchbook

Cofounder and CEO: James Ding

Select investors: Index Ventures, Y Combinator, Soma Capital

Extropic

What it does: Develops thermodynamic computing hardware that it says is radically more energy efficient than GPUs.

When it was founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: $50 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $14 million, according to PitchBook

Cofounder and CEO: Guillaume Verdon-Akzam

Select investors: E1 Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Weekend Fund

Exabits AI

What it does: Develops decentralized infrastructure for artificial intelligence facilities.

When it was founded: 2021

Total raised: $15 million, according to Pitchbook

Last post-money valuation: $150 million, according to Pitchbook

Cofounder and CEO: Hoansoo Lee

Notable investors: Google Accelerator, Harvard Innovation Launch Lab, Hack VC

Eyebot

What it does: Makes self-serve kiosks that run a vision test and generate a doctor-verified glasses prescription in about 90 seconds

When it was founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: $100 million, according to the company

Total raised: $28 million, according to the company

Cofounder and CEO: Matthias Hofmann

Select investors: AlleyCorp, Baukunst, General Catalyst, National Science Foundation, Village Global

Fathom

What it does: Builds AI that turns clinicians’ notes into the standardized billing and reimbursement codes insurers require, cutting down the paperwork that slows down payments

When it was founded: 2015

Last post-money valuation: $45 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $61 million, according to the company

Cofounder and CEO: Andrew Lockhart

Select investors: Alkeon Capital, Cedars-Sinai, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners

Getlabs

What it does: Sends a trained professional to your home or office to draw your blood and bring it to a lab for testing, so you don’t have to go to a clinic

When it was founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: $68 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $40 million, according to PitchBook

CEO: Claire Hough

Select investors: Emerson Collective, Minderoo Foundation, Tusk Venture Partners, Anne Wojcicki

Glass Imaging

What it does: Uses AI to make camera images sharper and cleaner by correcting flaws from the camera’s lens and sensor, so devices like phones and drones can produce much higher-quality images

When it was founded: 2019

Last post-money valuation: $100 million, according to PitchBook

Total raised: $31 million, according to PitchBook

Cofounder and CEO: Ziv Attar

Select investors: Abstract Ventures, Future Ventures, GV, Insight Partners

Kick

What it does: Uses AI to automatically keep a small business’s books up to date, tracking income and expenses and producing tax-ready financial reports

When it was founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: $90 million in 2024; Kick declined to share its latest valuation

Total raised: $20 million, according to the company

Founder and CEO: Conrad Wadowski

Select investors: Felicis, General Catalyst, GV OpenAI Startup Fund

Knowunity

What it does: Develops interactive learning software to help students with their everyday school life.

When it was founded: 2019

Total raised: $53 million, according to Pitchbook

Last post money valuation: Undisclosed

Cofounder and CEO: Benedict Kurz

Select investors: Combination VC, EduCapital, Redalpine, XAnge

Lightyear

What it does: Software that automates how companies buy and manage their telecom services.

When it was founded: 2019

Last post-money valuation: $335 million, according to Pitchbook

Total raised: $65 million, according to the company

Founders: Dennis Thankachan and Ryan Shrack

Select investors: Altos Ventures, Amplo, Susa Ventures, Mark Cuban

Mem0

What it does: Builds a memory layer to help AI become more personalized and useful over time.

When it was founded: 2023

Last post-money valuation: not disclosed

Total raised: $23.9 million, according to the company.

Founders: Taranjeet Singh and Deshraj Yadav

Select investors: Basis Set Ventures, Peak XV Partners, Y Combinator, Kindred Ventures, and Dharmesh Shah

Moment

What it does: Builds software for large financial institutions that helps them manage portfolios and execute trades more efficiently.

When it was founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: $56 million, according to the company

Total raised: $308 million, according to Pitchbook

Founders: Dylan Parker, Ammer Soliman, and Dean Hathout

Select investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Index Ventures

Paladin Drones

What it does: Send autonomous drones to 911 calls in order to assist first responders.

When it was founded: 2018

Last post-money valuation: not disclosed

Total raised: Roughly $15 million, according to the company.

Founder: Divyaditya Shrivastava

Select investors: Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, and Toyota Ventures

Patlytics

What it does: Patlytics builds AI software that helps companies and law firms draft, analyze, and manage patents much faster by automating complex legal work.

When it was founded: January 2024

Last post-money valuation: not disclosed

Total raised: $25.6M

CEO: Paul Lee

Founders: Paul Lee, Arthur Jen

Select investors: Next47 (Siemens), Gradient Ventures (Google), 8VC, Alumni Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, Myriad Venture Partners

Polymath Robotics

What it does: Polymath Robotics builds software, so heavy-duty vehicles in industries like mining and farming can drive themselves safely.

When it was founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: Undisclosed

Total raised: Undisclosed

Founders: Stefan Seltz-Axmacher (CEO), Ilia Baranov (CTO)

Select investors: TRAC.vc, Thursday Ventures, Y Combinator, SOMA Ventures

Rocketlane

What it does: A tool that helps companies run client projects smoothly by keeping all the tasks, updates, and paperwork in one place and automating the busywork.

When it was founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: not disclosed

Total raised: $45 million

Founders: Deepak Bala, Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar

Select investors: 8VC, Nexus Venture Partners, Z47

Scanbase

What it does: Uses computer vision and AI to interpret medical imaging results for at-home tests.

When it was founded: 2022

Last valuation: $288 million

Total raised: $2.5M

Founders: Jeffrey Lange, Steve Roger

Select investors: Y Combinator, TRAC, Liquid 2, Rebel Partners, Meridian Ventures

Starcloud

What it does: Builds data centers in space in order to address the AI energy bottleneck.

When it was founded: 2024

Last post-money valuation: $40 million last priced round, according to Pitchbook

Total raised: $34 million, according to Pitchbook

Founders: Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden, Adi Oltean

Select investors: NFX, In-Q-Tel, Y Combinator, Caffeinated Capital, Plug & Play

TaxGPT

What it does: an AI-powered assistant for tax professionals and accountants.

When it was founded: 2023

Last post-money valuation: $100 million

Total raised: $6.25 million, according to the company

Founders: Kashif Ali, Isabella Ali

Select investors: YCombinator, Launch, Jason Calcanics, Magusta Capital, Rebel Fund, Trac Unicorn Fund, Principle Venture Partners.

Terzo AI

What it does: Terzo AI turns contracts, invoices and POs into financial intelligence.

When it was founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: undisclosed

Total raised: $40 million

Co/founder and CEO: Brandon Card

Select investors: Great Oaks Ventures, Align Ventures, Engage Ventures, PIF

TinyFish

What it does: TinyFish’s AI-powered agents search the web for business context and come back with actionable intelligence for companies.

When it was founded: 2024

Last post-money valuation: undisclosed

Total raised: $47 million

Cofounder and CEO: Sudheer Nair

Select investors: Iconiq Capital, MongoDB Ventures, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners

Turion Space

What it does: Builds spacecraft to track objects in orbit and clean up space debris.

When it was founded: 2020

Last post-money valuation: $55 million, according to Pitchbook

Total raised: $37.54 million, according to Pitchbook

Founders: Ryan Westerdahl, Tyler Pierce, and Patryk Wiatr

Select investors: Y Combinator, United States Space Force, and DG Daiwa Ventures

Vector

What it does: helps marketers with contact-level targeting and shows customers who are seeing their ads.

When it was founded: 2022

Last post-money valuation: $100 million, according to the company

Total raised: $18 million

Co-founder and CEO: Joshua Perk

Select investors: SignalFire, Y Combinator

Zed

What it does: Zed provides a code editor for software developers.

When it was founded: 2021

Last post-money valuation: $153 million, according to Pitchbook

Total raised: $45.4 million, according to Pitchbook

Cofounder and CEO: Nathan Sobo

Select investors: Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures

• AI is transforming marketing, from data analytics to producing ad campaigns.
• We asked Business Insider’s 2026 Rising Stars of Brand Marketing how they are using the tech.
• They also shared their advice for entry-level marketers.

Marketers have been quick to embrace the era of artificial intelligence.

A recent Gartner study of 402 senior marketers from North America and Europe found that 65% of CMOs think AI will dramatically change their roles over the next two years.

We asked Business Insider’s 2026 Rising Stars of Brand Marketing honorees how they use AI in their day-to-day work — and which tools they rely on most.

These marketing professionals are using tools like Midjourney and Microsoft’s Copilot to pressure-test creative ideas, spin up visuals and narratives for presentations, and eliminate busywork, creating more space for marketing strategy.

We also asked them to share their advice for early-career marketers who are navigating this period of technological disruption.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Building an AI stack to mirror day-to-day work

Benny Gee, creative director, Edmunds

I see AI as an accelerator at the start of the creative process. It helps me explore more directions quickly, but the real work is deciding which ideas are worth pursuing and pushing them into something that’s clear, useful, and actually feels like Edmunds.

To support that, I’ve built a small AI stack that mirrors how I work day-to-day: Perplexity for deep research, Claude as a pressure-tester to push back and find holes in my thinking, and tools like Nano Banana and Higgsfield for quick visual exploration, from rough comps to pushing static ideas into motion.

We’re in uncharted territory in terms of how marketing work gets made and who gets hired to do it. The tools are changing fast, the job market is tight, and it’s led to a flood of work that’s fast and cheap — and often forgettable.

What makes me optimistic is that this rewards people who care about craft. Tools have lowered the cost of producing content, but they’ve made judgment and taste more important than ever. The marketers who stand out know what’s worth making, why it matters, and who it’s for.

Using image-generator tools to spin up concepts

Jasmine Sharpe, director and head of creative, Grubhub

Tools like Gemini‘s image generator and Midjourney have been invaluable for my team — whether it’s quick ideation to spark concepts, creating visuals for pitch decks, or developing imagery that elevates the creative.

On days focused more on strategy, project, or team planning, or brief development, I lean on the “old faithful” Gemini or ChatGPT to help formalize key inputs, making ideas clearer and more concise.

For up-and-coming marketers and creatives, I would encourage embracing adversity and putting yourself in challenging, even uncomfortable, situations early. You’ll get it wrong at times, but those experiences sharpen your skills, build resilience, and give you the confidence to take smart risks.

Additionally, don’t be afraid to explore different work environments or subject areas early in your career — this will broaden your portfolio, develop your 360° thinking, and prepare you to lead with impact later on.

Using AI as a ‘thought partner’

Fiona Green, head of communications at Amazon Community Operations

In my day-to-day work, I use AI as a strategic thought partner to pressure-test ideas, sharpen messaging, and surface insights that help ensure our campaigns better resonate.

While AI handles parts of execution, uniquely human skills are becoming more valuable, especially creativity, judgment, and a deep understanding of human behavior. Marketing has always been about understanding what motivates people and translating that into stories and experiences that resonate. That doesn’t go away in the age of AI. It becomes even more important.

For those entering the field, I’d encourage them to build fluency with AI tools while also investing in the humanities by studying behavior, culture, and storytelling. The marketers who will rise are the ones who can pair technical capability with critical thinking, empathy, and a clear point of view.

Sprucing up presentation decks

Natacha McLeod, senior manager, creative, The Coca-Cola Company

AI has become a critical part of my day-to-day work, supporting everything from staying on top of priorities and capturing meeting notes to ensuring briefs stay aligned to business objectives. I also use it to generate visuals for decks and help analyze complex data more efficiently.

Microsoft Copilot is my go-to tool because it integrates seamlessly into my workflow, though I actively explore other platforms to stay current as capabilities evolve.

Marketing is undergoing significant disruption, but that is exactly what makes this an exciting time. There is a real opportunity to lean into creativity and passion while using tools like AI to amplify natural skills rather than replace them. At its core, marketing still comes down to understanding what motivates consumers and how brands earn a meaningful place in their lives.

Pressure-testing creative ideas

Mohib Iqtidar, global marketing director, NYX Cosmetics

AI is a creative accelerator, but in beauty, humanity remains the differentiator.

I use GPT tools to synthesize research and unlock insights that would traditionally take hours or days. I also rely on Creaitech and OMI to visualize creative territories and prototype packaging.

AI has fundamentally changed the speed of exploration. We can research, synthesize, visualize, and pressure-test ideas faster than ever, freeing more time for strategic and creative depth.

But beauty marketing is emotional, cultural, sensorial, and deeply human. I used AI to expand creative possibilities, but never to replace real people or real experience.

As marketing becomes increasingly powered by technology, the greatest competitive advantage will remain profoundly human: the ability to understand people and move culture forward.

Anyone can learn the mechanics of marketing. What truly differentiates you is your point of view, your compassion, and how deeply you understand others.

Recording and summarizing meetings

Mia Vandermeer, content and brand marketing manager, Tennr

Recording and summarizing meeting notes has been the most effective use of AI for me. It allows me to stay present and jot down key ideas in brainstorms without missing any of the details.

Other than that, I’m somewhat of a Luddite because we have a company policy that prohibits the use of AI for writing. Clarity comes from writing, and outsourcing the act of writing is outsourcing the work of thinking. There’s value in spending the extra time to write well and clearly, and in crafting original, distinctive ideas that actually get people to think in a different way.

Storytelling is an industry-agnostic need that isn’t going away, especially in the AI slop era we’re experiencing. Companies and brands need storytellers who convey their value, resonate with their audiences, and separate them from everyone else.

Cutting through admin to stay focused on the strategic work that matters

Bita Jedo, influencer marketing manager, EMEA, Disney+

I use Microsoft Copilot to bring efficiencies to my day‑to‑day work, through refining influencer briefs, streamlining longer writing tasks, and quickly summarizing emails and documents.

It helps me cut through administrative work so I can stay focused on the strategic and creative decisions that matter most to our campaigns.

My advice to young people starting out is to seek out as much breadth of experience as you can, even in short bursts.

Careers aren’t linear anymore, and that’s a good thing. There’s also a world of opportunity and side hustles available online, which can help you find what you enjoy and build a more versatile background, as you never know where your career might take you.

Using tools like Gemini to translate numbers into clearer narratives

Celeste Roque, director of social media, Tubi

I use AI to remove friction from work that doesn’t require human instinct.

That matters because I want my team to spend their time where it actually moves the needle: studying our community, understanding what’s resonating in culture, and being creative.

On the practical side, I use Gemini heavily for reporting. It helps chart and analyze performance data so I can translate numbers into clearer narratives for leadership and show the impact social is driving.

My advice to a future generation of up-and-coming marketers is to learn to articulate why something works. If you think a piece of content will resonate, be able to break down why: what tension it taps into, who it’s speaking to, and why the timing makes sense. Instinct will get you in the room, but explaining the instinct is what builds trust.

Working with an internal AI stack composed of multiple models

Rachel Ferrigno, associate director of content marketing and SEO, Zoetis

I use AI primarily as a strategic accelerator rather than a content replacement tool. In day-to-day work, it helps with first-pass content edits and supports workflow efficiency — drafting outlines, helping with creative briefs, and identifying content refresh opportunities.

I’ve been lucky enough to be part of two generative-AI pilot projects at Zoetis, where I’ve learned and assessed multiple tools and refined my prompt-generating skills. My tools of the trade are our internal GenAI capability. Unlike stand-alone tools like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, our internal GenAI platform brings together multiple AI models — such as OpenAI, Claude, and Mistral — in one place for easier use.

My advice for the future generation of marketers would be to find a balance between being a generalist and a specialist. I suggest finding a niche within marketing you love and then having a few secondary specialties on top of that.

For example, if you’re a content marketing pro, I would suggest leaning into generative AI, search engine optimization, and storytelling as your sub-specialties.

• The US and Israel’s strikes on Iran are changing the face of air travel.
• Flight bookings in Europe are surging while those to the Middle East are collapsing, Ryanair’s CEO said.
• He doesn’t expect the conflict to last into the summer because Trump “has a short attention span.”

The CEO of Europe’s biggest airline has said that more people are looking to vacation in the continent since the US strikes on Iran.

“We’ve seen, certainly, there’s a big collapse in bookings to the Middle East, and a big surge in bookings on short-haul airlines within Europe, ” Michael O’Leary, the CEO of Ryanair, said at a press conference on Monday.

In particular, he added, the focus was on the Easter vacation period.

“The Gulf states will suffer damage to their tourism product,” O’Leary said.

Ryanair only operates single-aisle Boeing 737 airplanes, almost solely to and from European cities. It has some destinations in Morocco, and one in Jordan.

Although O’Leary doesn’t expect there to be “any fundamental change or impact” on booking trends into the start of summer.

The typically outspoken airline boss added that he believes the war will be over relatively soon. He doesn’t think Iran can maintain their retaliatory strikes, and that President Donald Trump “has a short attention span, so he would want it to be over reasonably quickly or he’ll get bored.”

Meanwhile, he added, the Irish budget airline can benefit because, like other carriers, it hedges against oil prices — plus more people are turning to short-haul bookings.

Some 300,000 British people and 20,000 Irish citizens are in the Middle East, according to the countries’ governments.

The UK said it has organised a charter flight departing from Muscat, Oman, early on Thursday to help repatriate citizens in the region.

More than 13,000 flights in and out of the region have been canceled since Saturday, affecting more than 1 million passengers, according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics firm.

• Dude Perfect hired its first content chief to lead its push into new shows, formats, and talent.
• The YouTube troupe is prepping programming for young kids after adding content aimed at older fans.
• It’s also been scouting new talent to reduce its reliance on its namesake founders.

Dude Perfect has hired its first chief content officer, Kevin Sabbe, as the group looks to turn YouTube fame into an expansive entertainment empire.

Texas-based Dude Perfect, founded in 2009 by five college roommates, initially rose to prominence with sports stunt videos. It is one of the few creator-led companies to receive significant outside funding, raising $100 million in early 2024 from Highmount Capital.

Outside its core YouTube channel, where it has 62 million subscribers, Dude Perfect has moved into live events, including a 22-city Squad Games tour this year, a book series, sports gear, and complementary programming. It’s partway through building an entertainment destination and production facility at its Frisco base, and announced plans to open a theme park.

Dude Perfect’s playbook is increasingly popular among superstar creators. Dude Perfect, like other creators including MrBeast and Steven Bartlett, have referenced Disney, with its famed flywheel — where characters and stories fuel other businesses — as a model they aspire to.

As CCO, Sabbe will lead the charge to develop new shows, formats, and talent. Sabbe’s career has spanned digital media, TV, and film, including positions at Tim McGraw’s Down Home, Defy Media, Maker Studios, Fox, and Warner Bros. Entertainment. He’ll work with Andrew Yaffe, the CEO of Dude Perfect.

Yaffe said he personally spoke with upward of 50 people for the role, and that Sabbe brought the “perfect blend” of creator and traditional media experience.

“Everything he’s done over the last however many years of his career is just instrumental in where we want to get to as a company,” said Yaffe, a former NBA exec who joined the company in 2024.

Sabbe’s hire underscores both the opportunity and the challenge that YouTube-born creators face.

There’s a recognition that they have the potential to become the next generation of entertainment companies. Hollywood giants have signed deals with YouTubers like MrBeast and Ms. Rachel to stay relevant with younger viewers. Sabbe’s hire also shows that creators often need people with traditional entertainment experience to help them build businesses beyond social media.

