• Perplexity's CEO said Google's model is at odds with the rise of AI agents.
• Google is testing agent-like tools, but its ad business is holding it back, said Aravind Srinivas.
• "They need to embrace one path and suffer," he said in a Reddit forum on Wednesday.

Perplexity's CEO said Google needs to rethink its stance in the AI browser wars.

In a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" on Wednesday, Aravind Srinivas said Google's business model is at odds with the rise of AI agents — the kind that power AI-native browsers like Comet, Perplexity's new product.

Google's core business relies on showing people ads and charging advertisers when users click. But AI agents that are built into web browsers can now browse, compare, and even make decisions on a user's behalf. That means fewer human eyeballs on ads and fewer clicks to sell.

"They have business model constraints on letting agents do the clicks and work for you while continuing to charge advertisers enormous money to keep bidding for clicks and conversions," Srinivas wrote.

While Google has been testing agent-like tools, Srinivas said the tech giant is constrained by its need to protect ad revenue.

"At some point, they need to embrace one path and suffer, in order to come out stronger; rather than hedging and playing both ways," he wrote.

Srinivas also criticized Google's internal structure. "It's a giant bureaucratic organization," he wrote, with "too many decision makers and disjoint teams."

Alphabet, Google's parent company, has about 183,300 employees and generated about $350 billion in total revenue last year, according to its annual report. Google Search's division brought in about $198.1 billion, fueled by growth in user adoption and advertiser spending.

In contrast, Comet's product lead, Leonid Persiantsev, wrote in the Reddit forum that the team is intentionally kept small "to stay nimble and fast."

Srinivas acknowledged that Comet wouldn't exist without Chromium, the open-source browser project maintained by Google. But he said that Perplexity is betting on a different vision: one in which agents work on behalf of users, not advertisers.

"We underestimated people's willingness to pay," Srinivas said in response to a question about Perplexity's shift away from ads.

"We also want to bring a change to this world. Enough of the monopoly of Google."

Comet is only available by invitation and limited to users on Perplexity's highest-tier plan, which costs $200 a month or $2,000 a year. The company said it will roll out a free version of the browser.

Perplexity and Google did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Tech giants 'copy anything that's good'

Srinivas said on Wednesday he expects Google to "pay close attention" and eventually copy or adopt features from Comet.

He pointed to Google's internal effort, Project Mariner, which is "similar but quite limited" compared to Comet.

At a Y Combinator event in June, Srinivas said bigger companies will "copy anything that's good."

"If your company is something that can make revenue on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars or potentially billions of dollars, you should always assume that a model company will copy it," Srinivas said in a conversation that was uploaded to YC's YouTube channel on Friday.

Perplexity's head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, wrote in a follow-up statement to Business Insider that bigger companies will not only copy, but also "do everything they can to drown your voice."

Perplexity launched its Comet browser on July 9. Later that day, Reuters reported that OpenAI was working on a web browser that would challenge Google Chrome.

"Browser wars should be won by users, and if users lose Browser War III, it will be from a familiar playbook: monopolistic behavior by an 'everything company' forcing its product on the market," Dwyer wrote.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on Perplexity's remarks.

In the back room of a morgue on the outskirts of Kyiv, the stench of rotten flesh hangs heavy in the air, its source a large white bag lying on a metal table. The mortician opens it, and inside is a smaller black bag containing a pair of mud-covered military boots, a mummified body, and a skull. This is all that is left of a Ukrainian soldier returned from captivity in Russia. Now begins the grueling work of finding out who he was.

Since Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine began three and a half years ago, at least 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have been reported missing. Soldiers often vanish after coming face-to-face with Russians in combat. Some are taken alive as prisoners of war; others who die on the battlefield are captured as collateral for future body repatriation exchanges between Kyiv and Moscow — a corpse for a corpse. For the missing's wives, parents, siblings, and children back home, there is most often no way of knowing where they are, what condition they are being kept in, and whether they are alive.

At the center of the search for missing soldiers are some 1,300 investigators within the war crimes unit of Ukraine's National Police. Each investigator, some in their early 20s and fresh out of the police academy, manages hundreds of cases at a time, working early mornings, late nights, and weekends to locate, return, and identify the missing. They interview witnesses, scour social media and cellphone records, collect DNA samples, and coordinate with the Ukrainian government. Perhaps more than anything, they serve as a crucial lifeline to the families living through a nauseating uncertainty that can extend for months or even years. This summer, the National Police gave Business Insider exclusive access to interview and witness the investigators at work at three locations in the Kyiv region — the first time a publication has been allowed to report on their work in detail. (This story contains graphic descriptions and photos.)

At the Brovary police station east of Kyiv, Maksym Kot's phone rings, one of 50 calls he will get throughout the day, the majority from the families of some of the 400 missing soldier cases he is working on. Baby-faced and soft-spoken, Kot is 23 and graduated from Ukraine's police academy two years ago. He is the sole investigator of soldier disappearances in Brovary, a city of more than 100,000.

