• Elvi Caperonis was laid off from her Big Tech job in July 2024.
• She used the layoff as an opportunity to focus on other ventures she'd been running on the side.
• Caperonis now runs her own career coaching, content creation, and Airbnb business.

Elvi Caperonis had a dream to work in Big Tech — and after five years and over 100 rejections, she reached it by landing a role at a prominent Magnificent 7 company in 2017.

But in July 2024 — seven years later — Caperonis was laid off.

Instead of her dream morphing into a nightmare, though, Caperonis told Business Insider that the layoff actually boosted her career.

She was able to focus on her own ventures as a career coach, content creator, and Airbnb Superhost and grow her entrepreneurial revenue to six figures in 2024, which Business Insider verified with documentation.

"Now that I work for myself," she said, "I have freedom to live life on my own terms and have discovered more profound happiness."

Working in Big Tech was exhilarating

It wasn't that Caperonis didn't appreciate her Big Tech job. In fact, she loved it.

"I saw world-class people build teams and was always on the cutting edge of technology like AI and machine learning," she said. "I was always fascinated by learning something new and having fun."

Her company felt like more than just a workplace — it was a platform where she thrived on the joy of learning and being constantly challenged, an opportunity she called "genuinely exhilarating."

The role included a lucrative six-figure compensation package, quality health insurance, remote work opportunities, and company parties.

Her LinkedIn kept growing and growing

In January 2020, Caperonis began building her personal brand and business on the side. She created content on LinkedIn to share her personal experiences and practical advice, in hopes of helping others boost their self-confidence and land jobs in the tech industry.

Thanks to a daily posting schedule — balanced with her full-time Big Tech job — and some viral posts, she grew her LinkedIn to 10,000 followers within a few months.

She began charging $150 per coaching session to help job seekers land their dream jobs at companies like Meta, Coinbase, Sonos, Microsoft, and Amazon.

In 2021, she started doing live sessions on LinkedIn to share her career insights and expertise, and in 2022, she grew her LinkedIn follower base to 80,000.

"I struggled to find new ideas but eventually shared my rejection journey in multiple posts, which in total got over 6.5 million views," she said. "It wasn't easy, but sharing my experience and the lessons I learned from it resonated with many people."

After going viral a few more times in 2023, Caperonis' LinkedIn surpassed 100,000 followers, which also brought in new clients. She started posting successful testimonials, which helped her increase her prices to $499 for a package of three coaching sessions.

In March 2024, just prior to her layoff, she secured her first official brand partnership on LinkedIn, which paid her $3,200 for three LinkedIn posts.

"This partnership provided a substantial financial boost and validated the value of my work and the reach of my personal brand," Caperonis said.

Caperonis also began co-hosting on Airbnb with her sister in October 2022 and earned the title of Superhost in 2023. This gave her another income stream alongside her coaching business, earning them $43,911 in revenue in 2023 and nearly $50,000 in 2024.

The layoff turned into an entrepreneurial opportunity

In April 2024, just one month after landing her brand partnership, Caperonis was told that she'd be laid off from her Big Tech job in July.

Instead of dwelling on the adversity, she used it as an opportunity to put her full effort into developing her side gigs.

"The layoff spurred me to tap into my entrepreneurial instincts," Caperonis said.

Coaching and content creation became her full-time job. She started engaging and posting up to twice a day on LinkedIn, and more brands reached out to her for partnerships.

In July 2024, she launched her business, Reinvent Yourself Academy, and the following month she received the LinkedIn Top Voice badge. She now charges clients $5,000 for her formal coaching program.

She is able to balance her time between her various ventures by automating her hosting business as much as possible, spending around 35 hours weekly on content creation and career coaching and five to 10 hours on Airbnb.

Having a backup plan that can't be taken away is crucial

"This journey has shown me that it's possible to turn challenges into opportunities with determination and the right mindset," Caperonis said.

If she could turn back time, she says she would've started building her personal brand on LinkedIn and her business much earlier — and planned her exit from the corporate world sooner.

"I've come to understand that it's essential to create something for yourself that cannot be taken away," Caperonis said. "Since layoffs can happen unexpectedly, having a backup plan is crucial."

Do you have a story to share about life after being laid off? Contact this editor, Jane Zhang, at [email protected].

• Legora is taking the legal world by storm with its AI software for lawyers.
• The Stockholm-born startup recently signed Goodwin as a client and opened a New York City office.
• Now, as Legora bears down on the US market, its chief rival, Harvey, faces real competition.

On a drizzly spring morning stroll through New York's Central Park, Max Junestrand, the 25-year-old Swedish founder behind legal tech startup Legora, opened up about a chip on his shoulder.

He started his company over a year after the founding of Harvey, the OpenAI-backed legal tech startup that has emerged as the apex predator in a fast-growing market for artificial intelligence products for law firms and corporate lawyers. Harvey has enjoyed a close partnership with the ChatGPT maker and secured major law firms as clients.

Now, as Legora bears down on new global markets, Junestrand tells Business Insider his company is gaining ground on chief rival Harvey — with less money and fewer employees.

"We're not here to be some European No. 2," he said. "We're here to play."

Founded in Stockholm in 2023, the startup helps legal professionals work smarter with a digital workspace built on top of large language models. Its application is used in nearly 20 countries by more than 250 clients, including the global firm Bird & Bird and Mannheimer Swartling, Sweden's largest law firm.

Last week, at Legalweek, Legora threw down the gauntlet at Harvey by rolling out new product features aimed at serving global tier-one firms, such as a Microsoft Word add-in. Legora said it had signed Goodwin, a leading law firm for tech deals, as a client. It also opened a new office in New York City, the company's first outpost outside Europe, where Junestrand will be based.

Not long ago, selling software to law firms looked like a losing business for startups. Lawyers worked mostly out of documents that were hard for software to read. They stored those files on physical servers on location for higher security and control over their data. But over the past few years, as even tech-averse lawyers recognize the clear potential of artificial intelligence, a new class of startups is trying their luck delivering software to the legal industry.

As a teenager, Junestrand competed professionally in video games before learning to code, figuring a career in tech could open more doors than esports. In 2020, he met his future cofounders, Sigge Labor, and August Erséus, during a volleyball game in the depths of the pandemic. The roommates shared Junestrand's fascination with machine intelligence and a desire to build.

Labor and Erséus had been toying with software that could complete simpler legal tasks, but the state of large-scale language models at the time limited its usefulness. ChatGPT changed that. "It just became blatantly apparent that this was a paradigm shift," Junestrand said. He left university, and the trio started a company, securing a conference room at a Swedish law firm to work from.

An investor shared on LinkedIn that one year ago, Legora had booked nearly $900,000 in annual recurring revenue, or the yearly value of revenue. Legora declined to share a more recent figure.

To date, Legora has raised more than $35 million in funding from investors such as Benchmark, Redpoint, Y Combinator, and Jack Altman's fund, Alt Capital.

Legora's web app looks like a cross between ChatGPT and a chart maker. Its search bar lets users ask questions about the contents of their internal data and browse the web and case law libraries. The app's killer feature is tabular review. It enables the bulk upload of documents and runs software programs called "agents" to answer specific questions about the contents of those documents.

Junestrand took BI through a demo as a pretend lawyer advising SpaceX on raising a make-believe equity round, in which the company's investors want to know about its financial health before deciding whether to write a check.