Along with Sabbe, Yaffe has built out the company’s leadership through hiring a CFO, a head of commercial partnerships, a head of legal and business affairs, a head of human resources, and a chief product officer. The company has more than 60 employees.

Dude Perfect is trying to expand beyond the 6 to 14 age range

Dude Perfect’s audience sweet spot is people ages six to 14. Its leaders want to expand their audience and talent pool. Like many independent creators, Dude Perfect is thinking about how to build a company that transcends its founders — Garrett Hilbert, Tyler Toney, Cody Jones, Coby Cotton, and Cory Cotton.

Dude Perfect is aiming at older audiences through an outdoor channel and the sports podcast “Almost Athletes,” with returning fans in mind. On the other end of the spectrum, execs revealed they’re developing new programming for younger fans, which Sabbe loosely described as “Dude Perfect Junior.”

“Our content is incredibly family-oriented,” Yaffe said. “Are there opportunities for preschool-age content?” He also sees an increasing opportunity to reach sports fans ages 14 to 34.

Branching into those areas is also a way to attract new talent, Sabbe said. “Almost Athletes,” for example, is cohosted by Kevin Sparkman, who joined the company in 2020.

“Our podcast, it’s hosted or co-hosted by someone who’s not one of the five Dudes,” Sabbe said. “The interns are not one of the five Dudes. When we get into a toddler space, that will not be the five Dudes. So, for us, that’s really important.”

There’s no guarantee creators can extend their appeal to new audiences, though. Dude Perfect Outdoors is three episodes in, with each averaging 836,000 views. Its gaming vertical has been around longer, and its view counts have varied widely, though.

The company sees room for the Dudes themselves to continue to grow, as well.

YouTube remains the company’s core business, but it’s also rolling out new books and selling merchandise and sporting goods, such as footballs. Its 2025 Hero Tour, a 20-city live arena tour that combined competition and comedy, drew around 200,000 people in total last summer and averaged more than $50 per ticket.

Yaffe revealed that Dude Perfect is also eyeing following some of its creator brethren — including MrBeast and Emma Chamberlain — into the food and beverage space this summer.

“For a long time, content was the biggest wedge of the pie,” Yaffe said. “You’ll see products and experiences continue to grow. Content will continue to grow as well, but on a percentage basis, products and experiences will grow even faster.”

• Leaner hedge funds are on the rise, fueled by SMA capital, better tech, and outsourcing operations.
• IIP Services is one startup helping portfolio managers streamline operations for quick market entry.
• The firm provides a ready-to-use platform but also helps PMs navigate the due diligence gauntlet.

A new wave of leaner, faster hedge-fund launches is on the rise.

Driven by an influx of capital from the separately managed account boom — and by technology that used to be available only to the biggest investment firms — entrepreneurial portfolio managers are launching with just a couple of employees, or in some cases all by themselves, and outsourcing the rest.

Service providers are scrambling to grab their piece of the growing SMA pie, advising managers and supplying the tech and operational plumbing that many PMs are navigating for the first time.

One such example is IIP Services, which launched in 2024 to focus on the expanding market of SMA allocators and managers.

The pitch to managers, according to partner Semi Gogliormella, is straightforward: They can outsource much of the non-investment business — operations, compliance, vendor management, and institutional-grade systems — and focus their early days on investing and raising capital.

Some of IIP’s manager clients have launched with hundreds of millions in capital and little to no staff outside the founders.

Gogliormella, who has held senior operations and compliance roles at firms including WorldQuant and Boulder Hill, said a combination of SMA demand and improved technology has significantly shortened launch timelines. In some cases, he said, managers can be up and running with new SMA capital within weeks of signing an investment management agreement, though he cautioned that this is not the norm.

“Onboarding and going live gets truncated significantly,” Gogliormella said.

The plug-and-play back office

Demand for the tools that make lean launches possible is rising alongside the SMA boom. SS&C, a major software and services provider to hedge funds, told Business Insider the number of clients using its cloud-based investment platform for emerging managers — Eze Eclipse — has risen more than 25% since 2024, including 70 new clients in 2025. The company attributed some of the acceleration to firms streamlining operations to support SMAs.

For emerging managers, that shift is redefining what “small” can look like. Instead of staffing up to meet institutional expectations, they can increasingly rent pieces — or all — of the operating stack: order and execution management systems, portfolio management tools, cybersecurity services, compliance support, and even help managing relationships with prime and execution brokers.

IIP’s model is to act as an aggregator and operator for the parts of a hedge fund that don’t generate alpha. Gogliormella said IIP aims to save managers and allocators money and time by purchasing institutional-grade software at wholesale prices and integrating it into a cohesive, ready-to-use system.

It also negotiates preferred rates with outsourced vendors across functions like trading support, legal, compliance, and IT.

The founders of Brabus Capital, a London-based systematic manager that uses IIP, recently told Business Insider that the outsourced setup let their firm operate at a scale on day one that would typically take a year to a year and a half to recreate from scratch.

For PMs, it’s akin to hiring a general contractor to manage the build of a new home rather than going to Home Depot and buying à la carte, Gogliormella said — without the sticker shock of budget overruns.

The firm’s client base includes more than a dozen managers and many allocators, Gogliormella said.

“We’re trying to help them build the business at a fraction of the cost,” Gogliormella said, as well as accelerate their speed to market and increase operational efficiency. Managers pay fees based on the complexity of their operation.

Spending potentially millions on middle- and back-office hires is a hurdle for smaller launches, but “allocators have become more accepting of the outsourced model,” Gogliormella said, a shift he noticed around 2020.

That flexibility hasn’t changed the non-negotiables. Allocators may be more comfortable with outsourced operations than they were a decade ago, but they’re not lowering the bar on controls, credibility, or diligence.

Shepherding would-be managers through the due diligence ringer, including allocators and brokers, is part of IIP’s hands-on approach. Even when capital comes via an SMA rather than a commingled fund, due diligence can include detailed reviews of cybersecurity, incident-response procedures, and physical security and access controls.

In other words, the infrastructure may be easier to rent than it used to be, but the scrutiny hasn’t gone away.

• The new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models are notably more expensive than previous generations.
• Apple didn’t specify a reason for the increases, but it’s previously talked about the global memory shortage’s impact.
• Apple’s recently announced budget iPhone 17e and iPad Air, however, maintained their lineup’s previous $599 starting price.

Amid the global memory shortage, Apple didn’t raise prices for its latest iPhone and iPad. That’s not the case for its new MacBooks.

After Monday’s reveal of the iPhone 17e and iPad Air, it’s the Mac lineup’s turn for a revamp. The tech giant announced on Tuesday a new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Studio Display.

Apple introduced the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips that will power two versions of the MacBook Pro, and the MacBook Air will run on an M5 chip.

The MacBooks got a price bump along with the new chips, which offer faster performance, as well as higher storage capacity.

The MacBook Air starts at $1,099 for the 13-inch and $1,299 for the 15-inch version — a $100 price increase for each model.

The M5 Pro MacBook Pro starts at $2,199 for the 14-inch option, up from $1,999. The 16-inch will go from $2,499 to $2,699. For the M5 Max MacBook Pro, the starting price is $3,599, up from $3,199.

While Apple didn’t specify a reason for the price hikes, they arrive as the consumer electronics industry grapples with a global memory shortage as the artificial intelligence race shakes up the supply chain and market for memory chips, which are used in computers and other devices.

In its January earnings call, Apple said it expected the price of memory to continue to increase. However, CEO Tim Cook declined to speculate on whether or not it would lead to increased prices for Apple’s products.

Best Buy CEO Corie Barry addressed the memory shortage earlier on Tuesday during the retailer’s earnings call.

“As you are aware, the significantly increased demand for memory components is driving cost inflation and supply uncertainty, particularly in computing. We are partnering with our vendors to mitigate impacts on the business,” she said. “We are focused on five major themes. One, we are bringing in as much inventory as we can. We are also providing our vendors with a longer forecast horizon to better plan allocations across commercial and consumer segments and collaborate more effectively with memory partners.”

The key features that Apple highlighted in the new MacBook Air are the Liquid Retina display, up to 18 hours of battery life, and a 12 megapixel camera. It comes in four colors: sky blue, midnight, starlight, and silver. For the higher entry price, customers will also get double the amount of starting storage at 512 gigabytes.

Apple said the new MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro chip delivers faster AI image generation, LLM prompt processing, and gaming performance, with the M5 Max building on that speed even more. Apple touts the new chips as game-changers for the MacBook Pro’s AI capabilities. The M5 Pro MacBook Pro starts at one terabyte of storage, up from the previous 512 gigabytes, while the M5 Max model doubled its starting storage to two terabytes.

The Studio Display, which starts at $1,599, and the $3,299 Studio Display XDR boast 5K Retina displays designed for video editing, 3D rendering, and more workflows.

The new computers are available for pre-order starting Wednesday.

• Target reported a 1.7% decline in total sales for its fiscal year.
• The earnings results extend a three-year streak of flat or declining comparable quarterly sales.
• New stores and a recent uptick in transactions could bring the retailer back to growth in 2026.

Target likely can’t wait to close the book on last year as it looks to turn the page and return to growth.

The bullseye retailer on Tuesday reported a 1.7% decline in total sales for the last fiscal year, which ended January 31, with a 1.5% drop for the quarter. That’s including the addition of a batch of new stores and growth in its digital business.

“I’m incredibly proud of how our team navigated through a challenging year in 2025,” CEO Michael Fiddelke said in a statement. “Our team is firmly focused on writing Target’s next chapter of growth.”

Adjusted fourth quarter earnings per share of $2.44 exceeded the Bloomberg analyst consensus of $2.13, but the outlook of less than a percentage point increase in comparable sales and first quarter EPS of $1.30 were less than Wall Street estimates.

While the fourth quarter’s results extend a three-year streak of flat or declining comparable sales, the company said traffic and transactions started to pick back up in December and January, and are on track to deliver net sales growth in every quarter of 2026.

“Target saw a healthy, positive sales increase in February, serving as an important milestone on our path back to growth this year, and reinforcing my confidence in the momentum we’re building and the future we’re creating together,” Fiddelke said.

Analysts said ahead of the earnings release that Fiddelke and his team have their work cut out for them.

“Time is Target’s greatest adversary,” Mizuho analyst David Bellinger said in a weekend note ahead of the release.

“While senior management is taking the necessary steps to re-position the business, others are not standing still,” he added, referring in particular to Walmart, which has been gaining momentum as Target struggles.

“Ultimately, the company needs to show how it can better compete and define its place in the market,” UBS analyst Michael Lasser said in a note leading up to the results.

Fiddelke is set to unveil his larger turnaround strategy Tuesday morning at Target’s headquarters in Minneapolis. One month into his new role, the CEO has said he’s focused on four key priorities: improving the merchandising, elevating the shopping experience, investing in tech, and supporting workers and communities.

The company also said it was seeing strong recent performance in non-merchandise sales, including its Roundel ads business, Target Plus membership, and same-day delivery services.

• Stripe CEO Patrick Collison advocated for on-demand software in the AI era on the “TBPN” podcast.
• Anthropic’s Claude AI update sparked a software stock selloff, impacting SaaS business models.
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed fears of AI replacing traditional software tools industry.

Stripe’s CEO, Patrick Collison, delivered a provocative thesis about the future of software in the age of AI.

Appearing on the “TBPN” podcast last week, Collison told show hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays that software shouldn’t be mass-produced but created on demand instead.

“Software should be like pizza, and it should be cooked right then and there at the moment of use,” said Collison. “Up until now, the economics of software have been conceived as fixed cost and then infinitely monetized.”

“Once there are inference costs and custom creation involved, it really shifts,” Collison added. “It’s kind of the non-Walrasian software regime.”

Collison’s analogy echoes a broader tension gripping the technology industry on whether AI tools could replace, rather than just augment, traditional software.

That anxiety briefly turned into market reality earlier in February. Releases and updates from Anthropic’s Claude AI, especially enterprise-focused capabilities like Claude Cowork and the automation plugin, triggered a deep selloff in software stocks as investors fretted that AI could automate tasks that once required licensed software or human expertise.

The selloff wiped out billions in market value, with broad software ETFs and enterprise names sliding sharply, as investors interpreted Claude’s expanding abilities as a threat to traditional SaaS business models that count on recurring licensing revenues. The iShares Expanded Tech Software Sector ETF is down nearly 30% since the beginning of 2026 as of March 2. IBM is seeing some of the heaviest losses among software companies, recording its worst slide in 26 years as the stock fell 13% on February 23.

The stock slide aside, not everyone is sold. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back on the idea that the tool industry is in decline and will be replaced by AI at a recent Cisco AI event.

“You could tell because there’s a whole bunch of software companies whose stock prices are under a lot of pressure because somehow AI is going to replace them,” said Huang. “It is the most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself.”

• The rise of separately managed accounts is enabling faster, leaner hedge fund launches.
• SMAs, outsourcing, and improved technology help small hedge funds scale fast.
• Funds can launch with a single employee, like Bayhunt Capital, but credibility remains essential.

A decade ago, a one-person hedge fund firm would’ve sounded far-fetched — science fiction for managers, and a due diligence horror story for allocators.

Back then, institutional investors wanted to see a real back office — finance, operations, compliance — and the expensive technology necessary to run sophisticated risk, trading, and reporting. Even seasoned portfolio managers typically needed a team before big investors would buy in.

But the future is here for portfolio managers, and allocators are seeing dollar signs.

Just ask Ben Williams, who launched Bayhunt Capital in 2024 as the founder, chief investment officer, and sole employee. The firm, based in Marin County, California, focuses on real estate stocks and manages $360 million, including leverage, for allocators through individual investment portfolios, known in the industry as separately managed accounts.

“It’s always been something in the back of my mind that I wanted to do — have my own business,” Williams told Business Insider. Now about a year into live trading, he said he’s on the cusp of onboarding his first employee, an investment analyst.

Even five years ago, Williams couldn’t have imagined some of the industry shifts that made it possible to start a company this way.

Leaner, faster launches like Bayhunt’s are one of the knock-on effects of the booming popularity of separately managed accounts. As allocators increasingly lean into SMAs for the transparency and control they provide, managers have been able to launch with a smaller headcount — and in some cases, without a commingled fund at all. At the same time, cloud-based tech systems and outsourced service providers have made it possible to rent much of the infrastructure that used to require an in-house build.

Hedge funds, which have had a generational run of returns in recent years, are now the clear favorite among investors — and a growing number of portfolio managers like Williams are concluding there’s never been a better time to take the plunge and pursue the dream of running their own fund.

SS&C, a top software and service provider to hedge funds, has seen a marked uptick in adoption of its cloud-based investment platform geared toward emerging managers. The number of clients using the platform, called Eze Eclipse, has grown more than 25% since 2024, with 70 new joiners in 2025, the company told Business Insider, attributing the acceleration in part to firms streamlining operations for SMAs.

A whole cottage industry of service providers is popping up and scrambling to meet the needs of these upstart firms. IIP Services launched in 2024 with a focus on the burgeoning SMA market. With more managers launching at smaller sizes, IIP saw an opportunity to provide a soup-to-nuts product for the non-investment aspects of the business.

Semi Gogliormella, a partner at IIP Services who has held senior operations and compliance roles at firms including WorldQuant and Boulder Hill, says many PMs are realizing that the combined power of the SMA market and improved technology has significantly reduced the time to get a firm off the ground.

He said he has seen managers up and running with new SMA capital within weeks of signing an investment management agreement, though he cautioned that it isn’t the norm.

“Onboarding and going live gets truncated significantly,” Gogliormella said.

The Substack effect, but for portfolio managers

The meteoric growth this decade of multistrategy hedge funds like Citadel, Millennium, and Point72, and the ensuing war for talent, has created more opportunities than ever for portfolio managers to gain experience and a taste of running their own business. A major allure of these firms is that the platform handles operational headaches and red tape, leaving investors to focus on markets, supported by world-class technology and trading systems.

Replicating that experience outside of the confines of a pod shop wasn’t realistic.

Superstars could spin out and raise the capital to build and hire — a lengthy endeavor — but for most managers, a “career change” meant hopping to another multistrat.

It’s not that small, stand-alone money managers didn’t previously exist. It’s that now they can attract institutional capital — and the economics that come with it — and more easily recreate the systems used by large funds, offering a career path many might not otherwise have considered.

It’s not unlike how Substack and its competitors offered better professional tools for writers to self-publish, distribute, and monetize their work.

“A lot of these managers, they’re incubating in these multistrats and have a good pedigrees when they spin out,” said James Griffin, global head of sales for SS&C wealth and investment technology group. “Their expectations are that they’re going to get the same bells and whistles that they’ve had at these big institutions.”

Multistrats have become significant SMA allocators in their own right, and some offer access to their in-house tools and systems as an inducement or in exchange for a fee discount, industry sources said.

But for those without that option — or who are looking for more independence and fewer strings — managers with less than $100 million in capital can rent the same tech stack as some multibillion-dollar pod shops, Griffin said, noting that his firm provides software to some of the industry’s largest funds.

Veteran systematic portfolio managers Matt Gormley and Matt Isherwood began looking to set up their own shop about five years ago, when the SMA rush was starting to take shape. They went in-house at Walleye, leaving two years later to launch Brabus Capital. Like Bayhunt, London-based Brabus started small and exclusively with SMA capital, but it is growing and is in the process of bringing on staff for key investor relations and technology roles.

“One of the challenges for systematic investing is the barriers to entry are high, which is why quants tend to be tied up in multistrats,” Gormley said.

The duo started exploring options to outsource components of the business and realized the landscape had changed significantly since 2020. Abundant SMA capital meant they could start running money faster. They could also rent state-of-the-art technology, compliance and operational infrastructure, cybersecurity, and hire someone to manage relationships with prime and execution brokers.

Like Williams, they signed on with IIP, which aims to save managers time and money getting off the ground by purchasing institutional-grade software — order, execution, and portfolio management systems — at wholesale prices and integrating them into a cohesive, ready-to-use system.

“It’s enabled us to get scale from day one that would typically take 12 to 18 months to build if you were recreating the multistrat setup from scratch,” Gormley said.

You can rent infrastructure; you can’t rent credibility

Don’t let the small headcounts — and the relative ease of getting these firms off the ground — fool you. This isn’t trading from your couch in your pajamas, and cheaper technology doesn’t mean launching a hedge fund is now fair game for anyone.

Experience, talent, and credibility are still prerequisites.

Both Bayhunt and Brabus said their comfort outsourcing non-investment work came from years inside institutional platforms, gaining exposure to the less glamorous but nevertheless critical functions of hedge fund — risk, operations, controls, and due diligence. Williams, who liaised with several risk managers at top-tier multistrats, said that while the technology is cheaper and more available than it was a decade ago, “a person needs to have a considerable amount of experience” to understand the risk math and to have the confidence to strike out alone.

Brabus’ founders put it more bluntly: you can outsource the plumbing, but you can’t outsource knowing whether it’s working — and allocators still aren’t writing meaningful checks without a credible track record and an operation that can survive institutional due diligence.

“Even with high-quality outsourced partners, running a hedge fund business is a big lift if you don’t understand what goes on downstream from your investment process,” Isherwood said.

• Sam Altman and Dario Amodei went viral for refusing to join together in a sign of unity.
• Once colleagues, the two AI CEOs have helped nurse their companies’ rivalry.
• Here’s how OpenAI and Anthropic finally reached this point.