As we sit in his small, cluttered office, Kot explains how each case begins: A family member files a missing persons report with the police, which includes the name and circumstances of a soldier's disappearance, if there are any known witnesses, or any suspected perpetrators — in this case, Russian service members. Then Kot starts calling the vanished's fellow soldiers, other relatives, and friends into the station for questioning.

Soldiers serving alongside the missing service member provide a timeline leading up to their last known moments. They can tell Kot where a troop was fighting, what their last orders were, and the exact last location of the missing soldier.

The families, whom Kot refers to as "the victims," share intimate details of the missing soldiers' lives. They provide pictures and descriptions of the soldiers' faces, tattoos, birth marks, and other identifying features, the last text messages soldiers wrote to them, and DNA samples — to test for matches with bodies returned from Russia in prisoner exchanges.

When Kot talks to the families, they often "can't stop crying, and it's hard to engage them in conversation," he says. "I always tell them that hope dies last." The emotional toll they face is deep and excruciating. Russian soldiers have also been known to torture Ukrainian POWs, starving them, and at times sexually assaulting them. (The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has gathered claims from Russian prisoners of war of being tortured, severely beaten, and subjected to sexual violence.) Mental images of what could be happening to their loved ones in captivity often sends family members into hysterics.

At Kot's office, a 21-year-old woman named Nadiia arrives for a scheduled visit. Her father, Pavlo, 46, went missing off the front lines in the eastern Bakhmut region on October 1, 2022. She has come to provide her first DNA sample; an uncle had previously provided one. (The families who work with Kot whom I spoke with asked that their last name be withheld for security reasons; if their soldier is alive and in captivity, they fear speaking out could worsen the soldier's treatment.)

"The last time I spoke to him was during the day," Nadiia tells me of her father. "He didn't say anything special, he just said he would call me again in the evening, but he never did." One week later, her family received a call from a military office informing them that Pavlo had gone missing. Several weeks after that, a soldier serving alongside Pavlo told his brother that their unit had been sent to positions in two groups of four — one group returned and the other did not. Nearly three years later, his case remains open, and his whereabouts and whether he's alive remain unknown.

After a few minutes, a forensic specialist walked into Kot's room with a large black suitcase containing personal protective equipment and a buccal swab kit to take a DNA sample from inside Nadiia's cheek. While the swab takes a few seconds, it can take months to a year to create a DNA profile. Nadiia tells me she is hopeful that her sample will not match with the remains of any of the soldiers recently returned from captivity to Kyiv — which would mean her father could still be alive.

After Nadiia leaves, Kot reaches over to the left side of his desk and grabs a large stack of paper held together by a binder clip — this is the paperwork of a single case.

Once he collects witness statements and DNA samples, Kot goes through various bureaucratic channels of Ukraine's government to receive permission to create the official case of a missing soldier. With that, he can gain access to cellphone records — which can show who the soldier last spoke with and where — as well as letters from the military confirming the soldier is missing.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is another resource investigators rely on. As a neutral body, the ICRC has designated teams in both Moscow and Kyiv that maintain lists of current POWs from both sides of the war. "There are delays. It's not a perfect system. But by and large, this system functions," says Pat Griffiths, a spokesperson for the ICRC Ukraine. It can be months before a POW is entered into the system, and if they have not been accounted for after a prolonged period, the likelihood that the person has been killed increases significantly, Griffiths says. As of June, the ICRC has received requests to account for 134,000 missing people from both Russia and Ukraine since the start of the war. Of those, 14,200 have been told the fate of their loved ones.

Families come to Kot regularly with any fragments of information from their own research. He trawls Telegram and other Russian social media and messaging channels for information about a soldier's whereabouts. In one instance, he found video and photos of one of the missing soldiers who was in Russian captivity. "I quickly informed his mother about this. She was very happy," Kot recalls.

Beyond collecting evidence, all Kot can do as the investigator is wait and comfort the families through their maddening purgatory.

"I never show them that I have reached a dead end," says Kot. "I have not shown and will not show weakness." When he started his job, Kot took every new case "to heart," he says — each family's anguish tormented him. After thousands of meetings with missing soldiers' wives, siblings, parents, and children, he's managed to "stay psychologically resilient," he says, though he still feels each case deeply.

One case that Kot worked on was a 38-year-old soldier named Oleksandr, who went missing from the eastern Pokrovsk region, one of the war's hotspots, on November 22, 2024. Eleven days before his disappearance, Oleksandr married his wife, Nataliia, 37. A few hours into my visit to Kot's office, Nataliia arrives to meet with him.