Junestrand dragged a folder containing dozens of loan agreements into tabular review. File names filled the far left column. In the next column, Junestrand wrote "loan amount" and clicked a button that expanded his prompt, telling the agents to extract the loan's value from the contract. He repeated these steps to work out the loan term.

The agents tunneled through the loan agreements at blazingly fast speeds. In seconds, the columns filled with the dollar amounts and dates. Junestrand clicked into a field and an agreement appeared in the right pane, showing the section where it gleaned the answer.

"Great software has to be intuitive," Junestand said. "Sadly enough, there's a lot of software in the legal space that looks like it was built in the nineties and doesn't prioritize design and ease of use."

Though he doesn't name them, it's easy to figure out who he's talking about. Two of the biggest players in legal tech are LexisNexis and Thompson Reuters. They boast decades of experience in creating products for legal professionals.

However, the old legal tech guard has one clear advantage over the challengers. LexisNexis and Thompson Reuters are sitting on troves of copyrighted data that feed their legal assistant products.

Sean Fitzpatrick, chief executive of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland, spoke at Legalweek about how this data gives it an edge. "The systems are only as good as the data that sits behind them," he said, "and veracity matters in the law. It matters a lot."

Junestand thinks legacy software providers will struggle to keep pace with ChatGPT-era legal tech. He said the technology is moving too rapidly for the incumbents to evolve. He added that he made a conscious decision to keep Legora's engineering team small and nimble, so they can respond quickly to the latest models and AI trends.

As for its battle with Harvey, Junestrand believes the best product will win over lawyers, even if Harvey's ties to OpenAI help boost its brand and credibility.

"When we started, we were immediately at a disadvantage. We were a year behind," Junestrand said, referring to Harvey's headstart on Legora. "And so pace and speed of execution became the things that we optimized for."

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• Palantir launched its healthcare business four years ago, with two 25-year-olds at the helm.
• The $193 billion data giant builds AI tools for health systems like Mount Sinai and HCA Healthcare.
• Co-lead Jeremy David said healthcare now makes up 15% of Palantir's commercial revenue.

Jeremy David and Drew Goldstein had no healthcare experience when, in their mid-twenties, they set out to use Palantir's software platform to disrupt hospital operations.

Now, they're working with top health systems like Mount Sinai and HCA Healthcare, competing with dozens of healthcare startups in the AI race.

The $193 billion data giant Palantir is best known for its AI-powered military surveillance software, which it sells to customers like the US Department of Defense, and data analysis tools for finance, which it sells to corporate clients like Morgan Stanley.

But Palantir's healthcare business, which launched around four years ago, is picking up steam. David said the healthcare segment now accounts for about 15% of Palantir's commercial revenue, which reached $702 million in 2024. Palantir said it's helped hospitals save millions of dollars with its tech for healthcare revenue optimization and workforce management and improved patient outcomes with tools for everything from sepsis detection to hospital-at-home care.

David and Goldstein attribute the business's rapid growth to a combination of its robust partnerships — Palantir has signed numerous multiyear contracts with health systems such as Cleveland Clinic, Tampa General, and Nebraska Medicine — as well as its focus on AI at a time when, as Goldstein put it, "folks are worried about getting left behind, and starting to question if the partnerships they already had are actually creating any value."

Palantir's unfair advantage in healthcare is obvious: the company has a depth of resources and financial backing at its fingertips rarely afforded to healthcare startups, plus the software capabilities to build personalized AI-powered solutions for health systems.

Palantir isn't entirely pushing out other healthcare companies, however. The data company launched a partnership in March with R1 RCM, the revenue cycle management company acquired by TowerBrook and CD&R in a $8.9 billion take-private deal in August. Palantir also launched a program called HealthStart last year to equip healthcare startups with tools like Palantir's developer platform.

"It's very hard to get access to problems in healthcare because of the monopolistic electronic medical records players and the information security challenges of working with patient health information," Goldstein said. "If we could make it easier for startup teams all over the place to get access to those problems and solve them faster, and democratize that, I think that's valuable for the whole market."

How Palantir is trying to transform healthcare

Palantir kicked off its healthcare push in 2021, working with Cleveland Clinic and Tampa General, when Goldstein and David were both 25 years old.

They were given a tall task: promise these giant healthcare institutions that, in two months, they would deploy Palantir's software customized for healthcare to drive value.

"When we've been cast as the people here to fix the hospital, but we show up as two 25-year-olds, it's a hilarious position to be put in because they hate you by default," David said.

Goldstein and David, now 29 years old, set out to build software for health systems in three buckets: revenue cycle management, staffing and scheduling, and patient capacity management.

For revenue cycle management, Goldstein and David set out to automate the whole process of how hospitals capture and manage revenue — from coding to submitting claims to handling insurance denials. They decided to partner with R1 RCM because its business can help manage the whole RCM process on top of Palantir's platform. In contrast, many startups are only able to tackle a subset of revenue cycle tasks, Goldstein said.

On the workforce management side, Palantir began working with Nashville-based HCA Healthcare in 2023 to create medical provider schedules with AI, taking into consideration clinicians' preferences and other staffing constraints. Palantir says it's now deployed its customized workforce management software across about 75 of the health system's hospitals for more than 40,000 nurses.

While Palantir's 120-person strong healthcare team has worked exclusively with hospitals to date, David said he and Goldstein have been having more conversations about where Palantir could plug into other parts of the healthcare system, like by helping to manage interactions between payers and providers.

"If you can automate and improve the interface between the payer and provider, that market is hundreds of billions of dollars, and no one's doing a good job at it," David said.

Palantir's entry into healthcare hasn't come without criticism. In 2023, the company won a roughly $415 million seven-year contract with the National Health Service in the United Kingdom to create a unified patient data platform. The contract was met with a public outcry over concerns that the data would be mishandled, in part because of Palantir's work with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which human rights groups argued was used to facilitate family separations and deportations.

Goldstein clarified that a separate team inside Palantir works with the NHS, and noted that he hasn't encountered the same degree of data privacy concerns in the US.

In response to mention of the criticisms, he pointed to Palantir CEO Alex Karp's long history of outspoken support of American innovation — and outspoken criticism of Europe's pace of tech development.

"You can find about a million videos of our CEO talking about why America is a hundred times better of a place to solve problems than Europe right now," Goldstein said.

• Google DeepMind uses noncompetes that last as long as a year to stop employees from going to rivals.
• A former DeepMind director commented publicly about the issue last week.
• Several factors, including an employee's seniority and work focus, affect the noncompete length.

The battle for AI talent is so hot that Google would rather give some employees a paid one-year vacation than let them work for a competitor.

Some Google DeepMind staff in the UK are subject to noncompete agreements that prevent them from working for a competitor for up to 12 months after they finish work at Google, according to four former employees with direct knowledge of the matter who asked to remain anonymous because they were not permitted to share these details with the press.

Aggressive noncompetes are one tool tech companies wield to retain a competitive edge in the AI wars, which show no sign of slowing down as companies launch new bleeding-edge models and products at a rapid clip. When an employee signs one, they agree not to work for a competing company for a certain period of time.

Google DeepMind has put some employees with a noncompete on extended garden leave. These employees are still paid by DeepMind but no longer work for it for the duration of the noncompete agreement.