If you want to know one of the biggest rivalries in AI, just ask for a show of hands.

Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei provided an iconic image of their rivalry when they refused to join hands as the rest of the gathered for a moment of unity.

Weeks later, their differences were put into even sharper relief when Anthropic and OpenAI came down on opposite sides of a dispute with the Pentagon.

Here’s a timeline of how Altman and Amodei went from colleagues to becoming the face of AI’s Cold War.

July 2015: Decisions happened over dinner

In July 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Altman, and a group of elite AI researchers all gathered at the swanky Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, California.

According to The New York Times, Musk had a falling out with then-Google CEO Larry Page. Weeks later, Musk, Altman, Amodei, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others discussed the formation of a new AI lab to ensure Google had a worthy competitor in the AI space. Musk invited Amodei, per tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz.

Their vision became OpenAI, though Amodei initially elected not to join the startup research lab. Roughly a year later, he changed his mind and joined OpenAI as “Team Lead for AI Safety.”

September 2018: Amodei rises up

Amodei quickly moved up the ranks at OpenAI. In September 2018, the startup named him its research director.

Altman, who cofounded OpenAI while still serving as president of Y Combinator, began to devote more time to the startup.

In March 2019, Altman stepped down as YC’s leader. He then became CEO of OpenAI and led the startup’s pivot to a capped for-profit structure.

In November 2019, OpenAI released GPT-2, which Amodei played a major role in developing. A month later, OpenAI named Amodei as its Vice President of Research.

June 2020: OpenAI releases GPT-3

In June 2020, OpenAI began to show just how far the technology had come with the release of GPT-3, considered to be the first highly capable Large Language Model (LLM).

Amodei told The New York Times that the model had “this emergent quality.” Independent researchers told the publication that GPT-3’s capabilities surprised them, even as the model still showed signs of struggle.

To address safety concerns, OpenAI initially controlled access through a private beta.

December 2020: Amodei goes his own way

The release of GPT-3 solidified OpenAI‘s standing, but behind the scenes, tensions were rising.

The rifts began when Amodei successfully lobbied to keep Greg Brockman, an OpenAI cofounder, off the team that developed GPT-3, according to Keach Hagey’s biography of Altman, “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.”

Hagey wrote that Amodei’s stunning power within OpenAI had started to ruffle feathers. Differences continued to escalate over Amodei’s long-held views on safety, Hagey wrote, especially regarding slowing the pace of updates to prevent malicious uses of the AI models.

Amodei told friends that he “felt psychologically abused by Altman,” Hagey wrote. Altman, in turn, was telling colleagues that the tension “was making him hate his job.”

On December 29, 2020, OpenAI made it official. Amodei was leaving, and a “handful” of other colleagues were leaving.

Amodei has since suggested that his vision became incompatible with OpenAI’s direction.

“It is incredibly unproductive to try and argue with someone else’s vision,” Amodei told podcaster Lex Friedman in 2024, when asked why he left OpenAI.

Early 2021: Anthropic is created

With seven other former OpenAI employees, Amodei founded Anthropic in early 2021. The group was extremely close and included Daniela Amodei, Dario’s sister. Daniela Amodei later said the name was chosen to emphasize their company’s focus on humans.

Only one of Anthropic’s initial employees hadn’t worked at OpenAI, according to AI Business.

Despite starting from scratch, Amodei said that by the Summer of 2022, the company’s chatbot, Claude, had finished training. Amodei said he was worried about what the release of a powerful AI could mean. Anthropic held off on a release.

“I suspect it was the right thing to do,” Amodei told Time Magazine in 2024. “But it’s not totally clear-cut.”

Months later, OpenAI released ChatGPT, kicking off the AI race and making Amodei’s former employer a household name.

May 2024: Amodei takes a shot … or did he?

As Anthropic began to establish itself in its own right, Amodei began to use his public appearances to take what were widely viewed as implicit shots at OpenAI.

During an appearance at a Bloomberg event, Amodei noted how Anthropic had kept its leadership intact.

“We have 7 cofounders,” he said, Gizmodo reported. “Three and a half years later, we’re all still at the company.”

While never calling out by name, OpenAI was experiencing upheaval at the time. Months earlier, Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder, had left the company. And in November 2023, Altman was briefly pushed out of OpenAI, an effort fellow cofounder Ilya Sutskever assisted. (Sutskever later expressed regret over his role. He formally left OpenAI just days after Amodei’s jab, though there had been months of speculation surrounding Sutskever’s standing.)

December 2025: ‘We don’t have to do any code reds’

By the end of 2025, OpenAI’s lead in the AI race was slipping. When presented with the opportunity, Amodei seized the moment to troll his rival.

Journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Amodei about OpenAI’s decision to declare a “code red” to marshal resources for ChatGPT amid Google’s rising strength.

We have a little bit of a privileged position where we can just keep growing and just keep developing our models, and we don’t have to do any code reds,” Amodei told Sorkin during an appearance at The New York Times’ DealBook summit.

Earlier in their conversation, Amodei appeared to take another swipe at Altman when he talked about some players “who are YOLOing” by making too risky bets on future demand based on their current revenue.

“Who is YOLOing?” Sorkin asked.

“I’m not going to answer that,” Amodei replied.

February 2026: A snarky Super Bowl ad gets a response

Anthropic used the biggest stage available to take its most direct shot yet at OpenAI.

Ahead of the Super Bowl, Anthropic revealed it was spending millions on an advertising campaign to denounce AI chatbot ads. While OpenAI was not named directly, it was clear who the intended target was, given that just months earlier, OpenAI had said it would begin testing ads on ChatGPT.

The ads featured real human actors mimicking the voice of product-pushing AI chatbots when asked questions like how to get a six-pack quickly or how to better connect with your mom.

“First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed,” Altman wrote in a lengthy post on X.” But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest.”

Altman wasn’t done.

“Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people,” he continued. “We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.”

Days later, the companies went head-to-head again. This time, with the release of major updates to their coding-focused model within minutes of each other.

February 2026: I (don’t) want to hold your hand

A who’s who of AI and tech elite gathered in India for a major summit on artificial intelligence.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the opportunity to orchestrate a classic image of unity: competing CEOs with their hands raised together. (It’s something Modi has done before with other world leaders, and politicians have been doing forever.)

Modi almost got his moment. While Altman held the prime minister’s hand, the OpenAI CEO didn’t grasp Amodei’s hand, who was positioned to his other side. Amodei grasped the hand of the other person next to him, but not Altman’s.

The internet, predictably, had a field day. And the world got a perfect encapsulation of one of AI’s bitter rivalries.

February 2026: Opposite sides of the Pentagon

Anthropic refused to back down in a standoff with the Pentagon. Hours later, OpenAI struck a deal with the Defense Department, an agreement Altman later said was “definitely rushed.”

“If we are right and this does lead to a de-escalation between the DoW and the industry, we will look like geniuses, and a company that took on a lot of pain to do things to help the industry,” Altman wrote on X on February 28 during an AMA on the platform centered around the deal. “If not, we will continue to be characterized as rushed and uncareful.”

Amodei said he and Anthropic remained firm in their “red lines” that any usage agreement must contain safeguards against “the mass domestic surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons.” The Pentagon argued that current laws prevent misuse, but the two sides ultimately couldn’t agree.

Users pressed Altman on how the Trump administration treated Anthropic after talks fell apart. Namely, they asked about Hegseth’s statement that he would formally designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, potentially banning any business with Pentagon contracts from working with Anthropic.

Altman said the designation was wrong, but added that Anthropic also bore some responsibility, too.

“I think it is an extremely scary precedent and I wish they handled it a different way,” he wrote on X. “I don’t think Anthropic handled it well either, but as the more powerful party, I hold the government more responsible.”

Yes; I think it is an extremely scary precedent and I wish they handled it a different way. I don’t think Anthropic handled it well either, but as the more powerful party, I hold the government more responsible.

I am still hopeful for a much better resolution.

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 1, 2026

The entire episode provided the most direct example yet of how far-reaching the rivalry has become.

• Pittsburgh has historically been known as “the Steel City,” but is trying to rebrand as a tech hub.
• Pittsburgh’s new mayor is personally cold-calling upwards of 20 founders and CEOs every week.
• The city is home to well-known startups, including Gecko Robotics, Abridge, and Skild AI.

Pittsburgh’s new mayor is personally cold-calling upwards of 20 founders and CEOs across the country every week to check in on them, or to convince them to move to his city.

“Some people think it’s a prank call, but for others, it’s like, ‘wow, the mayor of Pittsburgh just called,'” said Corey O’Connor, who estimates he has called around 150 people since taking office in January. “If you’re already here, I ask, ‘How can we help you expand?’ If you’re not here, I ask ‘How do we get you to come to Pittsburgh?”

Pittsburgh has historically been known as “the Steel City” and is home to the Pittsburgh Steelers. O’Connor’s father worked as a steelworker before a long career in city politics. However, as O’Connor is quick to point out, there are no longer any steel mills within city limits, while the area is home to some of the most important startups in the U.S.

After predictions of its waning influence during the Covid era turned out to be wildly off, the Bay Area’s tech scene is now hotter than ever, largely thanks to AI. That has not stopped smaller cities like Miami and Austin from trying to grab VC dollars, especially as the cost of living in California skyrockets. Now, Pittsburgh would like to be the next Miami.

Its startups raised $1.48 billion in 2025, still a fraction of major tech hubs, but the region’s strongest venture capital year since 2019, according to PitchBook.

Standouts include Gecko Robotics, valued at $1.7 billion, which builds wall-climbing robots that inspect critical infrastructure, including power plants and industrial facilities. Abridge, valued at $5.3 billion, uses artificial intelligence to automatically generate medical documentation from doctor-patient conversations. It has emerged as one of the most closely watched AI companies in healthcare.

The most high-profile is Skild AI, which is developing foundation models for robotics, training AI systems that allow machines to operate more autonomously in real-world environments. The company raised $1.4 billion in a deal led by SoftBank Group and Nvidia in January, pushing its valuation to $15 billion, according to PitchBook.

“Our goal is to change the narrative,” O’Connor said, adding he will use every opportunity he can get to tout the city’s tech potential, especially as the spotlight will be on Pittsburgh as it prepares to host the NFL Draft in April.

Deep-seated roots in AI and robotics

The city’s AI and robotics credentials stretch back decades. In the 1960s, Carnegie Mellon professors began groundbreaking research in AI. In 1979, the first robotics institute at a U.S. university was started at CMU.

The challenge is keeping the most talented graduates from bolting to Silicon Valley.

“I’m constantly going to meet kids on campus,” O’Connor said.

Affordability is a key selling point. The median price for a single-family home in Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County is 42.3 percent below the national average.

O’Connor is also trying to streamline the city’s permitting process to make it easier for tech companies to expand.

“We can get you a permit in four to five weeks, so you don’t have to wait through the government bureaucracy,” he said.

In January, Factify, a Tel Aviv-based digital document startup, said it plans to expand its presence in Pittsburgh and use the city as a major hub for customer engagement and operations.

Asked if he has successfully convinced any companies to move to Pittsburgh, O’Connor said not yet, but he is focused on the long game.

“They’re going to at least tell 10 friends that the mayor of Pittsburgh called,” he said. “That creates a buzz about the city.”

• The Dallas Fed analyzed employment and wage trends in AI-exposed industries.
• Wages in those sectors are still rising — especially in roles that reward experience.
• Entry-level workers appear to be facing a tougher hiring market.

Artificial intelligence hasn’t yet triggered the broad job losses many feared — at least not for experienced workers.

That’s the takeaway from a new analysis by J. Scott Davis, an assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, who examined employment and wage trends in industries most exposed to artificial intelligence.

Davis argues the data tell a more nuanced story — one that’s challenging the traditional career ladder, and helping older employees earn a bit more.

Since ChatGPT’s debut in late 2022, overall US employment has risen about 2.5%, according to Davis’ analysis, which uses an AI exposure index developed by researchers and published in the Strategic Management Journal. At the same time, employment in the sectors most exposed to AI has slipped by roughly 1%.

Wages tell a different story. The average weekly pay nationwide has climbed 7.5% since fall 2022. And across the most AI-exposed industries, wages have grown faster, up 8.5%.

If AI were simply replacing workers, both employment and wages would likely be falling, Davis wrote.

Instead, Davis points to a divide between “codified” knowledge — the kind learned from textbooks and in university courses — and “tacit” knowledge gained from hands-on work experience.

“Returns on job experience are increasing in AI-exposed occupations,” Davis wrote. “Young workers with primarily codifiable knowledge and limited experience will likely face challenging job markets.”

Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, his analysis found that the occupations most exposed to AI tend to offer larger pay premiums for experienced workers.

In roles with less hands-on experience, AI exposure is associated with weaker wage growth, he wrote.

Workers under 25 in AI-exposed industries have also experienced employment declines, according to Davis’ analysis.

“There appears to be less cause for concern about widespread job displacement for older, experienced workers,” he wrote.

A less dire picture… so far

The findings offer a counterpoint to the more apocalyptic predictions about AI’s impact on the labor market.

Last week, Citrini Research published a memo, written from the hypothetical perspective in 2028, that theorized how AI could crush the US jobs market and trigger a broad-based market collapse.

“What if our AI bullishness continues to be right…and what if that’s actually bearish?” the memo asked.

Top executives inside the AI companies are worried about jobs, too.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the company that runs Claude, warned that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs. OpenAI’s head of product, Olivier Godement, said the life sciences, customer service, and computer engineering industries were all about to get automated. And Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, said that he doesn’t believe the job title “software engineer” will exist next year.

For now, at least, the Dallas Fed paints a different picture of today’s jobs market. It points to less mass displacement and market ruptures — and more power for employees who already have their foot in the door.

• US-Israel strikes on Iran threaten the Strait of Hormuz and global oil flows.
• A prolonged closure could fill storage tanks and force Gulf producers to stop pumping oil.
• Surging crude may lift US shale while stoking inflation and economic pressure at home.

Oil traders are bracing for disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz after the US and Israel struck Iranian targets over the weekend, putting at risk the waterway that carries about one-fifth of the world’s oil.

A longer disruption would shift the risk onshore, because storage tanks across the Gulf can only be filled for only so long.

If the conflict drags on and export routes remain blocked, producers could be forced to halt production as storage fills up, Daan Struyven, the head of oil research at Goldman Sachs, said on Goldman Sachs’ “Exchanges” podcast published Monday. This could send prices sharply higher.

“If the Strait of Hormuz is closed for a very long time, you cannot draw inventories forever, and the market may have to rebalance by incentivizing prices to such high levels that you generate demand destruction,” Struyven added.

Oil prices are already sharply higher this year on the back of heightened geopolitical risks.

International benchmark Brent and US West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures are 3% and 2.4% higher at around $80 and $73 per barrel, respectively, in early trade on Tuesday. Both grades are up about 30% this year.

The Middle East accounts for about one-third of the world’s seaborne crude.

“Gulf producers do have storage capacity, pipelines, and tanker alternatives, but these are not unlimited,” wrote Chris Weston, the head of research at Pepperstone, in a Tuesday note.

“With the Strait of Hormuz temporarily constrained, the longer the disruption persists, the greater the risk that additional facilities and infrastructure across the Gulf region may be forced offline,” Weston added.

JPMorgan analysts have also warned that if the strait is effectively closed for more than 25 days, storage constraints could push major Middle East producers to suspend output altogether.

‘A supply shock of historic proportions.’

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Monday that the Strait of Hormuz is closed and they will attack any ship trying to cross the waterway.

Major lines are rerouting or suspending services and adding war-risk fees, while some marine insurers have canceled war-risk cover for vessels operating in and around Iranian waters.

Apart from oil, Qatar’s state-owned energy company has halted liquefied natural gas production after reported damage to facilities, underscoring how quickly disruptions can spill beyond crude into wider energy markets.

The macro consequences could be severe, wrote analysts at ING on Monday, as even a partial disruption to the Hormuz would produce “a supply shock of historic proportions.”

However, because the US is a major oil producer, higher oil prices benefit shale producers and improve the domestic energy industry.

Still, inflation could tick up for American consumers, so “that balance is politically awkward to explain and economically insufficient to compensate for the broader damage,” wrote ING analysts.

• Amazon’s Middle East data centers were hit by drone strikes amid US-Iran tensions.
• Some sites faced fire, flooding, and major structural damage.
• Amazon said the situation “remains unpredictable.”

Amazon said three of its data centers in the Middle East were damaged by drone strikes due to the US-Iran conflict in the region.

Two facilities in the United Arab Emirates sustained direct hits, while a third facility in Bahrain was damaged by a drone strike “in close proximity,” the company said in an update on its AWS cloud service dashboard on Monday afternoon.

“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage. We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts,” the company added in the update.

The infrastructure issues disrupted several AWS services, including the EC2 compute, S3 cloud storage, and the DynamoDB database offering, according to Amazon’s update.

“The ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable,” Amazon said.

“We expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved,” the company added. “We recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East consider taking action now to backup data and potentially migrate your workloads to alternate AWS Regions.”

In its latest update on Monday evening, Amazon said it has made “incremental progress” in recovering the DynamoDB and S3 control planes, which are its foundational services.

“We still estimate that the recovery time is at least a day before we are able to fully restore power and connectivity,” Amazon added.

The disruptions are happening as Iran responds to US military activity in the country by firing missiles at other countries in the region. Earlier on Monday, Business Insider reported that Amazon’s e-commerce business halted deliveries in Abu Dhabi due to the escalating tensions.

Cloud impact

An internal document reviewed by Business Insider offers more detail on the cloud fallout, revealing that Amazon evacuated staff and shut down access to at least one of the data centers after they experienced structural damage and flooding stemming from the attacks in recent days.

One of the sites suffered a “direct impact” and suffered “major structural damage,” the document stated.

Flooding compounded the disruption. Water levels inside the facility initially reached 3 to 4 centimeters, or over an inch, before receding to less than 1 centimeter, the document showed.

The damage knocked 14 EC2 cloud server racks offline, along with five other “production” racks. Racks are the structures inside data centers that hold computer servers and other cloud-computing gear. EC2 refers to AWS’s core cloud-computing service.

Cooling systems at the facility were also impaired. Air handling systems used to regulate temperature went offline due to power outages, and some suffered mechanical failures. Thirty cameras were monitoring the conditions, the document explained.

The data center is known as DXB62, likely referring to an AWS facility in Dubai, which has a major airport known as DXB.

A second AWS data center, called DXB61, shut down on Sunday after “indirect impact,” the document also stated. A small fire was extinguished, and no entry was allowed to the site without government approval. A third site, DXB60, experienced a WiFi outage, but the impact appeared localized, the document added.

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• Amazon halts e-commerce operations in Abu Dhabi amid Middle East instability.
• Amazon employees in Saudi Arabia and Jordan are advised to stay indoors due to regional tension.
• Third-party sellers face disruptions as Amazon’s Abu Dhabi closure affects logistics channels.

Amazon closed its fulfillment center operations in Abu Dhabi and suspended deliveries across the region, as the company responds to escalating instability that is rippling across its Middle East network.

The e-commerce giant shared the updates in an internal memo this week, which was seen by Business Insider. As a result, customers in the region are experiencing delivery and return delays, the memo said.