"No one knew I was getting married because I wasn't sure if his brigade would allow him to attend the ceremony," she tells me with a smile. "After we got married, my mother asked me, 'Why him?' I said, 'Because he can listen to me and understand me." She talks about the hobbies she took on to pass the time: web design, adopting a poodle, learning Turkish for no particular reason. She is 99 percent certain her "soulmate" is alive, she says with conviction.

Nataliia has come to show a Facebook post about some soldiers who went missing with her husband and recently returned from captivity — could Kot locate and interview them? Kot nods as he types notes into Oleksandr's case file on his desktop computer.

Eight days after my visit, Nataliia sends me a text message. She had just heard from Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which interviews POWs upon their return, that two witnesses saw Oleksandr die. She did not specify whether it was on the battlefield or in captivity. "It feels like I'm falling into an abyss," she says on the phone. Months of certainty that her husband was alive were stripped away in a moment.

Kot says that he and other investigators are identifying witnesses and will conduct interviews to confirm that Oleksandr is dead. After that comes the interminable process of returning and identifying his body.

Since 2022, Ukraine has secured the release of 5,700 prisoners of war and civilians from Russia. The Ukrainian police believe there are many thousands more still in Russian captivity, as well as tens of thousands of bodies of Ukrainian soldiers. Most of them have been killed on the front lines; at least 206 have died in captivity, according to the Ukrainian government. Ukraine receives the bodies of around 100 deceased soldiers every two to six weeks, investigators told BI. They are unloaded from vans by Russian government workers in an undisclosed location and collected by their Ukrainian counterparts, who in turn return the bodies of Russian soldiers.

In June, Ukraine received a sudden influx of 6,057 bodies (while Russia received 78, according to Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky) as part of a round of failed ceasefire talks between Kyiv and Moscow in Istanbul. The mass of corpses strained an already delicate system, with hundreds of bodies being brought to morgues throughout the country simultaneously. "As the nature of this conflict changed and rapidly escalated, suddenly you're dealing with a lot more human remains. The forensic infrastructure here risks being overwhelmed," says Griffiths. More than 90 percent of bodies return unlabeled and unidentified, and connecting each to a missing persons report is a lengthy, painstaking endeavor.

On June 26, I visit a morgue on the edge of Kyiv that just received the bodies of 50 servicemen, and meet with Victoriia Konopatska, a 24-year-old senior police investigator. Where Kot focuses primarily on locating missing soldiers who are thought to be alive, Konopatska focuses on identifying the dead upon their return. When the full-scale war began in February 2022, she was in her final year at Ukraine's police academy. She had four months of training left when, in March, she and her classmates graduated early to join the police force.

The smell of decaying corpses in the morgue seeps into the skin, makes your eyes water, and lingers long after you leave the building. Konopatska has been exposed to this smell nearly every day on the job for three and a half years, and has not grown used to it.

In the front room of the morgue, three dead civilians who just died at a local hospital — an elderly man and woman, and a man in his 40s — lie on separate tables. The mortician, a middle-aged woman, carefully dresses them in their funeral clothes: the men in black suits, the woman in a deep blue dress and a headscarf that the mortician delicately wraps around her head and tied just below her chin.

The bodies of the civilians were intact and their eyes and mouths peacefully closed — a stark contrast from the room Konopatska leads me to a few steps away. She is wearing a large white PPE suit, a blue hair net, and a face mask. Underneath all of the dressing, her eyebrows are perfectly shaped, her long lashes painted with mascara, and she has a fresh French manicure. As she stands holding an iPad, Simon Nikolaichuk, a forensic scientist, and his assistant assess the body of an unidentified soldier lying on the metal table. Though the soldier was dressed in the military uniform he had been killed in, the body was partly skeletal and mummified. It has "significant putrefactive changes and is generally reduced to bones and grease," Konopatska says flatly. Identifying it will be challenging.

As Nikolaichuk conducts the autopsy over the next hour, characteristics of the soldier begin to emerge. A rosary is pulled from his jacket, followed by a destroyed cellphone charger, and a pair of reading glasses, which suggests he may have been older. (The average Ukrainian soldier fighting today is 40.) These mementos will be given to the family of the soldier if he is identified and they are notified.

Konopatska types on her iPad each assessment called out to her. "Head injury. Gunshot wound to the head. Damage to the skull bones," says Nikolaichuk. "Broken shoulder blade. Fracture of the right and left shoulder blades. Fracture of the upper third of both humerus bones." He examines the soldier's scalp. "There are remnants of hair up to 0.7 inches long."

Konopatska estimates that she has assessed well over a thousand bodies throughout the war, both civilian and military. She spends the majority of her workdays collecting DNA samples from the bodies of the soldiers returned to Kyiv, up to five per day. "We finish working with some bodies, and others are immediately brought in," she says.