Several factors, including a DeepMind employee's seniority and how critical their work is to the company, determine the length of noncompete clauses, those people said. Two of the former staffers said six-month noncompetes are common among DeepMind employees, including for individual contributors working on Google's Gemini AI models. There have been cases where more senior researchers have received yearlong stipulations, they said.

"Our employment contracts are in line with market standards," a Google spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. "Given the sensitive nature of our work, we use noncompetes selectively to protect our legitimate interests."

As the AI field has blossomed in the past two years with new startups and opportunities at heavyweight tech companies, some DeepMind employees feel their lengthy noncompetes have restricted their movement.

"Who wants to sign you for starting in a year?" said one former DeepMind employee. "That's forever in AI."

Noncompete laws in the US vary by state, though noncompete clauses are unenforceable in California, where Google and several other tech giants are headquartered. New legislation introduced in 2023 expanded California law to ban the enforcement of noncompetes entered into outside the state.

In the UK, where DeepMind's headquarters is located, noncompetes are enforceable if they are deemed reasonable to protect the employer's legitimate business interests.

It can pose a serious challenge to some talent at one of the world's leading AI labs seeking career opportunities elsewhere during a boom period for the industry, particularly as some of DeepMind's competitors, such as OpenAI and Microsoft, grow their UK offices and try to poach staff.

One former DeepMind employee said they were aware of colleagues who considered leaving London for jobs in California just to get out of the noncompete.

'It's abuse of power'

The issue of noncompetes spilled into the public domain last week when Nando de Freitas, Microsoft AI vice president and former DeepMind director, posted a message to DeepMind employees on X.

"Every week one of you reaches out to me in despair to ask me how to escape your notice periods and noncompetes," he wrote. He added that employees unhappy about the terms should reach out to DeepMind leaders, including CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu and senior research director Douglas Eck, whom de Freitas said are "against it."

"Above all don't sign these contracts," de Freitas wrote. "No American corporation should have that much power, especially in Europe. It's abuse of power, which does not justify any end."

The AI talent wars

In the past, the idea of receiving full compensation without working for several months didn't seem so bad to some staff, though in the red-hot fight for talent now happening in the AI field, it risks becoming a problem.

"It's becoming less popular now because there's loads of cool startups that would not be willing to wait six months-plus, so people end up missing out on some good opportunities," said one former DeepMind employee.

A former Google employee said the noncompetes prevalent in the generative AI boom are a stark contrast to those seen in the tech industry in the previous decade, when "people working on some of the highest value systems in the world" could more readily take a job offer elsewhere without being bound by such agreements.

The former employee also drew parallels between noncompetes in AI and those seen in hedge funds, where clauses have proven notoriously aggressive.

"AI is interesting. It seems to be the first time in my career that you have this insane race, like a space race," the former employee said. "People really feel like to be six months ahead, a year ahead, could make all the difference."

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• Ask almost any software engineer and they'll tell you: It's a lot harder to get a coding job now than a few years ago.
• BI spoke with two engineers who offered $10,000 to anyone who'd help them secure a six-figure coding job.
• "The market is not at all what it used to be, and you really have to differentiate yourself a little bit more," one said.

Software engineers Argenis De La Rosa and Ryan Prescott took a creative approach to their job search recently.

"I'll pay someone $10k if they find me a 6 figure software developer role," De La Rosa first posted on LinkedIn.

"I'll draft out a legitimate contract which you and I will sign, and I'll make bi-weekly payments or whatever the payment structure of the job role is, when I get paid, you get paid," he added. "It's that simple. No hidden BS."

He added in his post that it's "a nice bounty especially if you already know a company that is hiring or are a recruiter, or are a developer who wants to give a referral."

Prescott and other job seekers on LinkedIn later joined in and posted the offer themselves.

It's an unusual proposition. While recruiters often get commissions for bringing on new hires, and companies frequently give referral bonuses to employees who recommend an external candidate who gets hired, it's usually not the applicants themselves who shell out for a position filled.

De La Rosa told Business Insider he had the idea one morning as a "Hail Mary."

"I was kind of being a little bit sarcastic, but I guess everyone received it somewhat well, and I just kind of went with it," he said.

The first 24 hours after he posted were "nonstop" messages, he said. De La Rosa said he received everything ranging from "very sketchy" sales pitches to senior engineers from Big Tech companies offering referrals or mentorship.

The software engineer said he lined up three job interviews in quick succession after making his post.

"I've gotten so much career advice like polish your résumé, make a portfolio, try to send these messages to people you don't know — and that doesn't work," De La Rosa said. "This has gotten more attention, ironically enough, than trying to do what they recommend."

Prescott, who saw De La Rosa's post on LinkedIn before posting his own version of it, told BI he was initially skeptical about the idea but ultimately thought that "this could be a really good way to cut through the noise and have my voice heard."

Some people, of course, were trying to cash in on the deal. (Prescott says one guy half-jokingly told him, "I take cash or card.") But what struck him most from the messages he received was the number of people who offered to help but didn't want the money.

"It was really interesting and super heartwarming to see the altruism," he said.

'A new way to approach this market'

Many tech companies overhired during the pandemic and later conducted mass layoffs, flooding the tech job market with thousands of applicants jostling for the same jobs.

Before the pandemic hit, "you could get tech interviews left and right," De La Rosa said. Now, he has to do "so much more" and gets "such a low ROI" on his job search practices.

De La Rosa said his offer is "a new way to approach this market that's just changing in front of our eyes."

"The market is not at all what it used to be, and you really have to differentiate yourself a little bit more," Prescott said. "It basically seems like everything you thought you knew about job hunting a year ago or two years ago, do the opposite."

Employers, it seems, are "looking for unicorns," he said.

"It's not so much, can you do the job? It's can you tick every single bullet point on my job description and there's no room for error," he added.

Prescott says a proposition like his and De La Rosa's "puts more power in the hands of the candidate."

"They have the choice to decide, what is it worth to me to land this role?" he said. "The candidate can decide what it's worth and work those terms out themselves."

To De La Rosa, the math was simple: "If I give up maybe six weeks of work in exchange for an opportunity at a reputable company, I would trade that every day of the week," he said.

Setting yourself apart

Prescott ultimately landed a job after a startup CEO reached out to him and he subsequently went through several rounds of interviews. Suffice it to say, he's not paying his current boss $10,000 to work for him, so the offer in his LinkedIn post was moot anyway.

But it had the desired effect: helping him stand out.

"Anything that's driving traffic to your LinkedIn profile is going to be beneficial in a market where cold applications and more traditional methods of job hunting are just falling flat because of the volume of applicants," Prescott said.

The biggest takeaway they've had from this experience?

"I would really just encourage more people to differentiate themselves in strange and remarkable ways," said Prescott. "I think it takes a degree of confidence and a willingness and ability to take risk to succeed in the market that we're in."

While De La Rosa is still looking for a full-time staff position, he's gotten contract work in the meantime.

He says he stands by "just posting publicly, even if it seems at the moment vulnerable."

"I think people resonate with that," he said. "If you're posting where you're at in your journey, I think a lot of people would generally want to help.

"The interviews I've gotten in the last week alone were more than the last four months."

• I recently visited Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, for the first time.
• I stayed at a five-star hotel in Salt Lake City and a three-star hotel in Park City.
• My rooms were similarly priced, but they offered completely different experiences.