Amazon employees in Saudi Arabia and Jordan have been instructed to remain indoors, the memo added. Many Amazon employees across the region are transitioning to work from home this week, while all business travel to Israel and Lebanon has been blocked.

No employee safety issues have been reported so far, the memo said.

Amazon’s spokesperson wasn’t immediately available for comment.

The disruption highlights how quickly geopolitical tensions can strain global supply chains. Amazon has spent years expanding its logistics footprint in the Middle East, after acquiring Souq.com for roughly $600 million in 2017. The UAE anchors that network, which also includes Amazon marketplaces in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey.

The shutdown in Abu Dhabi is expected to reduce network capacity across Amazon’s Middle Eastern businesses, according to the memo. The company has placed additional operational support on standby as it manages disruptions and monitors the situation.

The impact extends well beyond Amazon’s own warehouses. Nearly 300,000 third-party sellers in the region are facing shipment delays and potential order cancellations as logistics channels tighten, according to the memo. Many of these sellers rely on Amazon’s fulfillment and cross-border shipping infrastructure to move goods between Gulf countries.

Amazon did not specify how long deliveries in Abu Dhabi would remain suspended.

The US-Iran conflict in the region has also caused a power outage at one of Amazon’s data centers, the company announced on Sunday. Amazon said it could take at least a day to repair the damage.

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• In December, Paramount’s Larry and David Ellison said they had partners to help them buy WBD: Three Gulf states.
• At the time, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar were going to chip in a collective $24 billion into the deal.
• Are those countries part of the new deal Paramount struck with WBD last week? We don’t know yet.

A few months ago, Larry and David Ellison’s Paramount said it had lined up big backers for its bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery: three Middle Eastern countries, which would contribute a total of $24 billion to help buy the media conglomerate.

Now, Paramount has won the rights to WBD, after Netflix walked away. Are those three Gulf states going to help finance Paramount’s new deal?

Paramount won’t say.

In government filings and on an investor call Monday, Paramount reiterated that the Ellisons and private-equity firm RedBird Capital Partners have pledged $47 billion toward the roughly $81 billion Paramount will pay to buy out WBD shareholders. The rest will be financed with debt.

But Paramount doesn’t say how much the Ellisons and RedBird intend to cough up themselves, and how much will come from other investors. A company rep pointed to the merger agreement, which lets them sell pieces of that $47 billion equity commitment — but doesn’t identify who those investors might be.

What we do know: In early December, Paramount had told WBD it intended to raise $24 billion via state-controlled funds from three countries: Saudi Arabia, which would contribute $12 billion, and Abu Dhabi and Qatar, which would kick in $7 billion each. And Paramount later said those countries would not ask for board seats or voting rights alongside their equity stakes.

So it’s entirely possible that those three countries’ funds will be in this deal, too. I’ve asked fund reps for comment; I’ve also asked Warner Bros. Discovery, which had previously flagged potential regulatory issues involving foreign investors in Paramount’s deal.

The notion of other countries owning a piece of a powerful American-run media giant, which has multiple news operations, streamers, and movie studios, seems like the kind of thing you might hear politicians, regulators, and even normal Americans talking about. Particularly given the participation of Saudi Arabia, whose government killed a Washington Post journalist in 2018, per US intelligence.

It may also explain why Paramount has never emphasized the idea of foreign investment in any of its press releases or public presentations about the deal. Or why Paramount once shot down a story saying it was rounding up Gulf investment.

But outside of a few complaints from the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the notion that Middle Eastern nations might own a meaningful stake in an important US company doesn’t seem to have registered as an issue, for now.

One reason is that Gulf state money is increasingly everywhere, including in big US companies. The Saudis, for instance, are set to be the primary owner of video game giant Electronic Arts once that deal closes this year. Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund now owns 15% of U.S. TikTok‘s operations.

And Donald Trump has made doing business in the Middle East a big part of his second-term focus: Last year, he brought a who’s who of American CEOs to a business summit in Saudi Arabia and later hosted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House.

So it’s very possible Gulf state money will end up in a giant American media company, too. It would be nice to know for sure.

• Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna unveiled a billionaire wealth tax proposal on Monday.
• Under the plan, America’s roughly 1,000 billionaires would see a 5% tax on their wealth.
• Some of that money would pay for $3,000 checks for people in households making less than $150,000.

Bernie Sanders has a plan to tax the wealthiest people in America — and use it to send checks to Americans.

The Vermont senator, along with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, unveiled a bill on Monday that would enact a 5% annual wealth tax on America’s billionaires, which Sanders’s office estimates to be 938 people.

The legislation would raise $4.4 trillion over 10 years, according to an economic analysis by two economics professors at the University of California at Berkeley.

So what do Sanders and Khanna want to do with all of that money?

The flashiest proposal is a one-time, $3,000 direct payment to each American in households making $150,000 annually or less — meaning $12,000 for a family of four.

Beyond that, the duo also says they would use the revenue to:

• Fund recently expired ACA tax credits and reverse cuts to Medicaid made by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act;

• Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing for seniors;
• Build, rehabilitate, and preserve over seven million affordable homes;
• Ensure families don’t spend more than 7% of their income on childcare;
• Establish a $60,000 minimum annual salary for public school teachers;
• Expand Medicaid home health care for seniors and people with disabilities;

In a press release, Sanders’s office specifically said that Elon Musk — the world’s richest man — would owe $42 billion in taxes in the first year.

The proposal is unlikely to become law, particularly given GOP control of Congress.

But it’s a proposal that could influence the course of Democratic politics over the next several years, particularly as the party looks to the 2028 presidential election.

While Sanders has indicated he won’t run for president again, Khanna may.

The wealth tax proposal also comes amid a debate over a proposed billionaire wealth tax in Khanna’s home state of California, which led to several billionaires relocating to other states.

• Paramount made two big hires as it builds its ad business under CEO David Ellison.
• Paramount, fresh from winning Warner Bros. Discovery, is bringing on Amazon vet Danielle Carney.
• Read the memo from Paramount’s revenue chief on the hires.

Paramount Skydance has poached a top ad exec from Amazon to lead its US ad sales efforts.

Danielle Carney spent more than four years at Amazon, most recently as head of video and live sports sales, helping the ecommerce giant expand its live sports business with its 2021 exclusive NFL deal. Before Amazon, she spent more than a decade at Disney, most of it in ad sales for ESPN.

Jay Askinasi, Paramount’s chief revenue officer, cited Carney’s experience in entertainment, sports, and technology in her hire.

“As we accelerate toward a streaming-centric future, Danielle’s deep expertise across entertainment, sports and technology is invaluable,” Askinasi wrote in a memo that was obtained by Business Insider. “She will play a critical role in connecting our most valuable assets with brand marketers and agency partners, helping deliver a seamless, client-first experience across the Paramount ecosystem.

Askinasi also named Tribeca Enterprises’ Chris Brady as EVP of Paramount Media Labs, a new role he said was aimed at developing brand integrations and other partnerships.

It’s the latest shake-up to Paramount’s ads leadership under Askinasi, who was appointed in October. Chris Simon, a Paramount EVP of agency partnerships, stepped down in February, while fellow Paramount vet John Halley stepped down in late 2025 as advertising president.

Paramount is fresh off winning the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery after a drawn-out fight with Netflix.

Here’s the full memo from Paramount’s revenue chief:

All,

As we prepare for the upcoming Upfront season, we continue evolving both our team structure and our go-to-market strategy. Streaming sits at the center of that evolution, and we are elevating the client experience through a unified offering that brings the very best of One Paramount to life for our advertising partners and consumers.

This is a pivotal moment for our business — and an opportunity to build something truly differentiated together.

At this defining inflection point, I’m excited to announce the next important step in that journey as we welcome two outstanding leaders to our team.

Danielle Carney will join Paramount Advertising as Head of U.S. Sales, beginning March 9. Danielle comes to us from Amazon, where she served as Head of Video and Live Sports Sales, and previously spent more than 15 years in ad sales leadership roles at The Walt Disney Company. As we accelerate toward a streaming-centric future, Danielle’s deep expertise across entertainment, sports and technology is invaluable. She will play a critical role in connecting our most valuable assets with brand marketers and agency partners, helping deliver a seamless, client-first experience across the Paramount ecosystem.

Karen Phillips, Ryan Briganti and Karim Mawji will continue leading their respective portfolios and best-in-class teams, reporting to Danielle moving forward.

I’m also pleased to welcome Chris Brady, who will join Paramount Advertising as Executive Vice President, Paramount Media Labs, also beginning March 9. Chris comes to us from Tribeca Enterprises, where he served as President and Global Chief Commercial Officer, overseeing revenue, sponsorship, distribution and growth strategies. Prior to Tribeca, he held several leadership roles at WarnerMedia, most recently leading Brand Partnerships and Innovation.

In this newly created role, Chris will provide commercial leadership for Paramount Media Labs, our reimagined and expanded brand storytelling team, designed to unlock opportunities to connect brands with audiences through native, culturally relevant experiences. He will work in close partnership with Paramount Media Labs CMO Dario Spina to spearhead IP-centric innovation across brand integrations, creative partnerships and content-driven commercial strategies.

Both Danielle and Chris will report directly to me.

Their additions mark an exciting moment for Paramount Advertising as we continue building momentum across the organization. Over the past several months, we’ve taken meaningful steps to simplify our structure, strengthen collaboration and sharpen our go-to-market approach, including:

• Unifying our HoldCo partnerships, programmatic and advanced advertising sales teams into a single organization under Karen Phillips’ leadership to better serve our agency partners;
• Investing further in programmatic sales capabilities and enablement, recognizing the growing importance of data-driven and automated buying across the marketplace;
• Launching the Global Ad Marketing & Intelligence group, a centralized strategic go-to-market function led by Lydia Daly;
• Aligning our Creative+ sales team within Karim Mawji’s Global Client Partnership organization to reinforce a more client-centric model;
• Driving strong sales and engagement through the successful launch of UFC on Paramount+, alongside a record-setting NFL season, further establishing sports as a cornerstone of our sales strategy.

Each of these steps reflects a shared commitment to working differently — breaking down silos, moving faster together, and delivering a more connected experience for our clients and partners.

As we bring together the power of Hollywood storytelling with the speed, innovation and mindset of Silicon Valley, our focus now turns to translating that ambition into consistent execution. The opportunity ahead is significant, and what will define our success is how we show up for one another — as one team — in market.

Thank you for the focus, urgency and collaboration you bring every day. The momentum we’re seeing across Paramount Advertising is real, and it’s being built by all of you. Together, we are creating something special as we head into the Upfront and beyond.

Please join me in welcoming Danielle and Chris to the team.

Jay

• Anthropic is promoting how easy it is to switch from other AI companies.
• The move comes amid exploding interest in Claude after Anthropic’s standoff with the Pentagon.
• Claude is now No. 1 on the Apple App Store, blazing past competitors ChatGPT and Gemini.

Anthropic wants you to use Claude, even as President Donald Trump moves to kick the company out of Washington.

Now, Claud says it’s easier to move their history from a rival competitor into Claude. While Anthropic initially offered users the ability to import their data in October, the updated interface is “significantly improved,” a spokesperson for Anthropic told Business Insider.

All they have to do now is copy and paste a pre-written prompt into another chatbot.

“Switch to Claude without starting over,” the new dedicated landing page reads, adding that the process can be done in under a minute.

“You’ve spent months teaching another AI how you work,” the page reads. “That context shouldn’t disappear because you want to try something new. Claude can import what matters, so your first conversation feels like your hundredth.”

The overhaul shows how Anthropic is making aggressive efforts to promote itself amid an explosion of outside interest, after its CEO, Dario Amodei, refused to back down amid a standoff with the Pentagon.

Claude is now the most downloaded free app in Apple’s App Store, above OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

On Friday, Amodei said that the AI startup could not reach an agreement with the Pentagon based on two exceptions that Anthropic insisted on, which he said would limit the use of its AI models for deployment in fully autonomous weapons and for mass surveillance of American citizens.

Hours later, OpenAI struck a deal with the Pentagon to deploy its AI models, which sparked a backlash among some users.

In response, Trump blasted Anthropic, calling it “woke,” and pushed to prevent its use across all federal agencies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who moved to formally designate Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, said the Defense Department would not back down.

“America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech,” Hegseth wrote on X on Friday. “This decision is final.”

Anthropic has called the supply-chain risk designation “unprecedented,” particularly since Hegseth has suggested that it would mean anyone doing business with the Pentagon could not work with Anthropic. The AI startup has said Hegseth doesn’t have the power to impose such a wide ban.

“No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons,” the company said in a statement. “We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.”

• Greg Abel paid tribute to Warren Buffett by touting four of the investor’s best stock picks.
• Berkshire’s new CEO highlighted Apple, American Express, Coca-Cola, and Moody’s in his first shareholder letter.
• Those stakes are worth anywhere from 10 to 50 times more than what Buffett paid for them.

Warren Buffett‘s successor is making sure the legendary investor gets the credit he deserves.

Greg Abel, who took over as Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO at the start of this year, highlighted four of Buffett’s most successful stock picks in his first shareholder letter on Saturday.

Abel included a table that lists Apple, American Express, Coca-Cola, and Moody’s, along with Berkshire’s ownership percentage of each company.

For each position, it shows how much it cost Berkshire, what it’s worth now, and what it paid to Berkshire in dividends last year:

The first entry is Berkshire’s Apple stake, which Buffett built between 2016 and 2018 and grew into his company’s most valuable stock holding by far.

While Berkshire has offloaded most of the position in the past couple of years, it still owned 1.6% of the iPhone maker at the end of 2025.

Berkshire paid about $6.3 billion for those remaining shares a little over a decade ago; they were worth $62 billion at December’s close, making the stock a ten-bagger for Buffett.

“Tim Cook has made Berkshire a lot more than I have made Berkshire,” Buffett quipped about Apple’s CEO during last year’s shareholder meeting.

American Express and Coca-Cola are the second and third entries in the table. Buffett finished building those stakes in the mid-1990s and hasn’t touched them since.

Berkshire’s 22.1% piece of the credit-card giant cost it $1.3 billion. The position was worth just over $56 billion at the end of December, meaning Buffett made nearly 45 times his money on paper.

The 9.3% stake in the soda titan also cost $1.3 billion, and was worth $28 billion at December’s close — a roughly 21-fold increase.

Buffett touted both wagers in his 2022 letter, holding them up as examples of how long-term, concentrated investing can generate huge returns.

“Over time, it takes just a few winners to work wonders,” he wrote. “And, yes, it helps to start early and live into your 90s as well.”

The fourth and final entry is Moody’s, which Buffett invested in back in 2001. Berkshire’s nearly 14% stake in the credit ratings agency cost it $248 million and was worth nearly $13 billion at the end of 2025, representing a 51-fold gain.

Together, the four holdings were worth 17 times what they cost Berkshire at December’s close. They yielded a combined $1.7 billion of dividends last year, or about 18% of what Buffett paid in total for them. That means Berkshire would only have to collect that dollar figure in dividends for six years to make back the full cost of the positions and more.

“This is both a tribute to, and a documentation of, Warren Buffett’s stock picking ability over time through year-end 2025,” David Kass, a longtime Berkshire blogger and finance professor at the University of Maryland, told Business Insider about the table.

For many years, Buffett published a similar ranking of Berkshire’s 15 largest stock holdings, but it hasn’t featured in the past three annual reports.

Along with reviving the list, Abel included a comparison of Berkshire’s stock performance vs the S&P 500. It showed that Buffett oversaw a 6,100,000% return over six decades, compared to the index’s roughly 46,000% return, including dividends, over the same timeframe. Berkshire’s compounded annual gain was 19.7%, or nearly double the benchmark’s 10.5%.

By highlighting Buffett’s track record as an investor and four of his most lucrative stock picks, Abel has shown why he believes his old boss is a “very hard act to follow.”

• Paramount Skydance just reshaped the leadership structure of a key streaming team.
• A Paramount streaming VP unveiled the arrangement hours before the company won the WBD bidding war.
• This decision is part of the Paramount+ and Pluto TV unification, ahead of a planned joining with HBO Max.

Paramount Skydance’s plan to beat Netflix isn’t just about buying Warner Bros. Discovery.

CEO David Ellison is making moves behind the scenes to help the 114-year-old Paramount operate more like a tech company.

Paramount is changing the internal structure of key engineering groups for its streaming services, with the goal of improving user experience and facilitating “AI enablement and automated testing,” according to an internal memo viewed by Business Insider.

Victor Marinelli, the VP of engineering at Paramount+, told software engineers and product design staffers on Thursday afternoon that the company is combining the Paramount+ Global Quality Engineering team and the Software Test Engineering unit for Pluto TV, its free streamer.

This organizational shuffle comes as the company prepares to put Paramount+ and Pluto TV on a unified tech platform for the first time — a process known internally as “convergence.” The convergence operation is one of Paramount’s top streaming priorities in the first quarter, Business Insider previously reported. Paramount also told investors on Monday morning that it’s planning to combine its namesake streamer and HBO Max if its WBD acquisition goes through.

“We are evolving our operating model to strengthen accountability, deepen technical specialization, and ensure we are positioned for long term success,” Marinelli said in his memo to streaming staffers.

Paramount’s unified Global Quality Engineering team will have “five core pillars,” each led by a current director or senior director:

• Client Experience, Playback and Front End Quality
• Backend Services and Platform Quality
• Readiness & Release (R&R) and Production Quality
• Data Quality, Analytics
• QE Innovation

Bringing together technical teams for Paramount+ and Pluto TV will help the streamers “support increasingly complex launches,” such as tech stack convergence, live events like UFC matches, and “emerging product initiatives,” Marinelli wrote.

While Marinelli didn’t go into detail about new product features, Paramount+ is planning to add short-form video and is also brainstorming ways to bring shoppable features and user-generated content to its flagship streaming service, Business Insider previously reported.

A software engineer briefed on the changes to the GQE team said that the move is about making the team more efficient while better using AI.

Six Paramount employees told Business Insider that the company’s tech is still behind that of streaming leaders like Netflix.

Jason Kim, Paramount’s EVP of data and insights, told staffers in late January that streaming tech was at “the very top of Dave’s priority list of things that he has to solve,” in reference to Ellison.

“For us to make this all work, we need to transform Paramount+ in a way that’s going to really be able to compete,” Kim said in a meeting, a recording of which was obtained by Business Insider.

A Paramount spokesperson declined to comment.

Read the memo outlining the changes below, with team leaders’ current titles added by Business Insider in square brackets:

Hi everyone,

I’m excited to share an important update about the future structure of Global Quality Engineering (GQE). As we continue to scale to meet the ongoing needs of the business and support increasingly complex launches including convergence, UFC, live events, new platform expansions, and emerging product initiatives, we are evolving our operating model to strengthen accountability, deepen technical specialization, and ensure we are positioned for long term success.

Over the past year, the scope of GQE has grown significantly across client, backend, platform, data, and emerging technologies. To support that growth and to create a clearer, more scalable foundation, we are introducing a new leadership structure built around five core pillars of quality engineering.

These pillars represent the capabilities that will carry our organization forward, and each will be led by a dedicated senior leader. Furthermore, they are not intended to create silos, but to strengthen clarity of ownership while enabling even deeper cross team collaboration across the entire GQE organization.