Their assessment of the soldier's body complete, Nikolaichuk and his assistant return the remains to a white bag and carry it to a nearby cargo-sized refrigerator that is filled with dozens of other bodies stacked neatly on shelves. Nikolaichuk walks back to the morgue and quickly looks through the corpses in the three other bags — one dead a few months and partially intact, the man's white beard flowing from his chin; one putrefied; and the other torn to shreds, the skull split in two, likely from an explosion.

Bones and mummified corpses are all that remain of 80 percent of the soldiers' bodies that Russia returns to Ukraine, according to Ihor Kalantai, head of the police unit investigating war crimes. Some return decapitated, have their hands tied, or have stab wounds — all "signs of extrajudicial executions," says Kalantai. Undetonated explosive devices have been found tucked inside the clothes of bodies of Ukrainian soldiers, Kalantai says. A de-miner is now present during every repatriation. Some soldiers, Kalantai says, return as nothing more than a leg, arm, or a mere finger.

Other bodies have been dissected and have pieces of medical waste sewn into them. Bodies have also returned with missing organs. Last spring, when the body of Victoria Roshchyna, a prominent Ukrainian journalist who died in Russian custody at age 27, was returned to Ukraine, her eyes, brain, and parts of her windpipe were reportedly missing.

"It's hard to single out which bodies are difficult to look at," says Konopatska, "because every body is difficult to look at because you understand that someone was waiting for this person at home."

There is a common folklore belief in Ukraine that when a loved one dies, they will visit the dreams of their family members to say goodbye. When families have lost all contact with their relatives on the battlefield, many hold onto that legend, believing that if they have not dreamed of their son, their husband, or their father, then he must still be alive somewhere.

Once Konopatska has taken the DNA samples of the bodies, she brings them to Olha Sydorenko, 33, an investigator at the station's Department of Particularly Serious Crimes. She sends the samples to forensic scientists to create a DNA profile and begins the process of matching the remains to possible relatives.

When there is a match, Sydorenko is tasked with informing families. She has had this conversation with more than 2,000 families. It always begins with a phone call where she introduces herself and asks them to come to her office in Kyiv to discuss their case, a courtesy to deliver life-altering news in-person. Often, though, they're already expecting the worst, and she breaks the news on the call.

"No one wants to believe that their loved one has died," Sydorenko says in her office. Some families require many repeated explanations to fully comprehend that their son or husband has returned home in a body bag. Then she details the condition the body has returned in, so the family can decide whether to view the bodies and begin to make funeral arrangements. Many often choose cremation.

One of Sydorenko's first and most haunting cases, she tells me, was of Vladyslav Lytvynenko, a 27-year-old who went missing on April 7, 2022. Vira Lytvynenko, Vladyslav's mother, received a call from the patronage service of the 12th Special Forces Brigade of the National Guard — a unit known in Ukraine as Azov — informing her that he was killed fighting in Mariupol.

"I felt hysterical, like any mother would," Vira tells me. "We had been waiting for a message from him while he was already gone," she says as her voice breaks. She was then told that the fighting in Mariupol — the site of the heaviest shelling in the war's early months — was too fierce to collect the dead. Azov was forced to surrender in Mariupol to encircling Russian soldiers in May 2022, and more than 2,500 soldiers of the brigade were believed to have been taken as prisoners of war. Russian forces also took the bodies of hundreds of soldiers, including Vladyslav.

Sydorenko first connected with Lytvynenko that summer, and they worked together for months to find a way to bring her son's body home. For hours at a time, the pair looked through the National Police's online catalogs of corpses, which are filled with pictures of remains in morgues throughout Ukraine. Lytvyenko and her husband provided two rounds of DNA samples and pictures of their son's tattoos, one of which is a Viking warrior standing tall in front of skyscrapers, an orange sunset visible in the distance. In mid-October 2022, Sydorenko called Lytvynenko to inform her that they'd found a match: Vladyslav's body was at a morgue in Kyiv.

It was a cold spring when Valdyslav died, Lytvynenko says, and she hoped Russian soldiers would "at least return his body in a proper condition so that I could see him one last time." But the decaying body that Russia had returned bore no resemblance to her son, Sydorenko told her. "Nothing was sacred to them," she says of Russian soldiers who kept Valdyslav's body for months. Lytvynenko chose not to see his remains, in part because Sydorenko advised her against it, and in part because she did not believe her son would want her to see him as the "pieces of rotten flesh" he returned as.

"It's horrible to see any animal or person dead," she says. "And if you see it and they tell you it's your son, I guess humanity hasn't come up with a word to describe that feeling yet."

Additional reporting by Olena Lysenko.

Anna Conkling is a journalist currently based in Kyiv. Her writing has been featured in Rolling Stone, Elle, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere.

• Analysts expect Netflix to post strong revenue and earnings on the heels of its price hikes.
• However, growth from its password-sharing clampdown is slowing.
• Here's what analysts are watching for, including ad-tier growth and its content slate.