Park City may be Utah's central ski hub, but Salt Lake City offers luxury stays at a lower price.

I visited the area along Utah's Wasatch Front for the first time in January 2025 and booked hotels in both towns that cost about $300 per night.

I spent two nights in Salt Lake City's five-star Grand America Hotel and one night in the Sheraton Park City, a three-star Marriott hotel.

My experiences at each hotel were so different that I couldn't believe they were roughly the same price.

Park City has more luxury hotels and resorts than Salt Lake City — and they typically cost more than double the price.

Home to two world-class ski resorts, Park City is a place where you can wake up and hit the slopes right away. Salt Lake City, however, is about a 40-minute drive from Park City and has fewer five-star hotels that typically come at a lower price point.

Park City has eight five-star hotels listed on Booking.com, with an average nightly rate of $760. Four-star hotels cost roughly $660 per night, and three-star hotels cost $340 on average.

Salt Lake City has only two five-star hotels listed on the same site — the Grand America Hotel, where I stayed, and the Hyatt Regency. The accommodations here cost less than half the average per night, at about $150 for three-star hotels, $220 for four-star hotels, and $310 for five-star hotels.

I spent my first two nights in Utah at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City.

The Grand America Hotel was the first five-star hotel to open in Salt Lake City. It was built in 2001 for a specific reason — to host the 2002 Olympic Committee.

"One of the stipulations to bring the Olympics here was to build a five-star hotel," a hotel representative told Business Insider.

The hotel, known for hosting celebrities and professional athletes, was ranked among the 50 best hotels in the world by CN Traveler's 2024 Reader's Choice Awards.

The Grand America Hotel stretches 24 floors on 10 acres in Downtown Salt Lake City. It has 775 rooms and four tiers of accommodation, with a starting rate of $300 per night during peak season (depending on hotel occupancy), the representative told BI. That rate gets you a 700-square-foot premier room that includes a lounging area, a marble bathroom, and a wall of windows.

I stayed in the second-tier room, an 880-square-foot executive suite that cost $340 a night, though BI received a media rate for the two-night stay.

Aside from the size, the rooms are quite similar.

Then, I spent one night at the Sheraton Park City.

Sheraton Park City is a premium Marriott hotel built in 1983. Before an upgrade in 2019, it was known as the Park City Marriott.

The three-star hotel is about 10-minute drive from world-class ski resorts, Deer Valley and Park City Mountain, and the hotel has a shuttle service, making it a convenient stay for skiers.

A hotel representative told BI that the hotel has 199 rooms and four tiers of accommodation, with a starting rate of $300 during peak season.

I booked the lowest tier — a guest room— for about $300 for one night.

The Grand America Hotel had a posh European feel.

The Grand America Hotel is drenched in old-world glitz and glam. With Italian marble floors, glass chandeliers, and antique decor in every direction, I felt like royalty as I stepped into the lobby.

The Sheraton Park City had more of a southwestern mountain vibe.

The Sheraton Park City had a more modest feel. The lobby had an elevated cowboy-era look, with wood and leather furniture, a stone fireplace, and stacks of logs on the shelves surrounding it.

My executive suite at the Grand America Hotel was 880 square feet and included a living room.

My executive suite at the Grand America Hotel had accents and decor that matched the upscale, European look of the rest of the hotel.

The suite had a large living room with a lounge and desk.

If I had booked the lower room tier for $300 a night, I would have had a smaller, sectioned-off seating area in addition to the bedroom.

Sliding doors in the living room led to the bedroom.

The bedroom felt elegant with antique furniture, one of the coziest king-sized beds I've ever had the pleasure of sleeping on, thanks to a customized mattress, and a small balcony overlooking Salt Lake City.

When I stay at hotels, I love waking up to a wide view of the destination I'm visiting because it gets me excited to start my day of exploring.

My room at the Sheraton Park City was 350 square feet.

My room at the Sheraton Park City had two queen-sized beds across from a dresser and a small work desk. It looked more like a typical hotel room than my suite at the Grand America Hotel. The beds were comfortable, and I appreciated the local artwork on the walls.

I didn't have a balcony, and my room's window faced another side of the building, but I imagine that rooms on higher floors offered better views.

Although it was a bit plain compared to the Grand America Hotel room, my Sheraton Park City accommodation was clean, modern, and functional. It was certainly on par with other three-star hotels I've booked.

A large walk-in closet led to the bathroom at the Grand America Hotel.

The closet felt huge. Inside, I found terry cloth robes with matching slippers and amenities like an iron, steamer, safe, and extra linens.

There was also a vanity on one side of the closet and two mirrored doors that led to the bathroom.

If I had booked the lower-tier room, I would have had a smaller closet and bathroom, yet with all the same amenities as the executive suite.

My room at the Sheraton Park City had a smaller closet in front of the bathroom.

On the way to the bathroom, there was a small closet. It had an iron and ironing board inside. Across from it, I appreciated the brightly lit sink and vanity.

My bathroom at the Grand America Hotel was spacious and coated in marble.

Handpicked Italian marble coated the floors, counters, and some of the walls in the executive suite bathroom.

The bathroom had a soaking tub, a glass-walled shower on one side, and a toilet stall on the other. It was stocked with travel-sized toiletries.

The lower-tier rooms' bathrooms are smaller, but they have the same decor and include a tub and separate shower.

My bathroom was smaller at the Sheraton Park City, but the shower felt larger.

This bathroom was decent for a 3-star hotel. There was no tub, but the shower felt larger than the one in my Grand America suite.

Inside, there were two shower heads and full-sized toiletries.

The Grand America Hotel had indoor and outdoor pools.

The indoor pool was in the 20,000-square-foot Grand Spa, which also has saunas and 18 service rooms. The outdoor pool was surrounded by trimmed trees in a courtyard.

The Sheraton Park City had an indoor atrium pool.

The pool area sat in a courtyard atrium in the middle of the hotel and had an indoor-outdoor feel. Although there was no spa at the Sheraton Park City, the pool area had a hot tub and a sauna.

The Grand America Hotel was packed with amenities.

In addition to the spa, the Grand America Hotel had a fitness center, a European-style coffee shop and bistro, a strip of high-end boutique shops, multiple bars, 24 business venues, and a 35,000-square-foot courtyard with intricate landscaping.

The Sheraton Park City had convenient amenities, too.

With two restaurants, a coffee shop, a convenience store, a fitness center, a game room, a business center, and 11 event venues, the Sheraton Park City had plenty of amenities for a three-star establishment.

After staying at both hotels, I realized I'd rather sacrifice convenience than luxury.

I thought the Sheraton Park City was worth the $300 price point. The three-star hotel would be perfect for a budget traveler who wants to wake up and hit the slopes right away.

But the Grand America Hotel was just as luxurious as hotels that have cost me $1,000 a night or more in other cities.

After a tiring day of winter sports, I imagine retiring to a lavish room for a warm bath before stretching out on a custom mattress would be worth the drive.

• Mint Fantôme is a virtual, anime-style influencer, with 347,000 YouTube subscribers.
• The virtual YouTuber, or VTuber for short, appears as a digital avatar online.
• The creator behind Mint took an untraditional pathway into the entertainment industry.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with the creator behind YouTuber Mint Fantôme, a virtual influencer who appears as an anime character. Like other virtual YouTubers, the creator is anonymous online, but their identity is known to Business Insider. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I play a 19-year-old ghost online.