Organizational Pillars of GQE

1. Client Experience, Playback and Front End Quality

Leader: Susmita Mamidenna [senior director of software test engineering]

Responsible for all client platforms, playback and VPT, live events quality, A/B testing, accessibility, content launches, and client automated testing development and performance.

2. Backend Services and Platform Quality

Leader: Sachin Jaiswal [senior director of quality assurance engineering]

Covering CMS and MAM, APIs, transcoding, Ad Tech, Enterprise Platform and backend performance/service reliability.

3. Readiness & Release (R&R) and Production Quality

Leader: Karami Lenhardt [senior director of software quality assurance engineering]

Centralized owners of downstream regression (Apple & Android) and production monitoring, ensuring consistent readiness for convergence, UFC, and other major releases. We continue to invest in the R&R process and plan on expanding it to Pluto post-MVP, as well as onboarding additional platforms starting with Roku.

4. Data Quality, Analytics

Leader: Michael Jones [director of release & tools enablement engineering]

Owning ETL pipeline testing, analytics validation, data quality, DTE tooling and automated testing, and collaboration with MOPS and data partners.

5. QE Innovation

Leader: Max McCreery [director of software quality engineering]

Driving our automated testing framework strategy (TAF), AI tooling and governance, automated test development and maintenance, QE tooling integrations, test environments and cross GQE innovation initiatives.

Why This Change and Why Now

As our products scale and new business lines accelerate, the expectations placed on GQE continue to grow. This structure positions us to:

• Build specialized centers of excellence in the most critical areas of the platform
• Scale consistently across regions and product lines
• Strengthen test strategies, technical ownership and accountability
• Improve cross team alignment and responsiveness
• Support AI enablement and automated testing at every layer including client, backend, platform, and data
• Ensure quality remains a foundational, strategic advantage as the business evolves

This structure positions GQE to meet the moment and to lead confidently as the platform continues to grow.

Transition Period and Delivery Commitments

We will be entering a transition period over the coming months as leadership responsibilities and workflows align to the five pillar model.

It is important to note that there will be no disruption in support for convergence, UFC, live events, or other ongoing launches. We will be deliberate, coordinated, and collaborative to ensure continuity of execution and to avoid introducing any delivery risk.

Looking Ahead

This is an exciting moment for GQE. The combination of Pluto STE and P+ GQE under a unified GQE structure reflects not only where we are today but where we need to go as the platform and our business ambitions expand. I am proud of what this organization continues to deliver and confident in the impact this evolution will unlock for the teams, for the product, and for the business.

Thank you all for your continued partnership, resilience, and excellence. If you have questions, please feel free to reach out directly.

Please join me in congratulating our pillar leads!

Thank you,

Victor

• Apple’s latest version of its budget iPhone is here.
• The iPhone 17e maintains the $599 starting price as the previous lower-cost model.
• It also has MagSafe charging and an improved camera system.

The memory shortage is squeezing smartphone margins, but Apple is maintaining its $599 starting price on its budget iPhone.

The tech giant announced the iPhone 17e on Monday, adding new features including MagSafe charging. The new entry-level iPhone, which is available in black, white, and soft pink, comes with the durable Ceramic Shield 2 front cover that its fellow iPhone 17 family has.

On the backside, it sports a 48-megapixel fusion camera capable of portraits 4K videos, which Apple said is like owning two cameras in one.

Story developing…

• Intuit said its AI investments generated almost $90 million in efficiencies in the first half of 2025.
• AI use cases include task automation and matching customers with tax professionals.
• An Intuit executive said the company is also investing in physical stores as part of its 2026 strategy.

Intuit began its AI journey in 2019 when Sasan Goodarzi became CEO. A couple of months into the job, he said his biggest challenge was transforming Intuit from a cloud-based parent company of TurboTax and QuickBooks into an artificial intelligence enterprise.

To bring AI features to both Intuit’s workforce and customers, Intuit relied on the expertise of C-suite leaders like Chief AI Officer Ashok Srivastava and Chief Technology Officer Alex Balazs, who were hired in 2017 and 1999, respectively. In 2009, Intuit also hired Mark Notarainni, the executive vice president and general manager of Intuit’s consumer group, who spoke to Business Insider for this story. All three executives were among a small group of senior leaders who collaborated to set the vision and strategy to leverage AI to make tax filing less stressful, according to an Intuit spokesperson.

At the heart of Intuit’s AI endeavors is a data trove from 100 million business and individual customers and a proprietary generative AI operating system used to build and run AI-based apps. While Intuit doesn’t publicly disclose how much it invests in AI, the company said its investments have generated nearly $90 million in annualized efficiencies in the first half of 2025.

Ahead of this tax season, TurboTax is expanding a concept it tested last year: a return to the physical world. The company is opening nearly 600 offices and 20 TurboTax-branded storefronts in 2026, merging its AI and machine learning capabilities with human expertise.

If you rewind a decade, you can see how the seeds for this move were first planted.

The tech

In January 2016, TurboTax unveiled SmartLook, which allowed users to get virtual assistance from credentialed tax experts. Revenue for that service, which has evolved over the past decade and is now called TurboTax Live, is still growing: In the fiscal first quarter that ended October 31, 2025, it gained 51% more revenue year over year, according to earnings reports.

Many of Intuit’s leaders have long tenures, with Balazs, Goodarzi, Notarainni, and Srivastava collectively spending nearly 67 years at the business software giant. Throughout that time, they’ve spearheaded key product launches, like the company’s Virtual Expert Platform, which debuted in November 2022. It uses AI to understand financial and tax documents and answer customers’ questions. When human advice is needed, the platform matches the user with a tax specialist.

In November 2024, the company launched a generative AI-powered financial assistant called Intuit Assist, which can read tax documents uploaded to QuickBooks and display an automated checklist sidebar that reminds customers of any additional forms they may need. Intuit, which processes $105 billion in tax refunds annually on its platform, said this approach automates 93% of its forms.

Though nearly all Americans file their taxes electronically, increased customer use of TurboTax Live — which grew 17% in 2024 and 47% in 2025 — led Intuit to consider a greater emphasis on human-led tax services. Notarainni said the company is now placing a bigger bet on brick-and-mortar.

During the 2025 spring tax season, TurboTax piloted 200 expert offices in major metropolitan areas across the country, as well as 20 temporary storefronts in Southern California.

“What we learned during 2025 is there was a large percentage of customers that wanted to meet with us in person,” Notarainni said, adding that for some customers, an in-person meeting is necessary to establish trust. He cited in-house research showing that customers searching online for help are five times more likely to book an appointment with a professional expert if they are within a 50-mile radius than those who don’t have access to a local tax professional.

Much like Apple didn’t replicate Best Buy when it opened its own retail stores, TurboTax wasn’t keen to mirror rival H&R Block, which has a massive retail footprint of about 12,000 locations globally. “They reimagined the entire retail experience,” Notarainni said of the iPhone maker. “We wanted to do that for taxes and personal finance.”

In July, following the launch of the 2025 storefront pilot, Srivastava was appointed Intuit’s chief AI officer.

The outcome

TurboTax recently opened a flagship store in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. There are now 20 TurboTax stores, with more to come in major cities like Chicago, Dallas, and Phoenix.

At these locations, all of the tax experts’ digital work is conducted on smartphones or tablets, and you won’t see a computer atop a single desk, Notarainni said. “It’s very warm and inviting,” he told Business Insider. “Let our experts focus on you as a customer, not looking into a screen.”

Tax filers can come into the store with forms started at home or drop them off to a tax expert, and then either remain in the store to complete the filing or leave and track an expert’s progress through a mobile app. An Intuit spokesperson told Business Insider that more of its expert offices and TurboTax stores will open throughout the current tax season, which runs through April 15.

In addition to streamlining massive company processes and shoring up resources for new strategic investments, Intuit’s AI investments have changed workflows for its tax associates like Geanna Foreman.

Prior to using AI, Foreman said she would quickly jot down notes during client calls. During the busy tax season, client calls would be back-to-back nearly every day and cause Foreman’s work to pile up, she said.

Now, she uses AI-enabled note-taking and post-call summarization tools. “I went from having to make a lot of changes to the notes to now just reviewing them, and they look good, with maybe one or two changes,” Foreman said.

• On Monday, QatarEnergy said it ceased production at one of its energy facilities.
• Production was paused “due to military attacks” on some of the company’s operating facilities, QatarEnergy said.
• Natural gas prices jumped on Monday, as did other energy commodities, including crude oil.

Qatar’s state-owned energy company has halted production of liquefied natural gas, LNG, after Iranian drone attacks damaged one of its production plants.

“Due to military attacks on QatarEnergy’s operating facilities in Ras Laffan Industrial City and Mesaieed Industrial City in the State of Qatar, QatarEnergy has ceased production of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and associated products,” QatarEnergy said in a statement on its website.

Natural gas prices surged on Monday, with prices up more than 6%, mirroring similar rises in other energy commodities. Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, was up 8% on the day.

Iran launched missile strikes targeting at least six countries in retaliation for the Saturday morning attack by the US and Israel.

This is a developing story.

• Amazon invests $50 billion in OpenAI, boosting its position in the AI industry.
• The OpenAI partnership enhances AWS’s Bedrock services.
• Amazon’s Trainium chips gain momentum as OpenAI makes large commitment.

Amazon is making its boldest AI move yet.

The company agreed to invest $50 billion in OpenAI as part of the startup’s record $110 billion fundraising round, which values the ChatGPT maker at $840 billion.

The multi-year partnership includes:

• $15 billion will be invested upfront, with another $35 billion to follow in the coming months once “certain conditions” are met.
• Co-creation of new AI system architecture powered by OpenAI models and available on Amazon Bedrock. It enables developers to retain memory and context over time and deploy more advanced AI applications.
• Amazon Web Services will become the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI’s Frontier, a platform for managing AI agents at scale.
• OpenAI expands its existing AWS cloud agreement by $100 billion over 8 years and commits to using 2 gigawatts of AWS Trainium chips, including future generations of the AI chip.
• OpenAI will help build customized AI models for Amazon’s consumer business.

Beyond the eye-popping valuation, the deal cements Amazon Web Services as a core infrastructure partner to OpenAI and positions the cloud giant squarely in the middle of the escalating AI arms race.

Here are the 3 biggest takeaways.

1. AWS closes the AI perception gap and counters Microsoft and Google

For much of the past 3 years, Microsoft has been seen as an early winner in generative AI, thanks to its deep partnership with OpenAI. Google, meanwhile, has leaned on its in-house Gemini models and AI research strength to gain new cloud business and AI users.

Amazon has been perceived as a step behind by some analysts and investors.

Friday’s deal potentially changes that narrative.

“It’s an important strategic move that keeps them in the AI race,” DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria told Business Insider.

Combined with its multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic, Amazon now holds meaningful partnerships with the top two independent AI labs, creating a counterweight to Google and reducing reliance on any single model provider, Luria said.

BNP analysts noted that Microsoft investors will be closely watching the extent to which OpenAI continues to partner with Amazon.

By becoming the exclusive third-party infrastructure provider for OpenAI’s Frontier platform, AWS is now positioned as a core backbone for enterprise AI and autonomous agent development. While Microsoft retains certain API exclusivity for OpenAI models, AWS’s Frontier deal gives it a meaningful foothold in OpenAI’s most advanced offerings.

Gartner analyst Jason Wong called the move a “major coup” for AWS, noting significant customer interest in Frontier.

“OpenAI gives them a lot of market traction with enterprises to build their agentic solutions on AWS,” Wong told Business Insider.

2. A potential threat to Anthropic and a major boost for Bedrock

Amazon’s deepening relationship with OpenAI inevitably raises questions about Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude in which Amazon has already invested heavily. Anthropic remains a key AWS partner, but the new OpenAI partnership introduces competitive tension.

Amazon’s Bedrock, which offers access to other AI models, stands to benefit significantly. Adding OpenAI models to Bedrock through Friday’s deal will give developers more options and could make AWS a more compelling one-stop shop for enterprise AI.

Jefferies analyst Brent Thill framed the move as an expansion of choice. He told Business Insider that developers will be excited to have OpenAI Frontier available to build more advanced applications. For OpenAI, access to the world’s largest cloud provider by market share unlocks massive enterprise distribution, he added.

The move could complicate Amazon’s relationship with Anthropic. Bedrock has been a major distribution channel for Anthropic’s models, but adding OpenAI’s lineup may dilute that advantage and redirect some enterprise AI workloads.

3. A stamp of approval for Trainium, Amazon’s custom silicon bet

Another consequential element of the partnership is hardware.

As part of the deal, OpenAI has committed to deploy 2 gigawatts of Trainium, Amazon’s in-house AI chip. For years, AWS has invested heavily in custom silicon to differentiate from rivals and reduce its dependence on Nvidia.

Financial firm William Blair said the commitment serves as “another big vote of confidence” for Amazon’s custom chip strategy, noting Anthropic is also a heavy Trainium user. More Trainium deployment also drives deeper integration between OpenAI’s software stack and AWS infrastructure, potentially locking in long-term demand for Amazon’s chips and cloud services.

“There is clearly demand for AWS, and our sense is that AWS revenue growth is only going to be limited by how much compute capacity AWS can bring online,” William Blair analysts wrote in a note Friday.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at ekim@businessinsider.com or Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 650-942-3061. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• Major aviation stocks are plunging amid travel chaos triggered by attacks on Iran.
• The parent company of British Airways saw its share price drop more than 5% on Monday morning.
• Disruption to global air travel is expected to persist in the coming days.

Major aviation stocks across Europe and Asia plummeted on Monday, as strikes by the US and Israel on Iran caused travel chaos across the Middle East.

In the first hours of trading in Europe on Monday, shares in the continent’s biggest airline groups — IAG, Air France-KLM, and Lufthansa — all plunged as investors digested the potential for long-term disruption to the airline industry due to the conflict.

At around 10:15 a.m. local time (5:15 a.m. ET), shares in the London-listed IAG, the parent group of British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, were down more than 5%. At the same time, Paris-listed Air France-KLM shares had dropped 8%, and Frankfurt-listed Lufthansa shares were 6% lower.

Earlier on Monday, shares of airlines based in the Asia-Pacific regions had also fallen sharply to start the week. Qantas, the Australian flag carrier, Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines, and Japan Airlines, all saw drops in the region of 5% on Monday.

The three largest Middle East-based airlines — Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways — are owned by their respective governments and are not publicly listed.

Global travel chaos

Tumbling airline stocks reflect the huge disruption to airline operations triggered by military actions across the Middle East over the weekend.

Initial US and Israeli attacks on Iran, and subsequent Iranian retaliation, led to the closure of virtually all airspace across the region.

Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates all closed their airspace.

Tens of thousands of flights were delayed or canceled over the weekend, with scores of passengers stranded around the globe, largely due to the closure of major hub airports in the region.

The three major Middle Eastern airlines — Qatar Airways, Etihad Airways, and Emirates — operate hubs that connect passengers to destinations around the world, meaning that when their operations are disrupted, it creates a huge ripple effect.

While it is expected that some flights in the region may restart in the coming days, disruption to international air travel is likely to continue for many days, if not longer.

• OpenAI published a report detailing China’s “cyber special operations” that target critics online.
• The report followed OpenAI’s findings and removal of a ChatGPT account belonging to the CCP.
• Bluesky said it recently removed a small number of accounts for “inauthentic coordinated activity.”

It turns out that even the Chinese government uses ChatGPT — at least according to a cybersecurity report from OpenAI.

This is how OpenAI uncovered China’s “cyber special operations” targeting political dissidents in China and abroad, after the company found and removed an account owned by the Chinese government that uploaded periodic status reports to ChatGPT and asked them to be polished.

In OpenAI’s “Disrupting Malicious Uses of AI” report published on Wednesday, a third of the document detailed China’s tactics to silence and intimidate critics across social media platforms owned by American tech giants.

“This effort appears to be large-scale, resource-intensive and sustained, counting at least hundreds of staff, thousands of fake accounts across scores of platforms, the use of locally deployed AI models, and a playbook of dozens of tactics,” OpenAI wrote.

“The targets are not just people in China, but also dissidents around the world and representatives of foreign countries, up to and including the prime minister of Japan,” OpenAI added.

OpenAI’s report documented instances in which operatives for China forged US county court documents and submitted them to social media platforms in an effort to have certain posts removed.

Online operatives with thousands of fake accounts also collectively submitted abusive reports on dissidents to social media platforms to intentionally trigger false account bans and content restrictions, according to OpenAI. Many of these false reports, OpenAI said, include AI-generated images posing as screenshots of conversations and comments.

Some of the largest accounts on X have been targeted, according to OpenAI. That includes the handle @whyyoutouzhele, better known as “Teacher Li is not your teacher,” which has the fifth-largest overall traffic share on X as of January, with more than 2.1 million followers. The account mainly posts videos from inside China, often documenting instances of corruption and human rights abuses.

“We hope social platforms like X, YouTube, and Bluesky realize that your content moderation system is being used by the Chinese Communist Party as a weapon,” the team behind the Teacher Li account wrote in a post on X on Wednesday.

“We also call on the entire AI industry to take this matter seriously,” the team added in the original post written in Chinese. “When your technology is being used to systematically oppress human rights, to say that ‘we’re just makers of a tool’ is not an acceptable answer.”

Other social media platforms have observed similar patterns and have taken action to curb these activities.

Aaron Rodericks, head of trust and safety at Bluesky, told Business Insider that the platform has invested in its capabilities to identify and disrupt influence operations like those described in the OpenAI report, including hiring specialized investigative staff and expanding monitoring systems.

“As part of this ongoing work, the team recently removed a small number of accounts, consistent with those described in the report, that were engaged in inauthentic coordinated activity in violation of our Community Guidelines,” said Rodericks.

A person familiar with the matter told Business Insider that Meta includes activities that OpenAI described in its regular adversarial report, and takes action against accounts found to be violating platform policies.

X and China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

• OpenAI $110 billion financing is a record in more ways than one.
• The private-market transaction challenges decades of finance norms.
• Check out these charts to see just how huge the deal is.

OpenAI‘s latest funding round is unprecedented. The following charts put the deal in perspective.

The startup announced the $110 billion financing last week, pushing its valuation to $840 billion, including the new cash. It brings Amazon and Nvidia on as major backers and puts questions about OpenAI’s financial stability to bed. For now.

I asked venture capital data provider Pitchbook for help in sizing the round. It’s the largest ever, but also the biggest by a huge margin.

The deal “sets a new high for private tech fundraising,” said PitchBook analyst Dimitri Zabelin, in the understatement of the year so far.

What really stunned me: This private-market funding round is about four times larger than the biggest IPO ever.

Here’s the all-time ranking for IPOs, according to data from Renaissance Capital, a research firm focused on this key part of the market.

This is not how the financial world is supposed to work.

Usually, public markets offer companies a bigger pool of money to tap. Here, stocks trade all the time, so investors feel more confident about finding buyers quickly if they have to sell — what’s known as liquidity. And public-market investors get more information via regular financial statements, so they feel more confident putting money to work.

In private markets, investors can put money into a startup and not be able to sell their stake for years. And there’s no public financial statements for everyone to see. Historically, this has meant that there’s less money available for companies in this market. But OpenAI’s latest private round blows all this history out the water.

Speaking of history, do you remember the Facebook IPO? At the time, I thought it was huge. But that market debut raised $16 billion, about 15% of what OpenAI just took in from the private market.