Netflix seems poised for a record-setting quarter, even as its crackdown on freeloaders cools off.

Wall Street expects Netflix to report a best-ever $11.1 billion in revenue and $7.08 in earnings per share when it shares second-quarter results on Thursday, based on consensus estimates compiled by S&P Global. That would be up from first-quarter marks of $10.5 billion and $6.61, respectively.

Analysts think Netflix's primary growth drivers this quarter will be the price increases it implemented earlier this year and its budding advertising tier. That tier drove nearly half of Netflix's subscriber growth in the US in the first five months of 2025, according to data firm Antenna.

The fast-growing, cheaper plan is on a strong trajectory and could eventually bring in more revenue per user than the ad-free tier, S&P Global media analyst Melissa Otto told Business Insider.

Price hikes and its ad tier have become Netflix's main growth catalysts as its password-sharing clampdown runs its course.

The streaming giant shattered its subscriber growth record in 2024 when it stopped people from sharing passwords. It generated 41 million net sign-ups last year, including 18.9 million in the fourth quarter.

However, Netflix has likely picked most of that low-hanging fruit. The company no longer shares its subscriber count, though Antenna estimates that its gross monthly additions have leveled off in the US. Its US resubscribe rate has also rebounded, which implies that it's getting fewer first-time sign-ups.

"Netflix has largely run out of individuals who were motivated to pay for Netflix for the first time because they lost access via another household's account," Antenna analysts wrote this week.

A Netflix spokesperson declined to comment ahead of earnings.

Life after the password-sharing crackdown

Netflix analysts are confident that the company can keep growing despite the benefits from its password crackdown wearing off.

"We continue to view Netflix as well-positioned given the company's unmatched scale in streaming, further runway for subscriber growth, significant opportunities in advertising, and sports/live," Bank of America's Jessica Reif Ehrlich wrote in a mid-July note.

Netflix should benefit from a strong second-half content slate that includes new seasons of hits "Wednesday" and "Stranger Things" as well as "Happy Gilmore 2" and a pair of live NFL games on Christmas, Reif Ehrlich wrote. It also has momentum from the new season of "Squid Game."

And although Netflix has lost viewership ground to YouTube in the last year, it's still crushing its paid peers. Its viewership share is about as much as Disney+, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video combined.

"The viewership data has been strong, suggesting that engagement's good," UBS media analyst John Hodulik told BI. He added that this means cancellations should remain low.

Games could be another growth lever. Netflix hasn't mastered gaming yet, but many of its rivals aren't even trying.

"No one's really cracked the code on the streaming gaming, and it would seem that Netflix may be in a great position for that," Otto said.

• It's one thing we can all agree on: Getting a new job is tough right now.
• BI spoke with members of each generation about their career struggles — and how they're coping.
• Entry-level roles are deteriorating, managers are targets for layoffs, and retirement isn't all it's cracked up to be.

America may be divided over millennials spending too much on avocado toast, Gen Zers staring into the void, and boomers hoarding their wealth, but there's one thing that every generation can agree on: career prospects are feeling extra miserable lately.

One Gen Xer told Business Insider of when she learned she was laid off, "The day that I got that news, it was like going to the worst surprise party I've ever been to."

"My dream job might exist," a frustrated Gen Z job seeker said. "But I'm one of 400 people applying for it."

"I keep hearing employers talk about no one wanting to work, and I desperately want to work," said a millennial who struggled to find work for four years. "I can't get someone to ever sit down and talk to me."

It all stems from the current economic moment in which companies are hiring at nearly the lowest rate in a decade and are looking to cut costs where they can, but it feels different depending on your career stage and employment situation.

In recent months, BI has interviewed fed-up job seekers, laid-off managers, and people working past retirement age to pay the bills. Here's how each generation is experiencing the job market in 2025 — and what they're doing to cope.

Gen Z's entry-level opportunities are drying up

The job market for 22- to 27-year-olds with a bachelor's degree or higher "deteriorated noticeably" in the first quarter of this year, the New York Federal Reserve reported. That doesn't come as a surprise to many Gen Z job seekers.

"I was applying and I felt like, 'This is so stupid because I know I'm going to get rejected,'" said 21-year-old Bella Babbitt, a 2024 grad. She told BI that after completing her bachelor's in just three years, it took her hundreds of applications and months of waiting tables, but she finally landed a role in media strategy by networking with a family friend. "My parents have such a different mindset, where they can't comprehend how we've applied to all these jobs and we're not getting anything," she added.

For many of Babbitt's generation, it feels like their traditional pathways to success — a résumé of internships, rigorous classes, and a college degree — aren't translating to stable job offers. Cost-cutting from the White House DOGE office has slashed funding for jobs that ambitious young graduates of earlier generations used to vie for at government agencies, nonprofits, science labs, and public health centers.