My anime-style digital avatar goes by many names: Mint, Maid Mint, or Mint Fantôme. I have 347,000 subscribers on YouTube where I livestream my avatar chatting, singing, and playing video games.

This is my full-time career, and it has become all that I do. I'm part of a growing trend of virtual influencers, called VTubers. Like many others, my identity is anonymous.

I recently joked with a friend that our jobs are like the TV show "Severance." The virtual characters we play online are like our "innies," which are the separate workplace identities of the show's characters.

This character I created allows me to have a public persona online without fully sharing my personal self.

I discovered virtual YouTubers several years ago. Many of those I followed were from a Japanese company called Cover Corporation, which owns one of the top VTuber agencies, Hololive.

I found their content really fun to consume. Living in the US, it wasn't until Hololive put out auditions for English-speaking creators that I realized this could be really cool for me to try.

I auditioned, but I didn't get the role. However, through the audition process, I met some independent VTubers who inspired me. I realized you don't have to work with a huge corporation to do this work.

When I started in 2020, I wanted my avatar to be completely separate from my normal self. I told no one, not even friends or family.

Then, as I started to become more popular, some of my friends came across my videos and recognized my voice.

I later told my mom. She still doesn't quite understand it. But she knows I've always loved Japanese culture and anime. She can't believe what she thought was a phase has evolved into my career.

How I make money as a virtual influencer

Most of my income comes from donations on YouTube. That's just out of people's generosity, and it's how I've been able to maintain this as a career. I also sell merchandise and promote brands through sponsorships.

More and more, VTubers are infiltrating Western culture. For example, Hololive's VTubers collaborated with the Los Angeles Dodgers. I've seen other independent VTubers work with hockey teams and at other events where you maybe wouldn't expect to see an anime girl.

I've performed at a couple of live concerts, and I want to do more. At these shows, I'll dance and sing with other VTubers. Online, everybody is just a number and a username in the chat box. But with live events, I can feel a true connection.

What an average day looks like

I typically try to stream for two to four hours a day on YouTube.

Filming is simpler than people think. I use a phone, and there are programs like VTube Studio and VSeeFace that VTubers use to generate their avatars.

I went to school for filmography, so I have some experience. But I also watch a lot of YouTube tutorials.

When I first started, I streamed in my closet. It was a small walk-in closet with good sound insulation. Now, I have my own dedicated streaming room.

When I'm not streaming, I create my own graphics and thumbnails. I scroll through X, where I'll post and check hashtags. I also take notes on my phone on ideas for livestreams or merchandise.

It's hard for me to turn the switch off. Some creators can say they don't go online or on social media at certain times. I don't have strict boundaries like that.

Instead, I log off from my job by browsing my personal Instagram and TikTok accounts, which are centered on my hobbies and interests, such as anime and Japanese culture.

An alternative pathway to entertainment

This passion for anime helped me break into the entertainment industry, which I consider virtual YouTubers part of. As in any aspect of entertainment, so much success is the luck of the draw.

When I'm streaming, I'll see a number on the screen of how many people are watching. Maybe the number says 3,000, but I can't fully comprehend that 3,000 people are watching me. I know that they are people, and I know that their usernames represent a person. But even after all these years, I feel so ordinary. I don't feel like an influencer.

The anonymity that comes with being a VTuber has been really great for me.

I'm not a very public person. I'm very shy, and I have a lot of social anxieties. But chatting for hours a day online has really helped me come out of my comfort zone. I'm so grateful I get to do this job.

• Pediatric surgeon was the highest-paying job in the US based on newly released average pay data.
• Business Insider ranked pay data for hundreds of occupations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Most of the top 20 best-paying gigs, on average, were healthcare jobs.

Pediatric surgeons get paid well on average.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics published on Wednesday new data that shows the average wages and employment estimates for over 800 occupations in May 2024.

With many people searching for jobs, Business Insider looked at the national data to see which jobs had the highest average annual wages. We excluded a set of catchall job categories covering miscellaneous titles because of the lack of specificity.

Most of the 20 top-paying jobs were healthcare occupations, including radiologists and emergency medicine physicians. Their annual averages far exceeded the overall annual average of $67,920.

Below are the top 20, including their annual pay and employment.

20. Orthodontists

Average annual wage: $254,620

Employment: 5,150

19. Family medicine physicians

Average annual wage: $256,830

Employment: 107,950

18. Prosthodontists

Average annual wage: $258,660

Employment: 760

17. Athletes and sports competitors

Average annual wage: $259,750

Employment: 14,370

16. General internal medicine physicians

Average annual wage: $262,710

Employment: 66,640

15. Chief executives

Average annual wage: $262,930

Employment: 211,850

14. Pathologists

Average annual wage: $266,020

Employment: 11,800

13. Psychiatrists

Average annual wage: $269,120

Employment: 24,800

12. Airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers

Average annual wage: $280,570

Employment: 99,300

11. Obstetricians and gynecologists

Average annual wage: $281,130

Employment: 19,900

10. Neurologists

Average annual wage: $286,310

Employment: 7,700

9. Ophthalmologists, except pediatric

Average annual wage: $301,500

Employment: 12,110

8. Emergency medicine physicians

Average annual wage: $320,700

Employment: 33,680

7. Anesthesiologists

Average annual wage: $336,640

Employment: 41,890

6. Dermatologists

Average annual wage: $347,810

Employment: 10,080

5. Radiologists

Average annual wage: $359,820

Employment: 26,290

4. Oral and maxillofacial surgeons

Average annual wage: $360,240

Employment: 5,330

3. Orthopedic surgeons, except pediatric

Average annual wage: $365,060

Employment: 14,160

2. Cardiologists

Average annual wage: $432,490

Employment: 18,020

1. Pediatric surgeons

Average annual wage: $450,810

Employment: 1,050

A few months ago, I began noticing an unusual pattern across my digital feeds. Wherever I scrolled, people kept telling me to play Tetris.

Aspiring thought leaders on LinkedIn touted the game as a tool for honing strategic thinking. On TikTok, it was promoted as a salve for workday anxiety. Reddit users sang its praises, saying it may help prevent flashbacks from traumatizing experiences, such as witnessing a stabbing at Grand Central Terminal or watching a surfer swallowed up by a deadly swell. In the past six months alone, dozens of Reddit posts have suggested Tetris to help with PTSD, accumulating thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments.

I was skeptical. But I quickly realized that I was late to the party. Studies on the game's potential to improve players' mental health and cognition date back to at least the early 2000s. Research on how the brain adapts to playing Tetris goes back even further. In recent years, amid the rise of social media and the modern cult of self-optimization, Tetris has gained new momentum as a better-living gambit. The game has shown up in enough personal development content that its self-help status has graduated from the ultrafringe to the almost mainstream. Somehow, while I was busy living my life, Tetris had become a life hack for business bros, wellness gurus, and plenty of others in between.

But how exactly does it work?