OpenAI is expected to try its own IPO sometime in the next year or two. This jumbo private round has just raised the bar on that public market debut.

With such a massive valuation already, IPO investors “will want to see improving margins, stable usage trends and evidence that OpenAI can defend its position,” Zabelin said. “This round secures capital and computing power. The next test is proving that the economics of large-scale AI can support that valuation.”

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

• Shares of LexisNexis’s parent company Relx are down roughly 17% since the start of the year.
• A top exec told Business Insider that LexisNexis isn’t doomed because AI model makers lack its proprietary data.
• Relx recently attributed growth in its law firm and corporate legal business to customers adopting its AI tools.

The AI boom has been hammering LexisNexis on Wall Street. The legal-software giant says its fundamentals tell a different story.

“Every time we see a new model, every time we see a step forward, we’re actually in a better position,” Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of the global legal business of LexisNexis, told Business Insider.

In recent weeks, many software companies, including LexisNexis’s parent Relx have seen their stocks plunge over investor fears that AI poses an existential threat.

Shares of Relx fell about 14% on February 3, the day after the AI startup Anthropic rolled out a new plug-in for its Claude Cowork agent that can draft legal briefs and analyze contracts. The London-based company’s shares are down roughly 17% since the start of the year.

‘Authoritative content’

Fitzpatrick said investors are wrong about LexisNexis because AI model makers simply aren’t equipped to compete with it.

“What they don’t understand is that the most powerful thing that we have is our authoritative content, and that cannot be replicated,” he said.

This content, collected over several decades, includes some 200 billion legal documents, with around 4 million added daily, the company said, along with information from Shepard’s Citations, a service owned by LexisNexis that has tracked and validated legal precedent since 1873.

LexisNexis doesn’t license its proprietary data to general-purpose AI model providers, said Fitzpatrick. A spokesperson for Thomson Reuters said the company doesn’t either. LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters are the top providers of legal research software in the US.

While anyone can use off-the-shelf AI agents to complete legal work, Fitzpatrick said their data won’t be secure, and the results won’t be reliable.

“They’re not grounded in authoritative legal material, and that’s the standard for legal work,” said Fitzpatrick, noting that many lawyers have filed court documents containing AI-generated hallucinations. “You can’t be ‘probably’ right.”

LexisNexis did, however, cut a deal last year with Harvey, the OpenAI-backed legal software startup last valued at $8 billion, to pipe its legal corpus into the company’s platform. Users still need a LexisNexis subscription to access its content in Harvey’s app.

Not all legal work demands traditional legal research. A corporate lawyer doesn’t rely on case law as much as a litigator does. The opportunity for a company like Anthropic is to sell to in-house legal teams that use software to assist with reviewing contracts and comparing terms across agreements.

AI sales boost

LexisNexis uses a range of third-party AI models to enhance its products, including its digital legal assistant, Protégé. Fitzpatrick said the difference between general-purpose models and what LexisNexis’ AI tools offer is that the latter are grounded in the company’s legal corpus. That’s been helping LexisNexis deliver more value to customers, a boost reflected in Relx’s top and bottom lines, he said.

Earlier this month, Relx reported 7% revenue growth for 2025, and a 9% increase in adjusted operating profit. The company said its law firm and corporate legal business, which accounts for about 70% of its legal division’s revenue, is growing at a double-digit rate, driven by customers adopting its AI tools.

LexisNexis is hiring, said Fitzpatrick. The company hasn’t done any layoffs because of AI, and doesn’t plan to do any, he said.

For now, Fitzpatrick isn’t letting investors’ anxiety color his outlook, even though software stocks took another beating this week, and Wall Street forecasters said fears of a software apocalypse could drag the market into another sharp decline. He said investors will eventually realize their AI fears about LexisNexis are misguided.

“I’m not concerned, not one bit,” he said. “I haven’t sold a share.”

Additional reporting by Melia Russell.

• The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is the sole federal regulator of prediction markets.
• Chairman Michael Selig has emerged as an ally of the industry in its legal battles with states.
• Here’s what to know about Selig and the CFTC.

If you pay attention to Kalshi and Polymarket, there’s a name you should probably know by now: Michael Selig.

Selig, the 36-year-old lawyer selected by President Donald Trump to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is the country’s top federal regulator of prediction markets.

And in recent weeks, he’s made clear he’ll be a champion for the burgeoning industry.

“It’s something that I think is valuable to society,” Selig said of prediction markets on a recent episode of Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” podcast.

Here’s what to know about Selig and the agency he leads.

Who is Mike Selig?

Selig graduated from George Washington University Law School in 2015. While in law school, he worked as a law clerk for Chris Giancarlo, then a CFTC commissioner.

He later worked at several private law firms, where he represented many clients regulated by the CFTC.

Selig began serving in the Trump administration in March 2025, when he was named chief counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Crypto Task Force and as a senior advisor to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins.

He was nominated by Trump to serve as CFTC Commissioner in October and was confirmed by the Senate as part of a larger tranche of nominees on a party-line vote in December.

What is the CFTC?

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is a federal agency, established in 1974, that’s in charge of regulating derivatives markets.

That includes futures contracts, which allow people to hedge against potential price fluctuations, as well as swaps.

Because platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are selling what they call “event contracts” — derivatives that either settle at $1 or 0 based on the outcome of future events — they fall under the purview of the CFTC as well.

The CFTC doesn’t handle things like stocks — that’s up to the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC.

How Selig is boosting prediction markets

Prediction markets have found themselves in the crosshairs of state regulators, who view the platforms as a means for illegal sports betting.

Several states have taken legal action against prediction markets, including Nevada, which is home to a large gambling industry.

Under Selig, the CFTC has begun to intervene in those cases, starting with a friend-of-the-court brief in Nevada arguing that prediction markets are solely in the domain of federal regulators. That’s been met with praise from the industry.

“Today, the CFTC is taking an important step to ensure that these markets have a place here in America,” Selig said.

Selig previewed that approach in a speech at the end of January, when he said the commission may “defend its exclusive jurisdiction over commodity derivatives.”

It wasn’t initially clear that this would happen

When Selig was nominated to lead the CFTC, it wasn’t initially clear if he would take a side in prediction market companies’ battle with state regulators.

At his confirmation hearing in November, when Selig was asked whether sports contracts offered on prediction market platforms constitute sports betting, he said it was a “really complicated issue.”

“It is an interpretive question that is working its way through the courts, and so I will respect the decisions of those courts,” Selig said at the time.

Now, Selig’s gotten involved with ongoing battles in the courts — and Democrats want him to reverse course again.

In a letter sent to Selig in February, 23 Democratic senators urged the commissioner to “abstain from intervening in pending litigation involving contracts tied to sports, war, or other prohibited events.”

• Anthropic was designated a supply chain risk amid a dispute about the military’s use of its tech.
• Hours later, OpenAI struck a deal with the Department of Defense to use its AI models.
• The conflict may determine who ultimately controls the country’s most powerful AI models.

This week, in a dramatic escalation reshaping how artificial intelligence is integrated into national security — and who controls it — Anthropic was officially blacklisted by the Trump administration while OpenAI swooped in to win a new defense contract.

On Friday evening, the Pentagon designated Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, barring its technology from use by defense contractors after a transition period. That came just hours after President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI tools, citing the company’s refusal to agree to the military’s proposed use of its Claude model.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he could not “in good conscience” allow the tech to be used for mass domestic surveillance or to independently direct autonomous weapons — two use cases he says violate the company’s ethical guardrails.

Amid the standoff, Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI, announced that it had reached a deal with the Department of Defense to deploy its own AI models in classified environments.

The dispute has turned into a broader confrontation between the Pentagon and the private AI sector — not just over military contracts, but who ultimately sets the terms for how these powerful systems are used.

A clash of principles and contracts

Anthropic argued that restrictions around its system’s use for surveillance and autonomous weapons systems were not adequately reflected — or enforceable — in the government’s draft contract language.

Defense officials responded that they need to be able to deploy Claude for any “lawful use” — a term that would give the military broad discretion, even though mass domestic surveillance is illegal under several statutes.

Dean Ball, senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, described the standoff as “uncharted territory” rooted in competing principles: Anthropic’s insistence on setting contractual limits on how its tech is used, and the Pentagon’s view that defense policy should prevail over corporate priorities.

“This is a matter of principle for both sides,” Ball told Business Insider.

Shortly after Anthropic was declared a supply chain risk, OpenAI published a blog post saying it had agreed with the Pentagon on a framework that explicitly includes guardrails similar to some of those sought by Anthropic.

OpenAI outlined three main “red lines” guiding its collaboration with the Department:

• No use of its technology for mass domestic surveillance;
• No use in directing autonomous weapons;
• And no use for other high-stakes automated decisions, such as “social credit” systems.

OpenAI says its agreement is structured to protect these limits through layered safeguards, and that any use involving autonomous weapons or surveillance must comply with existing statutes and Department directives.

In a series of Ask-Me-Anything-style posts, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he is prepared for a potential dispute over the legality of specific government requests. However, he said that OpenAI would not agree to allow the government to use its technology for mass domestic surveillance.

“I am terrified of a world where AI companies act like they have more power than the government,” Altman added. “I would also be terrified of a world where our government decided mass domestic surveillance was ok.”

Potentially ‘existential’ stakes

Legal scholars say the government’s threats to enact the Defense Production Act and designate Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, in this context, are unusual.

Eric Chaffee, a business law professor at Case Western Reserve University, described the move as a “gamble,” noting that the recent Supreme Court decision that overturned Trump’s tariff policies has pushed back on expansive executive actions without clear statutory backing.

And while national security authorities generally enjoy deference in court, any litigation would unfold in legally unsettled terrain.

“The government, at this point, has ultimately outsourced a lot of its work to private entities,” Chaffee said. “As a result of that, because of the reluctance against state-run corporations, there are going to be tensions, and ultimately, in a context like this, figuring out how a private entity interacts with the government is going to be a complex process.”

For the Pentagon, removing Anthropic from military AI pipelines could cause disruption. Signum Global Advisor policy analyst George Pollack said Claude is deeply embedded in defense planning and readiness systems and that transitioning away from them risks operational friction.

He also argued that sidelining a leading US AI firm contradicts the stated goals of maintaining American leadership in the technology.

For Anthropic, the stakes are “existential,” Ball warned. He said the dispute could send a chilling message to entrepreneurs about the risks of doing business with the federal government if companies can be penalized for insisting on ethical guardrails.

OpenAI’s agreement with the Department appears aimed, in part, at breaking the impasse that engulfed Anthropic’s negotiations. In its blog post, OpenAI said it requested that the same terms be made available to all AI labs and urged the government to resolve its dispute with Anthropic.

Representatives for OpenAI and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. It was not immediately clear whether Anthropic, or any other leading AI company, had been offered similar contractual terms to those that OpenAI said it had agreed to.

Ultimately, how the conflict is resolved could influence not just one company’s fortunes, but the balance of power between the US government and private AI developers in setting the rules of engagement for next-generation technologies.

• Anthropic’s stance against the Pentagon and OpenAI’s resulting agreement is shifting the chatbot wars.
• As some ChatGPT users posted about canceling, Anthropic’s Claude over took ChatGPT to hit No. 1 on the App Store.
• OpenAI said its Pentagon agreement emphasizes human oversight of autonomous weapons and limits mass surveillance.

While OpenAI locks down Washington, Anthropic is locking down users and rocketing to the top of the App Store.

Anthropic has been sidelined in Washington following a public dispute with the Department of Defense over how its AI models would be deployed. President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to phase out its technology.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has secured new ground, with CEO Sam Altman announcing in a Friday night post on X that it had reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy AI models in its classified network.

OpenAI’s agreement has left some loyal ChatGPT users uneasy about OpenAI’s ambitions, prompting online debates about the ethical implications — and some saying they were defecting to its rival Claude.

As of 6:38 p.m. ET on Saturday, Claude ranked number one among the most downloaded productivity apps on Apple’s App Store, trailing ChatGPT.

Converts have taken to social media to share screenshots documenting their switch.

Pop musician Katy Perry wrote that she was “done” on X, alongside a screenshot of Claude’s pricing page, with a red heart around the $20-per-month “Pro” plan.

Another X user, Adam Lyttle, wrote “Made the switch,” alongside a screenshot of his email inbox with a receipt from Anthropic and cancellation confirmation from OpenAI.

On Reddit’s ChatGPT subreddit, dozens of users say they’ve deleted their accounts and are urging others to do the same.

“Cancel ChatGPT” has become a common refrain online, while some users have taken a more personal tone, saying Altman’s move “crossed the line.”

The agreement hasn’t polarized all AI users, however.

In one Reddit thread, several commenters said the news does not affect their choice of AI model, arguing that Anthropic’s work with Palantir raises similar concerns. In November 2024, Anthropic, Palantir, and Amazon Web Services struck an agreement to provide US intelligence and defense agencies access to Claude models.

After Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said he would designate Anthropic as a “supply chain risk to national security,” Anthropic said it would “challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.”

In his Friday post, Altman said the Department of War had agreed with two of OpenAI’s safety principles.

“Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems,” Altman wrote on X. “The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”

By Saturday afternoon, OpenAI published a more detailed description of its contract with the DoW, including the specific language it used surrounding the use of its models for surveillance and autonomous weapons.

On the topic of autonomous weapons, OpenAI said:

The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a human decisionmaker under the same authorities.

On the topic of mass surveillance, OpenAI said:

The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities.

While some chatbot users suggested it’s all fair in business, war, and federal procurement, others suggested the Pentagon’s stance may have handed Anthropic a public relations win.

X user Tae Kim joked that Hegseth might need a new title: “Secretary Hegseth Chief of Claude Marketing.”

• Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead, Trump said in a Saturday Truth Social post.
• The US confirmed Khamenei’s death after strikes on Iran on Saturday.
• The US and Israel pushed for Iranian regime change ahead of the strikes on Iran.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed during the massive joint US-Israeli strikes on the country, President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post on Saturday.

“Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” Trump wrote. “He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do. This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country.”

Khamenei, 86, was in power for almost 40 years, and his reign was marked by high tensions with the US and the West more broadly, as well as a recent brutal crackdown on Iranians protesting high inflation. Tensions with the US have centered on Iran’s longstanding support for terrorism and its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

In recent weeks, as the US urged Iran to make a new nuclear deal, the American military has been building up its forces in the Middle East. The buildup has been accompanied by heated rhetoric and warnings from both Washington and Tehran.

Missiles struck several high-value targets in and around Tehran, including Khamenei’s compound near Tehran and his offices in the capital. Khamenei’s location during the strikes was previously unknown.

During President Donald Trump’s video statement announcing the start of “major combat operations” against Iran on Saturday morning, the president called for Iranian citizens to “take over your government.” He said, “This will be probably your only chance for generations.” Trump has recently made similar comments in favor of regime change in Iran.

Separately, Israel has repeatedly issued threats against Khamenei. In June 2025, after joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran, Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said Khamenei “cannot continue to exist,” calling him a dictator. Other Israeli officials, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have made similar statements.

Khamenei became Supreme Leader in 1989, acting as the ultimate authority across all branches of the Iranian government and the military. Khamenei was also the country’s religious leader and was granted the title of ayatollah, a title for high-ranking clerics in Shia Islam, Iran’s official state religion.

His death marks a major upheaval amid US combat operations against Iran, which both the US and Israel said was aimed at eliminating imminent threats to Americans and Israelis. The American operation, called “Epic Fury,” has involved a mixture of land, air, and sea assets, including Tomahawk missiles, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, and drones.

It remains to be seen how Khamenei’s death will affect the fate of the Iran’s regime, which is bolstered by the hardline Revolutionary Guard Corps and a vast internal security force.

Iran’s retaliatory strikes targeted US bases across the region, with US assets and partner forces, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, involved in air defenses.

• Warren Buffett held tight to the purse strings in his final quarter as Berkshire Hathaway CEO.
• Berkshire’s cash pile grew to a record $373 billion as it sold stocks and refrained from buybacks.
• Operating profits fell sharply as insurance weakness outweighed strength in other Berkshire units.

If you handed most people nearly $400 billion, they’d find plenty of silly ways to squander it. Warren Buffett isn’t most people.

The legendary investor — known for his patience, discipline, and love of a bargain — said last year that he would happily put $100 billion to work if the right opportunity arose. But he resisted any urge to go on a last-ditch spending spree in his final quarter as Berkshire Hathaway CEO.

The message to shareholders from Berkshire’s fourth-quarter earnings report, released Saturday, is that Buffett once again struggled to find much worth buying.

That’s been the situation for years now with stocks trading near record highs and bidding wars breaking out over acquisitions.

Buffett and his team were net sellers of stocks for a 13th straight quarter in the three months ended December 31. The last time they bought more stocks than they sold was the third quarter of 2022.

Berkshire’s recent portfolio disclosure showed that it built a small stake in The New York Times Company, pared its key bets on Apple and Bank of America, and cut 77% of a small Amazon position in the period.

Buffett refrained from stock buybacks for a sixth consecutive quarter, after repurchasing around $17 billion worth of Berkshire shares over the course of 2022 and 2023.

The stock sales and lack of buybacks contributed to Berkshire’s pile of cash and Treasury bills reaching a record $373 billion after payables at December’s close.

Berkshire’s cash pile was around $130 billion at the end of 2022, meaning it’s nearly tripled in size over the last three years. It now exceeds the current market capitalizations of some of the world’s biggest companies, including Bank of America, General Electric, and Coca-Cola.

Buffett shocked the business world last May when he unexpectedly announced to an arena full of his shareholders that he planned to retire before the new year. He’s spent the last six decades transforming Berkshire from a failing textile mill into a $1 trillion conglomerate.

Berkshire’s new CEO, Greg Abel, said in his inaugural letter to shareholders on Saturday that he wouldn’t rush to pay out dividends or cut deals just to put the money to work.

Abel has plenty of work to do after a challenging fourth quarter. Berkshire’s operating earnings slumped 30% year-on-year to $10.2 billion.

The decline reflected a sharp drop in profits from its key insurance unit, which more than offset higher earnings at the BNSF Railway and in Berkshire’s manufacturing, service, and retailing division.

• Greg Abel paid homage to Warren Buffett in his first shareholder letter as Berkshire Hathaway CEO.
• Abel pledged to abide by core Buffett values such as capital discipline and integrity.
• He celebrated Berkshire’s Japanese bets, bemoaned its Kraft Heinz wager, and hailed Ted Weschler.

Greg Abel paid tribute to Warren Buffett and reassured Berkshire Hathaway shareholders he wouldn’t do anything drastic as their new CEO in his first letter to them on Saturday.

Buffett handed Berkshire’s reins to Abel at the start of this year, ending a six-decade run during which he transformed the failing textile mill into a sprawling conglomerate worth more than $1 trillion.

The legendary investor oversaw a 6,100,000% return for Berkshire shareholders between 1965 and 2025, trouncing the S&P 500’s total return of 46,100% including dividends. His compounded annual gain of 19.7% was nearly double the index’s 10.5% figure over a 60-year timeframe.

“Warren is obviously a very hard act to follow,” Abel wrote, continuing Buffett’s decades-long tradition of penning an annual shareholder letter.

Berkshire’s new boss dedicated the first section of his letter to Buffett, praising everything from his patience and judgment to his investing prowess, legacy as an educator, track record as a CEO, and the unique company he built with the late Charlie Munger.