AI could make it harder to find entry-level options in tech, and law school demand is rising beyond what the industry can support. White-collar roles at many major corporations have been hit by layoffs or hiring freezes. Early 2020s graduates may have fallen into a hot Great Resignation market, but recent grads aren't so lucky.

Solomon Jones, 26, said he's been unable to land a sports communications role after graduating in May. With $25,000 in student loan debt, he's moved back in with his parents while he continues the job hunt. He's trying to cobble together some freelance writing work — at least until full-time hiring picks up.

"The goal is to obviously get a job in the sports industry, but realistically, I know that life isn't fair," he told BI. "So at this point, I'm just trying to find a job, period."

Zoomers have a rising unemployment rate and are losing confidence in the payoff of a college education, with some pivoting to blue-collar work. The 22-to-27 recent grad group has had a higher unemployment rate than the overall American labor force since 2021 — reversing the typical trend of young grads outperforming the broader labor market that has persisted through past recessions.

"Young people are obviously not one monolithic group. Some are going to college, some started college and didn't finish," Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, previously told BI, adding, "But I don't think people always understand that this is what happens, the sort of 'first hired, first fired' phenomenon."

Millennial and Gen X managers are caught in the Great Flattening

Olivia Cole, 39, feels stuck after getting laid off from her product support role last October.

"As most people can probably relate, it's been difficult finding something that either is an equivalent level or a step up," Cole said. Cole has done everything that she says she's supposed to do: Polishing her résumé and LinkedIn profile, and building out her network. Even so, she's still looking — something she sees across her cohort.

"It does really seem like people are looking for those with a high level of experience or absolute newcomers," Cole said. "And as somebody in the middle, it's been a little difficult, because there's a million of us."

Many millennials looking for mid-career opportunities like Cole could be in trouble: A growing strategy of reducing middle management at Big Tech and small businesses alike is aimed at cutting bureaucracy and costs. As most managers today are millennials or Gen Xers, per a recent Glassdoor analysis, they're potentially on the layoff chopping block. The managers who remain are left with a heavier workload, including a rising number of direct reports.

Gusto, a small and midsize payroll and benefits platform, found that involuntary manager terminations — firings and layoffs — have greatly affected those ages 35 to 44, rising over 400% between January 2022 and September 2024. Job postings for management roles on the job-search platform Indeed are also trending downward.

Some millennials are finding solace in seeking out others in the same boat: After Giovanna Ventola, 35, was laid off three times in three years, she founded a support group for fellow job seekers called Rhize. She said that the majority of group members are over 35; many in that cohort had previously held roles like director or VP, and were six-figure earners, she said.

"They're applying for entry-level jobs because they're at the point where they're like, 'I need to do something," she said.

For Gen X, the financial disruption of an unexpected layoff or career pivot can be especially dire: AARP reported in 2024 that a fifth of not-yet-retired Americans 50 and older had no retirement savings.

After her second layoff in two years, 53-year-old Hilary Nordland is struggling to pay bills and feels like she will be "working forever." "I should be retiring in 12 years, and there's no way that's going to happen," she said. "I have no retirement savings."

Baby boomers increasingly need jobs past retirement age

For the last decade, the number of older Americans working full-time has been trending upward. BI has heard from thousands of older Americans struggling to afford necessities with limited savings and Social Security. Hundreds said they are still working full-time, have picked up part-time shifts to supplement their income, or are actively looking for work.

Herb Osborne, 71, works full-time for a small business that makes olive oil and charcuterie accessories and reads financial documents as a hotel auditor on weekends. He said he has to continue working two jobs to afford the Bay Area's cost of living.

"Financially, for me, it is really almost imperative that I work," he said. "I do work every day in order just to survive. And it's scary now at the age I'm at, because Social Security doesn't cover anything."

A survey published by Harris Poll and the American Staffing Association in 2024 found that 78% of baby boomers believe their age would be a contributing factor when being considered for a new position, and 53% think their age limits their career opportunities. At the same time, LinkedIn reported that about 13% of previously retired baby boomers on the platform listed, then ended, a retirement on their profile in 2023.

Bonnie Cote, 75, is a substitute teacher near Washington, DC. She has decades of education experience and loves the work, but said it's hard to keep finding a gig that pays enough money to supplement her Social Security, especially in her 70s.

"It doesn't matter what age you are," Cote told BI. "You should be able to get a job."

• Jamie Dimon prioritizes family, country, and JPMorgan, with hobbies like hiking and barbecuing.
• Dimon, 69, said he plans to lead JPMorgan as long as he has the energy for it.
• Dimon's hobbies are simpler compared to some of his Wall Street peers.

When he's not in JPMorgan's boardroom, Jamie Dimon says he is out hiking and barbequing.