Tetris was created in 1984 as an arcade game in Soviet Moscow by the scientist Alexey Pajitnov. The concept was simple: Players pieced together descending multicolored puzzle blocks to form tidy rows that fell away to clear space for even more blocks, which tumbled from above at an ever-increasing speed — a hypnotic, quick-thinking race against a game-ending pileup. Players couldn't get enough. Within a few years, the video game creator Henk Rogers partnered with Pajitnov and secured a deal to bring Tetris to Nintendo's then new Game Boy devices, cementing the game as an international obsession and a staple of '90s childhoods.

It wasn't long before Tetris devotees began reporting a strange occurrence. The game's cascading blocks would follow them off their screens and show up against the walls of darkened rooms, when they closed their eyes to fall asleep, and even in their dreams. A 1991 study of Tetris players' brain scans found that their cognitive processing while playing the game became more energy-efficient the more they played, suggesting that as they grew their Tetris-playing skills, their brains became ever more primed toward solving the puzzle. Players were able to engage with the game so deeply that they stayed in the zone even after they'd finished playing, the study found, and without virtual Tetris blocks to maneuver, their brains conjured up imaginary ones. In 1994, Wired dubbed this the "Tetris effect."

Multiple studies went on to find that playing Tetris within a critical time window following a traumatic event might reduce the onset, intensity, and frequency of PTSD symptoms. A study published last year found that among 164 Swedish healthcare workers who faced work-related trauma during the pandemic, playing a single 20-minute round of Tetris immediately after focusing on the visual aspect of a traumatic memory led to an average 85.9% drop in intrusive memories five weeks after playing. Tetris players continued showing post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms at about half the rate of nonplayers in follow-ups three and six months later.

Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and mental health podcaster in the Florida Keys, says that the research on Tetris and PTSD aligns with a broader shift in the clinical understanding of how memory consolidation and trauma work together. Earlier in her career, Morin recalls, she was expected to coax patients "to process and debrief" in the aftermath of possibly trauma-inducing experiences, such as an act of violence in the workplace. Instead of helping people move past the event, this approach often made them feel worse, she says. She and her professional peers now recognize that diving headfirst into processing terrible moments right after the fact can exacerbate distress and give way to rumination, which is a known risk factor for developing PTSD.

Playing Tetris, on the other hand, has been found to have the opposite effect. "Tetris takes just enough brainpower that you have to be much more present and can't be worried about the future or rehashing something in the past," Morin says. "Your brain's kind of like a file cabinet, trying to decide which folder to put these memories into. And something about the way that Tetris works makes it so those things don't end up in the 'let's revisit this later' file." In other words, whether through neurocognitive trickery or the sheer force of distraction, playing Tetris may safeguard against locking in the kinds of memories that might become intrusive thoughts down the line. Morin is so enthusiastic about the therapeutic possibilities of Tetris that she recently devoted an entire episode of her podcast to the subject.

Other studies point to further applications for Tetris' magic. Richard Haier, the psychologist who first uncovered the mechanism behind the Tetris effect, found that the cerebral cortices of frequent Tetris players became thicker over time, which could lead to improvements in associated functions such as memory capacity and cognitive development. Another study, published in 2018, found that playing Tetris may help counteract anxiety by inducing a state of flow, or being able to focus deeply on a task. Further research has indicated that these brain changes aren't unique to Tetris, with gamers reporting Tetris effect-like hallucinations from other video games. Repetition and puzzle-solving alter your perception, whether you're fitting together a cascade of colorful blocks or mining for materials to slay the "Minecraft" dragon. But it's the simplicity and accessibility of Tetris that keep new generations of players discovering — and rediscovering — its hypnotic capabilities.

Will Padilla, a 28-year-old content creator and software-as-a-service sales rep in Scottsdale, Arizona, hadn't heard about any of this research when he discovered that playing Tetris helps him push through the trickiest parts of his workday. It was a happy fluke when Padilla decided, on a whim, to queue up the game to keep himself preoccupied one day during the first nerve-racking round of cold calls on the job.

"Cold calls make me really nervous — and everyone who has to make them — because you're calling someone out of the blue," Padilla tells me. "The person could be really rude to you. But it's part of the job." Padilla tried other means of distraction to ease the process, such as squeezing a stress ball, to no avail. With Tetris, he realized he'd found his ideal solution. "It helped me get over the initial 30 seconds of nerves," Padilla says. He went on to share the tip on TikTok with fellow SaaS sellers.

Padilla's explanation for why the game helped aligns with the research. "You're doing this stimulating thing that's not causing more anxiety but is making you think in a very calm and analytical way," he says.

Abhishek Shankar, the founder of a fertility-planning tech startup in Delaware, plays Tetris to clear his mind and sharpen his focus so he can code. "Its fast-paced decision-making gets me into a flow state that carries over to solving complex programming problems," Shankar, 39, tells me. He's even programmed a version of the game for personal use.

Katherine Yan, a 27-year-old engineering manager at Medium who's based in Los Angeles, similarly says that Tetris helps train her brain to quickly recognize patterns and make decisions under pressure. "It's a constant exercise in prioritization, spatial reasoning, and adapting to imperfect conditions — just like managing competing deadlines and priorities or untangling a legacy codebase." Yan, who began playing the game in high school, says she noticed over the years that after playing for even just a few minutes she would return to her work with more focus and faster decision-making capabilities.

Jamie Krenn, an adjunct associate professor of human development at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University's Teachers College, has students play Tetris in her classes every semester to demonstrate how some games can improve problem-solving, spatial reasoning, and working memory by forcing players to think fast and adapt on the fly. "The way Tetris makes you recognize patterns and plan ahead is basically a workout for your brain," Krenn says.

At least some of the surge in awareness over the science of playing Tetris comes down to simple SEO. In 2018, Rogers and a team of Japanese video game developers unveiled a spinoff of the game called "Tetris Effect" — a sly homage to the cognitive phenomenon. Google searches for the term predictably soared when the game came out, a process that repeated with subsequent releases for new gaming consoles over the next five years. It's all but certain that many of the gamers looking for news on the game stumbled upon the research behind the title.

But with growing interest comes expanded misunderstanding. Content creators and even journalists don't always have the scientific background to correctly interpret researchers' studies, which can lead to exaggerated or oversimplified claims, confusion, and backlash. "'Play Tetris' is the new 'Have you tried yoga?' for PTSD and I'm not having any of it," a frustrated Reddit user wrote a couple of years ago in a support channel for complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

It's a problem that spreads far beyond Tetris. "Once an idea that's overly simplistic takes root, it's really hard to challenge that, even if the broader research world knows that that's not true," says Peter Simons, a science journalist and the author of the online publication Mad in America who has written critically about this dynamic. "Once it's in the layperson's mind and culturally out there, everywhere we look, it's really hard for a researcher to say, 'Hey, actually, the literature doesn't support this at all.' Then it sounds like you, the researcher, are the person who has to prove an extreme point of view, even though it's the mainstream cultural view that's extreme and overblown." It's the same hive-mind instinct that feeds conspiracy theories and problematic health advice.

"We'll get interested in pop psychology, and we'll replicate the same error over and over again, spreading misinformation because we don't understand the complexity of what we're reading," he says. "But as we get more excited about it, we'll do it more and more. That, to me, is a societal ill, not a societal good."