Abel used the letter to properly introduce himself to shareholders, and even tried to inject some of Buffett’s trademark wit.

“I will not be your CEO for the next 60 years as simple arithmetic makes that — shall we say — an ambitious plan,” he quipped.

More of the same

Abel made it clear to shareholders that he “gets it” — he understands what makes Berkshire special and has no plans to ruin it.

He walked through what he called Berkshire’s “foundational values“: its decentralized model, integrity, financial strength, capital discipline, risk management, and operational excellence.

Abel lingered on the topic of capital discipline, showing he’s aware of how much scrutiny Berkshire has received for hoarding more than $370 billion of liquid assets.

He signaled there won’t be any rushed deals or immediate dividend payouts on his watch. He described Berkshire’s cash pile as both its rainy-day fund and its “dry powder” for stock purchases and acquisitions, but said he’ll remain disciplined in spending it “regardless of the size” of the company’s reserves.

Digging into the details

Abel’s letter contained several key nuggets for close followers of Berkshire.

First, he described its Kraft Heinz investment as “disappointing” with a return “well short of adequate,” echoing Buffett’s uncharacteristic bashing of the food giant.

Second, Abel broke out the five stakes in Japanese companies purchased by Buffett a few years ago. The dedicated table showed Berkshire paid a total of $15.4 billion for positions worth a combined $35.4 billion at December’s close, and collected $862 million in dividends from them last year.

Third, he revealed that Ted Weschler now oversees about 6% of Berkshire’s investments after assuming control of the recently departed Todd Combs‘ portion of the company’s portfolio.

Abel also positioned Weschler as one of his key deputies, writing that his “impact extends beyond these investments” to weighing in on big opportunities and Berkshire’s businesses, and providing other support.

Finally, he signaled a shift to a bigger brain trust at Berkshire. Instead of Buffett and Munger holding court for the entire Q&A at Berkshire’s annual meeting, as they did for many years, Abel will field questions with Berkshire’s insurance chief, Ajit Jain, and later with Katie Farmer and Adam Johnson, two of his top deputies.

• Some companies are keeping remote work policies even as other firms call people back to the office.
• Companies like Atlassian, Dropbox, and Deel report increased job applicants and retention rates.
• Some firms also credit work flexibility with boosting employee satisfaction.

You might not be destined for a cubicle after all.

As a number of big-name companies increase their requirements for how often workers spend time in the office, some firms are sticking with remote work arrangements.

Those leading the RTO charge have argued that face-to-face collaboration breeds a stronger culture of teamwork and creative problem-solving. However, remote companies say they are reaping their own set of distinct benefits.

The doubling down on flexibility has been a boon to recruiting at some companies, allowing firms like Dropbox and Crowstrike to tap into a wider pool of talent.

“A lot of the companies going back to the office are leaking talent to us, whether or not they want to admit it,” Alex Bouaziz, cofounder and CEO of the HR and payroll platform Deel, previously told Business Insider.

Here are 12 companies that still offer remote work — and why:

Atlassian

The software maker Atlassian has 13,000 employees in more than a dozen countries. Nine in 10 of its workers report that flexibility is both an important reason they stay and that it allows them to do their best work, Avani Prabhakar, the company’s chief people officer, previously told Business Insider.

Since the company introduced its work-from-anywhere policy in 2020, it has seen the number of applicants per job opening double, Prabhakar said.

Coinbase

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has been remote-first since May 2020. L.J. Brock, chief people officer at Coinbase, told Business Insider via email that the company is not “remote-only,” but instead has hubs all over the world and no central headquarters.

Teams also gather in-person once a quarter for what Coinbase calls “Surges,” Brock said. Brock added that the firm is constantly iterating on its in-person meetings to make sure that the company’s remote structure evolves.

The company has taken a remote-first approach for a couple of reasons, Brock said, including the fact that Coinbase operates in a decentralized industry and that remote work allows the company to tap into a global network of talent.

“We’ve unlocked a caliber of talent that simply cannot be reached without the flexibility of remote work,” Brock wrote. “Our teams don’t have to choose between their personal lifestyle and the opportunity to build the future of global finance.”

CrowdStrike

Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike has a remote-first work culture. From its inception over a decade ago, the company has placed an emphasis on hiring talent from a diverse pool.

“Being a remote-first company ensures CrowdStrike can hire the best people — regardless of their geographic location,” the company wrote in 2022.

The company added that its remote structure enables employees with family or caregiving obligations to contribute to its mission.

Deel

Deel’s Bouaziz said the most in-demand workers are often most willing to push back — or leave — when employers introduce rigid RTO policies. He said that the strict approach by some companies has benefited Deel.

Deel has a global workforce and hired more than 2,000 employees in 2024 — out of a pool of 1.5 million applicants, the company said.

DoorDash

In 2022, DoorDash committed to a “flexible workplace model” and continues to offer that structure to employees. The policy allows teams to decide how and where they want to work.

“Rather than requiring employees to work in an office for a set number of days, we recognize that elements of both in-person and remote work will differ depending on how distributed each team is, and the nature of each team’s work,” the company wrote in a blog post on the subject.

A company spokesperson told Business Insider it also offers “meaningful in-person collaboration where it makes sense.”

“We’ve found that trust and clarity around outcomes matter more than rigid location policies,” the spokesperson said.

Dropbox

Dropbox implemented a “virtual-first” policy in 2021. The cloud storage company has redesigned its workforce to focus on flexibility, and this approach has paid off in both hiring and retention, Melanie Rosenwasser, the company’s chief people officer, previously told Business Insider in an email.

The average number of applicants per job is nearly sevenfold higher than it was prior to the company adopting its virtual-first model, Rosenwasser said. She added that more than eight in 10 applicants accepted Dropbox’s employment offers, and attrition is the lowest in the company’s history.

HubSpot

The software company says more than 70% of its employees work remotely. HubSpot requires its employees to work from the location where they were hired, but allows them to log on from elsewhere for up to 90 days.

Remote workers can visit an office twice a quarter. The company also offers a stipend each month to go toward expenses related to working remotely.

HubSpot also provides funds so that workers in a geographic area can meet up with their colleagues. There are also monthly virtual chats, where the company pairs someone with another employee elsewhere in the company to facilitate a sense of belonging.

Mozilla

Mozilla embraces a remote-first approach while offering in-person options.

“Employees have the flexibility to choose the type of workspace that best supports their productivity and wellbeing — whether that’s a home office, a Mozilla office, or a co-working space,” a spokesperson told Business Insider in an email.

The open-source software company has offices or coworking spaces in several locations, including San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Toronto, Paris, and London. For those who prefer an office setting but are based elsewhere, the company may cover the cost of a coworking space, Mozilla said.

“By accepting the imperfect reality of a hybrid environment, we enable ourselves to take full advantage of the opportunity of this moment,” the company wrote in a 2022 blog post.

Olipop

Olipop has been remote since its founding, but the prebiotic soda brand, which has roughly 220 staff members, hosts cohorts of new hires for off-sites throughout the year and also holds regular leadership and individual team off-sites.

In a previous interview with Business Insider, CEO Ben Goodwin said that instead of investing in office facilities, Olipop pays significant costs in employee benefits and perks. The company pays for employees to have a gold PPO plan and covers 95% of insurance costs, Goodwin said.

Olipop also offers department off-sites, a party at the end of the year with a DJ and a hotel stay, new hire orientations, and a program for leadership called Olipop Leadership University.

Spotify

Since early 2021, when the music streaming service introduced a policy allowing employees to work from anywhere, Spotify has seen about half of its employees working remotely — from home or elsewhere — and the remainder going into an office.

Spotify states that roles are often associated with specific regions or time zones; most employees have the option to work from a country where the company has an established entity.

The annual attrition rate at Spotify has fallen to 3%, about half of what it was before it began the policy, according to the company. At the same time, the average time to hire workers has dropped to 37 days from 48, Spotify said.

Toptal

Toptal, a company with about 700 employees, has operated remotely since its inception. Taso Du Val, CEO of the talent sourcing company, previously told Business Insider that he thinks of the structure as hybrid, because teams meet typically for three-day off-sites once a quarter.

He said the ideal work structure is an “80/20 mix,” which he describes as working remotely 80% of the time and meeting in person the other 20%.

Zapier

For a week each year, the software company Zapier brings together its workers and customers to focus on various projects, Brandon Sammut, the company’s chief people officer, previously told Business Insider.

By working with customers and problem-solving with teammates, he said, “you naturally build connection and belonging.”

Some of Zapier’s 800 workers, who are spread across 42 countries, also gather periodically to focus on a particular topic or challenge.

An earlier version of this story appeared on November 14, 2025.

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• Paramount Skydance is set to gain control over Warner Bros. Discovery after Netflix withdrew.
• Many of Wall Street’s top bankers had a stake in steering the mega-deal — and a lot on the line.
• But even a loss for Netflix’s investment bankers could prove to be a reputational win. Here’s why.

In the world of high-stakes M&A, the Wall Street bankers who worked on the monster Warner Bros. Discovery deal seem to have inherited the Midas touch.

On Thursday, a transaction that proved to be one of the most expensive corporate dramas in Hollywood history started to come to a close. The saga — a fight between Paramount Skydance and Netflix that stood to decide the media industry’s future — was a high-profile test for all the banks involved.

Some of the country’s biggest lenders and most elite advisory firms pitched in — from JPMorgan Chase and Centerview Partners, to Wells Fargo Securities and more. It began in December when Netflix launched an $82.7 billion bid for select WBD assets — an offer that was later upended by a counteroffer from David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, valuing the media giant at about $111 billion including debt.

The battle for WBD played out amid a pivotal backdrop for Wall Street: a period investment banks hope will mark a full-throated M&A rebound, in which just landing a role on a deal of this size is as useful for one’s street cred as actually winning it. Even advisers on the losing side will walk away with hefty fees, boardroom credibility, and proof they belong on the biggest mandates of the coming year.

The tension surrounding the transaction, which remains subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, rippled across Wall Street. Nearly half of this year’s top 20 dealmakers on Business Insider’s annual Rainmakers list — compiled with MergerLinks, a division of Datasite — were tied to the deal in some capacity.

New banks on the block

Bank of America and Citi, along with private equity giant Apollo, have organized a roughly $54 billion debt financing package backing Paramount Skydance’s bid — one of the largest financing commitments assembled in recent years. The scale of the package underscores just how aggressively lenders are positioning themselves for a dealmaking upswing.

“Top down, I think it’s a win because you’re seeing a $110-plus billion deal get done that’s going to require a lot of heavy lifting on the IB side,” Brian Mulberry, a senior client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Management, told Business Insider on Friday. He said Paramount Skydance’s bid requires financing for roughly half the transaction value — a scale that could translate into significant fees for the lenders and advisers involved.

On the losing side of the bidding war, Netflix’s retreat is being viewed by some analysts as a moment of discipline rather than outright defeat.

One beneficiary of that framing is Jeff Hogan, Wells Fargo’s head of global mergers and acquisitions, a spearhead of the bank’s work on the deal, who landed at No. 1 among North American dealmakers on our most recent Rainmakers list.

For Wells Fargo, the mandate carried significant symbolic weight. Last summer, the Federal Reserve lifted a stifling asset cap that had constrained the bank, as punishment for its series of consumer banking scandals. Since then, Wells has engaged in a spirited push to grow its investment banking and advisory presence — vaulting it from 17th place on LSEG’s worldwide M&A league table in 2024 to ninth in 2025.

Landing a role alongside Netflix in a transaction of this magnitude was viewed by industry observers as a reflection of that effort. Indeed, advising a client to walk away from an $80-plus billion bid — and securing a multi-billion-dollar breakup fee in the process — offers a powerful talking point in future boardroom pitches. When Wells Fargo bankers sit down with CEOs going forward, they’ll be able to point to the Netflix mandate as evidence they’re no longer chasing supporting roles in Wall Street’s biggest productions.

“Netflix choosing them as a syndicate partner was a big reputational win,” Mulberry said. “You can gain credibility by knowing when not to overpay.”

The boutiques make their mark

While America’s biggest banks by assets were instrumental in assembling financing firepower, boutique advisers played a pivotal role in shaping the prevailing narrative in the boardroom.

Centerview’s Blair Effron reinforced his reputation as one of media’s most influential advisers, with Centerview serving as a lead financial adviser to Paramount Skydance on the Warner Bros. Discovery bid.

For Gerry Cardinale, founder of RedBird Capital — a key Skydance investor that also advised on the deal — the transaction illustrates the firm’s builder’s strategy. Rather than simply taking passive minority stakes, RedBird has focused on backing and assembling platforms that control valuable intellectual property and can compete at scale in a tech-disrupted entertainment landscape. That includes stepping in when legacy media assets are fragmented or under pressure from declining linear-TV revenues and shifting consumer habits — forces that have made the economics of traditional studios increasingly uncomfortable.

Industry participants say the deal’s scale serves as a harbinger of renewed confidence across corporate America. “There’s still confidence in the broader economy,” Mulberry said, saying that uncertainty about factors like AI’s impact on employment aren’t alarming enough to jettison the optimism that’s taking hold.

“At the end of the day, we are still looking at some pretty strong fundamentals,” he continued. “That allows a deal of this size to get done with confidence.”

Still, even in a world where everyone claims some sort of victory, some trophies are still undeniably larger than others.

Netflix is walking away with $2.8 billion in cash and a stock price that rose as investors breathed a sigh of relief. Paramount Skydance moves closer to assembling a global entertainment empire.

And the banks?

They’ll collect the advisory fees, the financing mandates, and the bragging rights — which might actually be the most valuable prize of all.

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• Jack Dorsey’s announced that Block was cutting about 40% of its staff. It could be a sign of what’s to come.
• Some workplace observers say they see leaders conducting layoffs to signal that AI investments are paying off.
• There is a chance that companies could cut too deeply, risking the loss of critical skills.

AI can do a lot. Showing it’s paying off is another matter.

As companies pour billions into AI, Wall Street is seeking evidence that those bets are worthwhile — and many CEOs are feeling the pressure.

In response, some are offering a simple proof point: They need fewer workers to get the job done.

The most recent example of a CEO cutting workers en masse while talking up AI’s transformative power is Block cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey. On Thursday, he announced plans to lay off about 40% of the company’s workforce, shrinking it from more than 10,000 employees to fewer than 6,000. He said the move comes even as the company remains healthy and profits continue to rise.

Investors cheered the move, sending the company’s shares up more than 16% on Friday.

Block isn’t alone in tying cuts to AI. A number of companies, including Salesforce, HP, and IBM, have identified gains from the technology as a reason for needing fewer workers.

Measuring productivity

In the absence of standardized metrics demonstrating AI productivity, job cuts are becoming an easily digestible signal to investors.

The cheapest way for a CEO to boost a company’s stock price — and to signal readiness to capitalize on the AI boom — is to conduct a “noisy round of layoffs,” Michael Blank, assistant professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told Business Insider.

Doing so, he said, can indicate that a company’s integration of AI has progressed to the point where it’s past experimentation and that its employees can now get more done with less coworker support.

Blank said that weakness in the labor market means it would likely also be easier for an employer to rehire for roles that a company finds out aren’t as easy to replace with AI as it had hoped.

It’s often otherwise difficult for companies to clearly articulate how they’re getting benefits from AI, Gary Cohn, the former director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC on Friday.

“The one KPI that they can tell you is ‘We’ve cut heads,'” he said.

“We’ve sort of made the world synonymous with, ‘I’m using AI, therefore I need less heads.’ I ultimately don’t think that’s the truth,” Cohn said.

That doesn’t mean every company has actually remade their operations thoroughly enough for automation to fully replace their workers, of course. Some observers are skeptical that massive job cuts are purely the result of an AI windfall.

“Block must have uncovered a secret sauce, perhaps within the software development process, to claim all of these jobs are AI-related,” Jason Schloetzer, a business administration professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, recently told Business Insider’s Sarah E. Needleman.

“From the dozens of executives across industries that I’ve spoken with about AI deployment, they certainly aren’t seeing these types of gains outside of the software development process,” he said.

Block didn’t respond to Business Insider’s request for comment about whether the layoffs were, at least in part, intended to demonstrate fiscal discipline to Wall Street.

During Block’s earnings call on Thursday, Dorsey said the company is a leader in efforts to use AI to produce efficiency gains — a posture he expects “all companies will eventually” adopt.

An AI expansion?

There can be good reason for slimming down company ranks. Alexandra Mousavizadeh, cofounder and co-CEO of Evident, which tracks AI use in the financial sector, said that if a company is carrying too much “weight” — too many engineers, for example — it can make sense to build with a leaner team.

“Transformation does not necessarily need huge volumes of people, but it needs the right people,” she told Business Insider.

At the same time, Mousavizadeh cautioned, companies sometimes need to cut costs for other reasons — and AI can become a convenient rationale.

Ultimately, she said, few companies have fundamentally remade their workflows to the point where they can run with minimal supervision. Most organizations that are ramping up their AI deployment “are, in fact, hiring rather than firing,” Mousavizadeh said.

Jeff Fettes is also seeing this. He’s the CEO of Laivly, a company that uses AI agents to support customer service work for Fortune 500 companies.

Fettes said that for some customers who have made AI work, the result isn’t fewer jobs. In some cases, it’s the opposite: Clients that have used AI to boost sales, for example, often want to expand those teams, he said.

“Why wouldn’t you invest in more salespeople now? Because AI is helping them to deliver at scale in a way that they weren’t before,” Fettes said.

The risk of cutting too deeply

Companies contemplating layoffs in the name of AI — or simply because competitors are doing so — should tread carefully, said Wayne Cascio, a distinguished professor of management emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver who has studied corporate downsizing.

He told Business Insider that companies frequently cut too deeply — and too quickly — only to realize later that they’ve eliminated critical skills and institutional knowledge.

“Then what happens is companies wind up hiring back many of the very people that they laid off,” Cascio said.

That can result in companies needing former employees to return as consultants or full-time workers.

Cascio noted that a typical corporate downsizing trims about 10% of the workforce. Anything above 25% qualifies as “extreme,” he said.

Dorsey is cutting almost half his workforce, Cascio said. “That’s double-extreme.”

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• OpenAI has struck a deal with the Department of Defense to use its AI models.
• The agreement was announced hours after the Pentagon said it was cutting ties with Anthropic.
• Anthropic was unwilling to budge from its red lines on what it considers unlawful use of its AI.

OpenAI has struck a deal for the Department of Defense to use its AI models, CEO Sam Altman announced late on Friday.

The news came just hours after the Pentagon severed its relationship with AI rival Anthropic over the company’s concerns about how the technology would be used in surveillance and autonomous weapons.

The Department of Defense is now moving to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk, a significant escalation by the government that could threaten how the AI startup does business with other US-based companies.

OpenAI’s Altman said in a post on X: “Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.

“In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.

“AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”

On Friday, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology amid the dispute between the AI giant and the Department of Defense.

“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a post on X that he would be directing his department to label Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security.”

“Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,” Hegseth said in the post.

Anthropic said in a statement that it will fight back.

“We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court,” Anthropic’s statement read, adding that the company had not received “direct communication from the Department of War or the White House on the status of our negotiations.”

It insisted that “no amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.”