In an episode of the "Acquired" podcast released on Wednesday, JPMorgan's CEO said that he was taught to always have a purpose. His "hierarchy" of priorities is family — he has three adult daughters and several grandchildren — country, and working at the bank.

Besides that, he has a list of dad-style hobbies.

"One of my daughters said, 'Dad, you need some hobbies.' And I said, 'I do. Hanging out with you, family travel, barbecuing, wine,'" Dimon said.

He added that his family now likes whiskeys and that he loves to read and learn history. He said that he cannot play tennis anymore because of his back, but he goes hiking.

"I don't buy fancy cars and stuff like that, but this gives me purpose in life beyond family and beyond country," Dimon said. He also said that he can't imagine playing golf.

Dimon, 69, is frequently asked about his retirement plans and what succession at the $800 billion bank could look like.

As he usually does, Dimon said on the podcast that he plans to lead the bank as long as he has the "energy" for it.

Still, he shared what he might do when he's no longer at JPMorgan.

"When I'm done with this, I don't know, I'll teach and write. I may write a book like Andrew Russin did," he said, referring to another asset manager. "But I have got to do something. And I'm not going to twiddle my thumbs and smell the flowers."

A representative for Dimon did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Dimon's mainstream American dad hobbies are a contrast from some Wall Street execs' quirky pastimes.

Goldman Sachs' CEO, David Solomon, likes to DJ. Solomon has released remixed tracks through his Instagram account and Spotify. Before 2023, he performed half a dozen times a year, often at high-profile events like Lollapalooza.

Ray Dalio, who founded Bridgewater Associates, said he practices transcendental meditation and is an avid hunter, including large wild animals in Africa.

• Education and hospitality have the highest summer turnover rates relative to other months.
• The youngest workers are the most volatile in employee separations.
• If you're paid less, you're more likely to leave, ADP Research Institute found.

Summer is the season of backyard barbecues, beach days, and baseball games, and if you're in one of these industries, it might be the season of leaving your job.

Data from ADP Research Institute shows that job turnover during the summer months, defined as June through September, jumps compared to the non-summer months. Across all sectors, summer attrition rates, including both voluntary quits and involuntary separations like layoffs, were 0.42 percentage points higher than non-summer rates in the US over the past five years.

The education and leisure and hospitality sectors had the biggest jump in workers leaving their jobs in the summer months. Traditionally high turnover industries like retail see loftier rates, but are far more constant throughout the year.

Education trumps the list with the highest percentage point difference between summer and the rest of the year turnover rate. As the school year closes out, many teachers are laid off or quit to work in different industries for the summer.

The most recent jobs report from the federal government was fueled by what looks like a change to that typical pattern. After seasonal adjustment, which aims to account for those summer layoffs, over 63,000 jobs were added in state and local government education in June.

"Probably what's going on here is that there were smaller-than-expected summer layoffs in the education sector, which could be about teachers or it could also be about support staff, like school bus drivers or custodial staff," Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, said about the June jobs report.

Leisure and hospitality is second on the list, and has the highest summer layoff rate overall. In May, the industry had strong growth thanks to restaurants and bars hiring more employees.

Those in the retail trade have some of the most consistent rates of turnover year-round, with smaller rises in summer months.

Office workers also saw an increase of over half a percentage point in summer turnover compared to the rest of the year. Those in accounting, marketing, sales, and other business services face trends of impending summer layoffs, ADP Research Institute found.

White-collar workers deal with office paranoia year-round, and some look for signs like a manager asking to speak on short notice, or a companywide meeting suddenly appearing on a calendar.

ADP Research Institute found that seasonal and part-time jobs have some of the highest turnover across sectors. Over the summer, full-time employees had a 3.14% turnover rate versus part-time workers' 5.58% rate of attrition.

In leisure and hospitality, the 10 most visited states' turnover rates at 4.61% were shadowed by the 7.69% turnover rate in less preferred destinations. Places like New York, Florida, and California have higher worker retention rates than West Virginia, North Dakota, and Idaho.

"Given tourism's important economic role in these highly visited states, employment in leisure and hospitality likely isn't as seasonal as it might be elsewhere," the ADP Research Institute report read.

Entry-level roles, most common in leisure and hospitality and retail, also have the steepest turnover rates. Those making between $10,000 and $30,000 have an almost 7% turnover rate. People entering these roles are also some of the youngest workers, just finishing school and looking for a summer job. Workers aged 15 to 28 years old, had higher turnover rates than those 29 and older.

Were you laid off, or did you find a new job over the summer? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

Elon Musk's xAI, even more than rival AI startup leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic, is a cash incinerator — and despite the company's soaring valuations, it has little prospect of building significant revenue, let alone profit.

Yes, but: There's one niche of a future AI business ecosystem that xAI fits perfectly. It could end up as the Fox News of the AI infosphere — a right-skewed source of truth for those who view mainstream alternatives as too "woke."