Morin sees things differently. From where she stands, the calculus is simple: The research is promising, the game is fun, and, in many cases, it's free to download and play. There's little to lose in trying. "So many other treatments for PTSD come with risks, like medications and even therapy," she tells me. "But who hasn't played Tetris or some other, similar game? You're not out on anything by giving it a shot."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

This is going to be a "strange" year for Pride, Kevin Kilbride says, given everything that's going on. About one-third of New York City Pride's corporate partners are still holding back their sponsorship dollars this year, with just a couple of months to go before the event, explains Kilbride, who handles media and marketing for the organization. "That is unusual," he says. "We've seen folks moving a little bit more cautiously, what they would say is strategically."

Some sponsors have expressed political concerns, pointing to the White House's antagonistic stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion and the current climate more broadly. Others are gesturing at tariffs or general economic instability as the cause for their hesitation in committing big money, which organizers have to take at face value, even if it's hard to imagine the politics aren't part of the calculation. Case in point: Kilbride says that a "pretty significant" corporate sponsor has asked to be a silent partner of this year's New York Pride, though it hasn't scaled back its funding.

"Our businesses have long been a leader in trying to support this community and push this movement forward and more into the spotlight," Kilbride said. "And it's unfortunate that that not across the board seems to be shared by all of the former partners."

LGBTQ+ Pride month is close on the horizon, in June, and organizers of events, marches, and celebrations across the country are in the final stages of securing funding and sponsorships. In contrast to years past, when, if anything, the complaint was that Pride had become too corporate, planners are encountering a much different, colder scenario. This year, businesses are anxious about their involvement. While some are sticking to it, others are scaling back donations or declining to participate entirely. They're scared of the Trump administration's anti-DEI stance and threats of retribution. They're worried about the potential social media backlash. And they're reacting accordingly.

"There's a variety of responses. One is there is obviously retreat," said Bob Witeck, a communications strategist focused on the LGBT business community. "A number of companies have made the decision that this is a fraught environment in which to take part."

San Francisco Pride has had several big sponsors back away this year, including Anheuser-Busch, Comcast, Diageo, and Nissan. It may be on track for a $200,000 shortfall in its anticipated $4.1 million budget. Suzanne Ford, the executive director of San Francisco Pride, said the companies backing away have been wishy-washy about why.

"Obviously, the Trump administration and the war on diversity, equity, and inclusion, I think, has affected some corporations' decisions about who they sponsor," she said. "Some corporations are hedging their bets, not trying to inflame one side or the other and trying to just stay out of the fray."

The public attention on the dropouts has helped inspire other sponsors to jump in and fill the gap, Ford said, including Levi's, which is returning after a three-year hiatus, Benefit Cosmetics, and La Crema wines. As news about withdrawals trickled out, San Francisco Pride also brought in $30,000 in donations from individuals last month, and organizers believe some companies could still make donations even if they choose not to officially sponsor. Pride is a boon for San Francisco: A 2015 economic impact study found it injected $350 million into the local economy every year, thanks to more than half a million visitors attending the two-day celebration. Ten years later, Ford thinks that number could be $1 billion as crowds have continued to grow.

"Pride, over its history, has faced difficult times, and we've always found a way, and we'll find a way now," she said.

A Diageo spokesperson said that Diageo plans to participate in events around Pride in San Francisco, such as offering promotions at bars through its Smirnoff brand. Comcast, Anheuser-Busch, and Nissan did not respond to requests for comment.

Ryan Bos, the executive director of the Capital Pride Alliance in Washington, DC, said a number of sponsors have dropped out of this year's event, including Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm and major federal contractor that could, in theory, find itself in the crosshairs of some of Trump's DEI-related executive actions.

"As you can imagine, being in the nation's capital, a lot of advocates we work with either have federal contracts or definitely receive federal funding," he said.

In an email, a Booz Allen spokesperson said the company is committed to supporting all of its employee communities and celebrating tribute months. They said the decision not to be a headline sponsor this year "does not reflect any pullback of support to this community."

Denver Pride has seen a decrease in funding for its events, which include a festival, parade, and 5K race. Natalie Zanoni, the organization's interim CEO, said in an email that among those who sponsored Denver's 2024 Pride and are coming back this year, average contributions have decreased by 62%. Other sponsors aren't coming back at all. She noted that Denver's Pride is unique in that it doubles as an annual fundraiser for Denver's local LGBTQ+ community center, The Center on Colfax, meaning the decline in sponsorship money will affect more than the size of parade floats. "The decrease in funding we are experiencing puts these critical services at risk, such as mental health support, programming for our trans and gender diverse community, youth, older adults, and more," she said. While they are "disappointed" by the situation, the group doesn't want to call out specific funders. "We also recognize that these decisions do not reflect the views and opinions of everyone within the organizations in question," Zazoni said.

Kojo Modeste, the executive director of Pride Toronto, said that Nissan Canada is the only company that's publicly announced its exit from the city's event. The company said in an email that it was a "local decision solely due to a reevaluation" of its marketing and media activations in a "variety of activities." However, Modeste said "quite a few" other sponsors have quietly pulled out. Many of the corporations haven't provided a detailed justification, though most are based in the US, which, given the current economic headbutting between the two countries, adds another element. "It sends a message without sending the message, without them telling us exactly that they're pulling out for these reasons," Modeste said. "I think there is a level of fear."

Some smaller Canadian sponsors are trying to step in to help fill the gap, which Modeste is grateful for, but their generosity will still leave the organizers with a shortfall. "The cost of doing the festival year after year keeps going up," Modeste said. "Even if we were to gain back 50% of that loss, it is not going to cover that big gap that is left."

It's not just the large Pride events that are seeing pullbacks. Jessica Laney, the president of Pikes Peak Pride in Colorado Springs, said the event has never really had large corporate sponsors. It's generally relied on grassroots support and smaller entities, but they've scaled back this year, too. Pikes Peak is seeing fewer sponsors at their $5,000 and $10,000 tiers, which represent some of their highest levels of giving. Government grants have dried up, too. "Those are pretty much gone now," Laney said. On the more encouraging side, they've had an uptick in smaller contributors, say, at the $1,000 level. "It's kind of like a change off," she said.

Pikes Peak Pride is still below where it was last year in terms of sponsorship dollars, but the group hopes more money will come in. It's being more proactive about outreach and doubling the number of fundraisers it hosts.

Alexander Clark, the board president of 406 Pride, which hosts Billings Pride Fest in Montana, said they've had some new sponsors jump in, including a large local hotel chain, and as of now, one of its five major sponsors is returning — and increasing its donation. As for the other four major donors, Clark said the organizers are taking a cautiously optimistic approach. "As we're approaching some of the bigger sponsors, though, we're expecting to get some pushback, because some of the companies that have participated in the past may not have that same DEI focus," he said.

406 Pride is what Clark admits is a "unique" organization and location, given that it's in a deep-red county in a deep-red state.

"Folks seem to have a 'keep to their own' mentality," he said. If they're part of the queer community, they'll come out, but if not, they "don't really bother with us."

That means in terms of sponsors, it's always been a more thoughtful decision to participate. This year, Clark is hoping partners will come back and then some, because organizers are taking a number of new — and more expensive — safety measures. They're installing concrete barriers instead of wooden ones and are hiring a security firm to back up local police. "I'm not taking any chances this year," he said.

These decisions to scale back Pride support aren't happening in a vacuum — they're taking place in a context when many corporations are afraid to engage in anything that might appear DEI-esque.