• Trump ordered agencies to stop using Anthropic amid a dispute between the AI giant and the DoD.
• Shortly after Trump’s announcement, the DoD moved to label Anthropic a supply-chain risk.
• Anthropic said no “intimidation” would shift its stance against mass domestic surveillance.

The Department of Defense is moving to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk, a significant escalation by the government that could threaten how the AI startup does business with other US-based companies.

Anthropic said in a statement on Friday night that it will fight back.

“We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court,” Anthropic’s statement read, adding that the company had not received “direct communication from the Department of War or the White House on the status of our negotiations.”

The company said in its statement that “no amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.”

The response comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a post on X that he would be directing his department to label Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security.”

“Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,” Hegseth said in the post.

The move amounts to a blacklisting of a US-based company.

It came shortly after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology, amid a dispute between the AI giant and the Department of Defense.

“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday.

Trump said that there would be a six-month phase-out period for departments, including the Department of Defense, that are “using Anthropic’s products, at various levels.”

“WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about,” Trump wrote.

Ahead of the White House’s decisions loomed a Friday evening deadline defense officials had given Anthropic to agree to the military’s terms of use for the company’s frontier model, Claude.

Earlier this week, the two parties came to an impasse over how the military can deploy Claude.

The issue appeared to revolve around two safeguards Anthropic was not willing to drop: mass surveillance of US citizens and autonomous weapons.

Hegseth had given Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei until Friday, 5:01 p.m. Eastern Time to get on board with the military. Hegseth also warned that the government could invoke the Defense Production Act — a wartime law that gives the president broad authority over a company’s resources — and designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk.

Both would be unprecedented moves by the government against an American technology company, experts previously told Business Insider.

On Thursday, Amodei published a blog post stating that the Defense Department had added language to its contract allowing for “any lawful use” of its model.

A source familiar with the negotiations told Business Insider that this language effectively gave the military discretion over how it uses Claude.

The Anthropic CEO said in his post that the company would prefer to continue serving the department but that it could not “in good conscience accede to their request.”

• Microsoft is considering releasing a new AI revamp of its software bundle, sources say.
• The bundle could include Microsoft Copilot and its new AI agent hub, Agent 365.
• The company could charge up to $99 per user.

After years of internal buzz and false starts, Microsoft is considering rolling out its long-rumored E7 enterprise productivity software bundle, a pricier, AI-loaded version of Microsoft 365, according to two people familiar with the plans.

Microsoft 365 is a popular suite of productivity software that includes widely used tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Microsoft sells this software primarily in bundles called E3 and E5, where the E stands for “enterprise.” E3 is a more basic offering, while E5 has more bells and whistles.

A larger, more expensive “E7” software bundle has long been rumored and has earned a kind of mythical status inside Microsoft, with employees and salespeople debating and guessing whether it will ever appear.

Microsoft’s AI-packed E7 bundle comes as competitors like Google, Salesforce, and nearly every major software-as-a-service company rush to embed AI tools and autonomous agents into their products. Software stocks have taken a significant hit this year as investors worry that generative AI tools will upend traditional software products.

Microsoft declined to comment.

The new E7 bundle under consideration includes everything in the E5 bundle, plus AI features such as Microsoft Copilot and the company’s new AI agent hub, Agent 365, the people said.

Microsoft is looking into per-seat and consumption-based pricing for E7, but could charge up to $99 per user per month, the people said. E5’s current advertised price is $57 per user per month while Copilot is advertised as an add-on for $21 per user per month.

The company previously floated a new AI software bundle in 2024, but paused the plan.

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• Netflix has never made a giant acquisition.
• That’s why it was surprising that it made an $83 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.
• But both Netflix shareholders and Republicans hated the deal.

Investors didn’t want Netflix to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.

Republicans didn’t want the deal to happen, either.

So now it’s dead.

That’s the cleanest and most likely explanation for Netflix walking away from the $83 billion transaction it agreed to a few months ago.

Netflix’s move means that, barring something very surprising, Larry and David Ellison’s Paramount will end up owning all of WBD: not just the movie/TV studio and HBO, which Netflix wanted to buy, but its collection of TV networks as well, including CNN.

We may hear other explanations for the Netflix move in coming days. But my educated guess is that this is a real Occam’s situation:

At one point, Ted Sarandos and company thought they had done enough to win over Donald Trump, which is what you need to get a merger done in 2026.

But Trump never announced that he would actually favor Netflix’s bid over the Ellisons’, who have done a lot of work to woo Trump. At a congressional hearing earlier this month, Netflix got a taste of the pushback it would get from Republicans, who accused the company of pushing woke content on its subscribers.

And last weekend, Trump reminded Netflix of his penchant for pushing around American companies from his bully pulpit, when he demanded that Netflix fire a board member who offended him. It’s worth noting that Netflix’s Thursday announcement came hours after Sarandos visited the White House. If he was looking for assurances that the Trump administration would back his deal, it doesn’t seem like he got them.

Meanwhile, Netflix shareholders had been signalling their distaste for the deal for weeks by pushing down the company’s stock. Netflix shares began rebounding this week as it became clear that Paramount’s chances of winning the deal were getting better. (They shot up 10% in the hours after Netflix bailed out.)

So Netflix’s surrender makes plenty of sense: If your investors don’t want the deal, and the people who need to approve the deal don’t want the deal, what options do you really have?

What all of this means for WBD and its various assets is way too early to tell. Will Bari Weiss, who was installed as the head of CBS News last year, now oversee CNN, as well? Will HBO employees, who seemed cautiously optimistic about going to work for Netflix, feel the same way about the Ellisons? What about the people running the Warner Bros. studio, who have been on a historic hot streak?

And while we’re asking questions: In December, Paramount said $24 billion of its financing would come from three Gulf states: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. Is that still the plan? I’ve asked Paramount for comment.

We will have plenty of time to speculate and report about all of that.

One thing we do know: Assuming Paramount’s deal goes through, it will mean the Ellison family, who were minor players in media just a year ago, will now be titans: They’ll control a conglomerate that owns two movie studios, two major news operations, two major streaming services, and a broadcast network with a long-running NFL deal. And Larry Ellison’s Oracle now owns a piece of TikTok’s US operations.

That’s an astonishingly large and influential portfolio for any owner, let alone a family with a minimal track record running media companies.

It’s also a family that has repeatedly tried to convince Donald Trump that they’re in his corner. Granted, the reality may be more complicated than the optics — people who complain about Paramount firing Trump critic Stephen Colbert, for instance, tend not to say much about Paramount re-signing Trump critics Jon Stewart and the South Park guys.

But the facts are the facts: Last fall, David Ellison told us his family had a good relationship with Trump. On Thursday, we saw the likely benefits of that relationship.

Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Business Insider’s parent company, is a Netflix board member.

• OpenAI raised $110 billion, with Amazon and Nvidia joining as major investors.
• OpenAI’s biggest corporate backers are all intense rivals of Google.
• Elon Musk’s original reason for funding OpenAI is even more true now.

When Elon Musk committed big money to start OpenAI in late 2015, he wanted to create another AI company to stop Google from dominating this important field.

While a lot has changed since then, the reason OpenAI exists still holds: Google has been working toward this AI moment for over 25 years, and it’s the beast to beat.

Take a look at the companies backing OpenAI, which raised a record $110 billion on Friday.

OpenAI’s largest corporate investors are fierce Google rivals that will benefit greatly if OpenAI manages to seriously challenge Google in the battle for AI supremacy and control over how digital information flows in this new era.

It’s become “everyone else against Google,” in my view. Here’s the breakdown:

Amazon is Google’s biggest cloud rival

The new big kahuna. Amazon is investing $50 billion in OpenAI.

Amazon competes with Google in cloud computing. AI workloads have become the big new growth engine for this sector, and Google has been growing quickly.

Amazon also rivals Google in product search, one of the most valuable parts of the online search business. Google has woven AI throughout its search offering, and Amazon is behind in this area.

Google has been designing AI chips called TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) for about a decade. Amazon has a similar offering called Trainium—another huge area of competition.

Amazon’s $50 billion investment in OpenAI gets it several goodies that can help it fight Google.

Amazon Web Services will serve as the exclusive third-party cloud distributor for OpenAI’s Frontier business product, while jointly developing custom AI models for Amazon’s applications.

OpenAI will also use significant Trainium compute capacity to support advanced AI workloads and expand business access to its models via AWS’s cloud infrastructure.

Nvidia competes with Google’s AI chips

Nvidia agreed to invest $30 billion in OpenAI in this latest round.

Nvidia is the clear leader in AI chips, with its GPUs. However, Google TPUs have gained ground recently, with many of Nvidia’s biggest customers also agreeing to either rent or buy TPUs. This could eat into Nvidia’s market share and might slow its growth, if TPUs really catch on.

For its new investment, Nvidia also gets new goodies to help it fend off the Google threat.

OpenAI is deepening its partnership with Nvidia by using massive new computing capacity to better train and run its most advanced AI models.

The new deal specifically centers on Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin systems and significantly increases the computing power available to run OpenAI models after they are trained. This is known as inference, and it’s becoming the most important part of the AI chip wars.

Microsoft still owns a big chunk of OpenAI

Although Microsoft didn’t invest in the latest round, it has been OpenAI’s biggest investor for years. Even after skipping this round, Microsoft likely owns more than 20% of OpenAI already and has a massive cloud-computing deal with the startup.

Microsoft is Google’s original arch-enemy. Microsoft dominated the tech world before Google rose up in the early 2000s and took the web by storm.

These days, Microsoft competes with Google in almost everything it does, including cloud computing, business software, and search. (Bing lags far behind Google in search market share, though it still makes good money for Microsoft.)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is still trying to make Google dance, and OpenAI is key to this.

With Friday’s new OpenAI funding round, Microsoft’s existing deal with OpenAI won’t change, including how they share revenue, handle intellectual property, define advanced AI, and Microsoft’s exclusive rights to provide certain services.

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• Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav addressed employees in a town-hall meeting on Friday morning.
• He described the speed with which Paramount nailed down a deal to buy WBD as “whiplash-y.”
• Netflix was WBD’s preferred suitor before the streaming giant pulled out on Thursday. “We’re getting our bearings,” Zazlav said.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s CEO just pitched employees on its impending Paramount Skydance deal, after spending the last few months arguing against it in favor of the now-nixed Netflix deal.

David Zaslav told WBD staffers at a company town hall on Friday morning that he’s excited to join forces with Paramount.

“I think together, we can be a great company,” Zaslav said on the call, a recording of which was obtained by Business Insider.

“We’re getting bigger, and we’re getting stronger,” he said.

WBD had agreed to sell its studio and HBO assets to Netflix for $27.75 per share. Paramount launched a rival bid of $30 per share for the whole company, including its cable TV networks, and pitched WBD shareholders that its deal was better.

Zaslav acknowledged that the decision to switch from its Netflix deal to Paramount’s rival offer “all happened very quickly.”

“It feels a little whiplash-y,” Zaslav said, adding that he and WBD’s board of directors are still “getting our bearings.”

Paramount “acted with determination” in pursuing WBD, Zaslav said.

WBD underwent a “thorough, rigorous strategic review process” and was under a legal obligation to continue to review and evaluate unsolicited offers that could bring shareholders more value.

Zaslav suggested that teaming up with Paramount is crucial to WBD’s survival.

“If Warner Bros. is going to survive, then we needed to be bigger, and we needed to be global,” Zaslav said.

Zaslav added that “some of these companies are getting so big that they can just run us over.”

The Paramount-WBD deal still needs regulatory approval, a process that will likely take at least six to 12 more months.

“The deal may not close,” Zaslav said. “If it doesn’t close, we get $7 billion, and we get back to work.”

Last week, WBD’s board told its shareholders that there could be an employee exodus if it took Paramount’s deal, citing the $6 billion in cost savings that Ellison’s company planned to achieve. Netflix had said it planned to get $2 billion to $3 billion in savings from its deal.

• FedEx says it will refund customers for tariff charges if its own efforts to get a refund succeed.
• On Monday, FedEx sued the Trump administration in trade court seeking a refund.
• An exact timeline or process for refunds remains unclear after last week’s Supreme Court ruling.

FedEx says it will give you a refund if you used its shipping service and paid President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional tariffs — that is, if the company itself gets a refund from the government.

Days after the US Supreme Court ruled against many of Trump’s tariffs, FedEx filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration seeking a refund of the tariffs it had paid on behalf of customers.

If that effort is successful, the company said, it plans to pass that money on to the businesses and people it charged for those duties.

“Our intent is straightforward: if refunds are issued to FedEx, we will issue refunds to the shippers and consumers who originally bore those charges,” FedEx said in a statement on its website.

Right now, there’s no timeline or process for handling refunds, FedEx said, adding that it’s waiting “on future guidance from the government and the court.”

Rival UPS, which had not revealed plans to seek tariff refunds as of Friday, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

FedEx is one of many companies suing the Trump administration to recover some or all of the tariffs they paid.

Many US consumers have been hit directly by tariffs through international shipments carried by services like UPS and FedEx, Business Insider previously reported.

Some individual customers and businesses have had packages held up at customs for weeks, or tried to dispute tariff charges they say were incorrectly calculated, including at a 200% rate for Russian aluminum.

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• OpenAI announced it secured a $110 billion funding round, its biggest yet.
• The round included investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and Softbank.
• OpenAI said it was entering a “new phase” where frontier AI was moving from research to daily use.

OpenAI just made its biggest raise yet.

The company said it has secured a $110 billion investment, with backing coming from Nvidia, Amazon, and SoftBank.

The new funding was at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, OpenAI said in a Friday announcement. The round included $30 billion from SoftBank, $50 billion from Amazon, and $30 billion from Nvidia. The company had a $500 billion valuation as of October after a secondary share sale.

OpenAI said it had also signed a strategic partnership with Amazon that would see the two companies build customized AI models for Amazon. $35 billion of Amazon’s investment is tied to certain milestones being met, OpenAI added.

OpenAI said it also “secured next generation inference compute” with Nvidia.

OpenAI said it expects additional investors to join as the round progresses, it added.

“We are entering a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at global scale,” OpenAI wrote in the announcement. “Leadership will be defined by who can scale infrastructure fast enough to meet demand, and turn that capacity into products people rely on.”

In a separate joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft said their relationship was not changed by the latest investment round.

Speaking on CNBC after Friday’s announcement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman downplayed concerns around circular financing between AI companies and discussed OpenAI’s IPO prospects.

“We are open to going public at the right time. There are advantages to being private, there are clear advantages to being public,” he said.

• Elon Musk said the future of Tesla’s German gigafactory is under threat from “outside organizations.”
• His comments come ahead of crucial union elections next week at Giga Berlin.
• Musk told employees that Giga Berlin wouldn’t expand if outsiders gained control.

Tesla’s sales in Europe are plummeting — and now Elon Musk has a warning for employees at the company’s German megafactory ahead of crucial union elections.

In an interview with Giga Berlin senior director Andre Thierig posted on X on Thursday, Musk said Tesla would “ideally” expand its only European gigafactory and start production of its battery cells, Cybercab robotaxi, and Optimus robot at the site.

Asked if he had any advice for the team at Giga Berlin to work toward that vision, Musk said any expansion was contingent on Tesla being free from interference from “outside organizations.”

“Things certainly get harder if there are outside organizations who are pushing Tesla in the wrong direction,” said Musk.

“It’s difficult to say that then we would expand, if we had outside organizations who were making things very difficult. We’re not going to shut down the factory, but we wouldn’t expand it either,” said the Tesla CEO.

The billionaire’s comments come ahead of a crucial vote at Tesla’s German factory next week, with powerful German union IG Metall pushing to gain control of the site’s work council — an elected body of employees required by local laws that negotiates pay deals and working hours with management.

German publication Handelsblatt first reported Musk’s comments, which it said were screened for employees on Wednesday.

Tesla clashes with union

The run-up to the election has been marked by fierce disputes between the union and Tesla’s executives. Earlier this month, Tesla filed a criminal complaint against an IG Metall representative, accusing them of secretly recording an internal meeting.

IG Metall, which has frequently clashed with Tesla over working conditions at Giga Berlin over the past few years, denied the allegation and responded with its own complaint accusing Thierig of defamation. The union said Thursday that both sides had agreed on a truce ahead of the works council elections.

The debate over Giga Berlin’s future comes as Tesla’s sales in Europe have collapsed. The US automaker saw registrations of its EVs fall nearly 38% in the EU last year, as it was hit by backlash over Musk’s political interventions and backing of German far-right party AfD.

In January, Tesla’s European sales dropped to just 8,000 units, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, less than half the number sold by Chinese rival BYD.

Musk also said in the interview that Tesla expects to receive approval to sell Full-Self-Driving driver assist technology in the Netherlands on March 20.

• Dell reported record annual revenue of $113.5 billion in its latest financial year.
• Dell’s server and storage business surged 40% and it projected that server sales would double in 2027.
• Tech giants like Nvidia and Meta have also reported strong annual results tied to the AI boom.

Dell is the latest company to get a massive windfall from the AI boom.

The tech company reported record annual revenue of $113.5 billion on Thursday, up 19% in its financial year ending January 30.

Jeff Clarke, Dell’s vice chairman and chief operating officer, said it had been “a defining year for the company” in an earnings call on Thursday.

Annual revenue in the company’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), which sells servers and storage infrastructure, was up 40% across the financial year, and Dell projected sales would continue to surge in 2027.

The Texas-based company said it expected AI-optimized server sales to grow 103% and deliver $50 billion in revenue in the current financial year.

Dell’s shares were up more than 10% in premarket trading on Friday morning as investors cheered the blockbuster results.

A recent slew of similarly strong earnings results from industry leaders like Nvidia and Meta have helped calm investors’ fears of an impending “AI bubble.”

“The AI opportunity is meaningfully growing and transforming the company,” said Clarke in a press release.

“We closed more than $64 billion in AI optimized server orders, shipped more than $25 billion throughout the year, and are entering FY27 with record backlog of $43 billion — powerful proof that our engineering leadership and differentiated AI solutions are winning,” said Clarke.

Alongside competitors like HP and Lenovo, Dell raised product prices across both its divisions in December amid industry-wide shortages of key storage and memory components that power AI.

The increases led to some “sticker shock” for Dell’s servers and storage customers, Clarke said on the call. However, they quickly grasped “the gravity of the situation,” and the “most sophisticated customers in the world began to move aggressively to protect their infrastructure build outs,” he said.

Dell’s business is split into two key divisions: the Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), which sells storage and servers, and the Client Solutions Group (CSG), which sells PC and other hardware.

While Dell’s AI business is booming, its traditional PC line has been struggling. In July, Clarke announced he would take on “day-to-day leadership” of the CSG division to “help accelerate decision-making and build momentum.’

In the 2026 financial year, annual revenue in CSG grew by 5% — an increase compared to last year, when revenue in the division declined by 1%.

As Dell positions itself for the future, it has been reshaping operations across the board, from headcount to the tools employees use.

The changes have included a 25,000 reduction in staff numbers, in the last two years — an almost 20% drop, RTO mandates, and significant changes to how sales staff earn commission, as Business Insider reported exclusively in February.

Dell is also preparing for a major overhaul of its internal systems in May, which it told staff will be the “biggest transformation in company history,” according to an internal memo seen by Business Insider in January.

The goal is to modernize and standardize the underlying infrastructure that Dell runs on to help prepare it for the AI future.

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