The big picture: Musk is trying to raise an additional $5 billion for xAI, and he's turning to his own companies for cash — including SpaceX and Tesla — presumably because it's convenient and free of strings.

• It could also mean that outside investors are tiring of throwing money at the company, which has already raised more than $20 billion in debt and equity but continues to show little return.

By the numbers: xAI's AI business is expected to bring in $500 million in revenue this year, per Bloomberg, chiefly from API fees and subscriptions.

• Now that Musk has rolled X into xAI, xAI can add the former Twitter's $2.26 billion estimated ad revenue (per eMarketer).
• That figure may look paltry next to the income of social media giants like Meta and YouTube, but it's transformative for xAI's top line.
• The company also made headlines last week with an announcement that it has a deal for "up to $200 million" with the Pentagon, which is exploring uses for advanced AI and has also made similar deals with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

So the revenue line is beginning to move up — but hardly enough to justify the $200 billion valuation that Musk is reportedly seeking from new investors in xAI, or even cover its estimated $1 billion-a-month burn rate.

• The company does have some real assets: Its foundation model, Grok, has matured to a level where, for the moment, it's beating rivals like OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini on a variety of benchmark tests. And its Colossus data center in Memphis is one of the largest AI development facilities in the world today.

But turning those assets into cash flow is going to be very hard.

• The AI model business is ridiculously competitive, with those three rivals all boasting larger customer bases, more impressive research records and better reputations.
• It's unlikely that the U.S. market will support four separate, wildly expensive and largely duplicative frontier-model makers. That would leave Musk's company as the AI equivalent of the losers in the 1990s search engine wars. Who remembers Lycos or Excite?

xAI's biggest advantage is its integration with X. It gets real-time news and information from X users at the same time that it can promote its chatbot's services to them.

• The trouble is, this edge is also an Achilles' heel for xAI, because X itself has become such a troubled media environment.
• Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, he has opened the doors wide to racists, extremists, Nazis and other hate groups — in the name of free speech.
• That's had an impact not only on the social media platform, which has seen an exodus of left-leaning users and nervous advertisers, but also on xAI's Grok, which recently went on a pro-Hitler posting bender.

What's next: The likeliest path for xAI is to continue to cultivate and refine its appeal to the deep red side of America's red-blue split.

• Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic and other startups are all in a race to connect consumers and businesses to AI.
• The key differentiator will be how well they integrate AI with the rest of the tech we use every day — whether that's phones and desktop software, education and medical platforms, or cars and TV sets.

But some potential AI users will also choose based on ideology.

• Many of these users don't want their chatbots telling them that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, that ivermectin is not a cure-all, and that climate change is real.
• There might even be some who don't mind hearing that Hitler was an admirably decisive leader.
• AI makers who want their chatbots to provide a middle-of-the-road consensus reality may not satisfy such users. That opens a lane for Musk's Grok — which can be intentionally provocative and, at one point, was instructed to "not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect."

Of course, it's hard to predict what the size of that market is, or how xAI could tap it for enough revenue to support a ten-figure valuation.

• Fox News has dominated the conservative media for several decades, but at a roughly $24 billion market cap Fox Corporation today is worth 1/8 what Musk is reportedly asking for xAI.

The Senate early Thursday passed President Trump's requested clawback of $9 billion in federal funding for the Public Broadcasting Service, National Public Radio and foreign aid programs.

Why it matters: It's a win for conservative fiscal hawks who wanted to follow on DOGE's work, while Democrats fear the victory for the White House opens the door for more rescissions packages negating bipartisan spending deals.

• The measure passed 51-48 with only Republican support. Two Republicans — Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — voted with Democrats against the bill.
• The package will now need to gain final approval in the House, which is facing a Friday deadline to get the measure to Trump.

The big picture: The GOP's rescissions package takes back money that has already been appropriated by Congress and signed into law by the president.

• The Senate stripped parts of the version the House passed in June, including cuts to PEPFAR — a global health program to prevent HIV and AIDS.
• To secure the support of Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), GOP leaders committed to fund tribal broadcast services in South Dakota.
• Democrats waged a messaging campaign against the bill, hoping to pick off the support of enough Republicans to sink it.

Driving the news: Senators endured hours of yet another vote-a-rama, with Democrats raising numerous amendments to try to undo parts of the bill.

• Collins and Murkowski at times voted in favor of amendments, though none passed.

Between the lines: Democrats worry Trump will ask Congress to approve even larger rescission packages in the future, potentially undermining bipartisan deals to avoid a government shutdown.

• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has warned Republicans against more attempts to rescind federal funding, signaling that could threaten Democrats' support for government funding bills ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline.
• Unlike the rescissions bills, which have a simple majority threshold for passage, any measure to fund the government before the end of September will require Democratic support to get to 60 votes in the Senate.