The White House has pledged to root out what it's characterized as "illegal DEI" from the federal government, government contractors, and, where possible, private companies and is seeking to make examples out of specific entities it believes have gone too far. Some conservative social media influencers are on the hunt for targets to rile up their followers about. Businesses don't want to be caught up in whatever the controversy of the day is, or the one that pops up tomorrow, or the day after that. This has led a number of major companies to scale back their DEI practices. Some have eliminated or overhauled programs aimed at underrepresented consumers, vendors, and employees, including the LGBTQ+ community, and have scrubbed mention of certain diversity-related terms from their websites, financial filings, and other documentation. Take Target: It faced blowback last year over its Pride merchandise collection and wound up scaling it back, even though the collection wasn't markedly different from anything it had done in previous years.

"If you and I were talking five years ago, the bigger issue was corporate exploitation," Witeck said. "So we're really back to, in a sense, what Pride was originally intended to be. It was sort of a civil rights activation."

He added that some companies, instead of sponsoring celebrations or parades, are donating to community causes instead. "In some respects, that's a positive move," he said.

Fabrice Houdart, a human rights advocate who focuses on LGBTQ+ rights and corporate social responsibility, pointed out that the Trump administration has not targeted Pride, including this year's World Pride, which will happen in Washington, DC. In Houdart's mind, companies may just be taking advantage of the opportunity to walk away from initiatives they were never really that attached to in the first place.

"Right now, the wind is not very pro-LGBT and therefore they're thinking, 'Well, I'm just going to throw out the baby with the bathwater and run away from that community as quickly as I can,'" he said. "In many ways, what it shows is that there was some amateurism in the way the company expressed their values."

All of the Pride organizers I spoke to expressed disappointment about former sponsors' handling of this year's events. Parades, festivals, and other gatherings cost money to put together, and less money may mean they could need to scale back their plans, though, in certain areas, such as security, medical services, and insurance, there's no compromising.

"People are getting the message that Pride is fragile. It always has been and always be," Ford said.

Historically, some corporations have been ahead of the curve on LGBTQ+ rights — General Motors, for example, extended marriage benefits to same-sex couples before same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide. Organizers also said they were starting to look for more grassroots, individual support going forward so that they won't be so reliant on big business and whatever cultural and political tides they're reacting to.

"You've got a free event that we're trying to make as accessible to as many people as we can. It's very, very hard to make that happen without corporate support," Kilbride said. "It's still, I think, going to end up being on the queer community. In my opinion, we are our own sponsors during Pride Month, so I think that's kind of what the future is headed towards."

In the meantime, New York City Pride is planning to get fundraising for this year wrapped by the beginning of May. Some of the attention on sponsors dropping out is bringing some of them back to the table, and there's hope additional visibility could inspire other companies to step up — corporate anxiety works both ways.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• A Ukrainian drone operator said he can text and FaceTime with manufacturers.
• Manufacturers want battlefield feedback and can send replacement parts in a day.
• He said it means Ukrainian drones are typically better fit for the fight than what is made by Western companies.

A Ukrainian drone operator said that he can text and FaceTime with drone manufacturers about how to make and improve the tech, making the weapons better suited for battle.

Dimko Zhluktenko, a drone operator with Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces who has operated both strike and reconnaissance drones, told Business Insider that working with Ukrainian drones "is much easier because of the communication with the manufacturers."

In training, "we would send them videos, pictures, FaceTime or anything" if there were any issues, feedback, or parts that needed to be replaced, he said.

Most of the drones that Ukraine's forces are using to fight back against Russia's invasion are being made in Ukraine, but drone operators are also using ones made in the West, like the US's Switchblade and Turkey's Bayraktar.

Hundreds of Ukrainian companies, from bigger, government-backed operations to smaller ones working out of garages, are working on making a host of different types of drones. And there is a lot of communication with troops about what works and doesn't. It permits rapid iteration.

Zhluktenko said that being able to talk so directly with the manufacturers in Ukraine means that he typically prefers working with Ukrainian drones over Western alternatives.

"Normally having the Ukrainian thing is somewhat better just because you can get it to work faster much faster," he said.

Ukrainian weapon systems are being built and refined for this specific conflict. He said that "it's not fair to say that all foreign stuff is crappy, but at the same time, I know that in most of the cases, if it's Ukrainian, that is somewhat battle-tested and better fit for our specific battlefield."

The problem with working with big Western companies is that there is a "shitload of bureaucracy, and probably you won't get very fair results even after that."

In Ukraine, there's a "short feedback loop," he said, where manufacturers start to design a new drone type, drone alteration, or new drone software, and then they work with the operators to quickly design and prototype the most suitable one. He said that drone operators get direct requests from the manufacturers asking them to fly new drone types. It provides feedback for rapid iterative development.

He said that the drone makers will hand them the drone and the manual, tell them to fly at the range or in battle, and report back. They don't even care if it gets lost, they just want a detailed report on what could be improved so they can make a better product.

It's "essentially market research," he said.

Zhluktenko said that manufacturers "want to come to our places" near the battlefield "and see how we operate. They want to see what is that they can do to make our life easier."

The close communication allows for speedy repairs and replacements too. That allows Ukraine's troops to keep training or fighting without introducing new delays.

Zhluktenko said that sometimes when they have had issues with a drone, "we called the manufacturer and said, 'Guys, we had this kind of issue and something broke off, can we just quickly patch it somehow?'"

"And then they'll say, "no problem at all."

A replacement part can regularly arrive from the company the next day.

"The communication here is tremendously good," Zhluktenko said, noting that they don't have to go through official bureaucratic channels. "It is very direct, and they are very open to help us. They don't need a shit load of documents or anything," he said, telling BI that he hasn't had similar experiences with Western drone manufacturers.

Zhluktenko said that in Ukraine, "manufacturers are acting in their best interest" because if the soldiers think the product is good, the companies "can pitch it to the government, the government can buy it, they could scale the production, and Ukraine can win. I think that is the main motivation here."

A different way of making drones

Different from Russia and many Western nations, the way Ukraine is making its drones comes with a host of advantages and disadvantages.

It breeds innovation and creates a range of drones that Russia has to learn to defeat, but it also creates more work for operators. It is also a lot harder for any individual company to scale up production.

Drones have been used more in Russia's invasion of Ukraine than in any other conflict in history. They have been used for reconnaissance, to track and hit Russian equipment and troops, damage Russian ships at sea, and hit oil refineries in Russia hundreds of miles past the border, among other missions.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine produced 2.2 million drones in 2024 and planned to increase that further in 2025.

But with a smaller military and a smaller population than Russia, Ukraine still needs all the help it can get, and operators are still using Western drones, including ones purchased directly by soldiers or their supporters from other countries.

Ukraine has relied on drones as it dealt with shortages of other equipment, including turning to drones when supplies of ammunition from partners fell short.

Ukraine has received billions of dollars in aid from partners, including the US and Europe, but at times that aid has been insufficient.

Ukraine has increasingly made more of its own weapons as the war has continued in a bid to become more self-sufficient. Its president said 30% of the military equipment it used in 2024 was made domestically.

That matters more as international partners like the US under President Donald Trump become less reliable. Its increased domestic production may not be enough though. Some experts assess Ukraine can only last a few months with no aid from the US.

Europe is boosting defense spending and many allies intend to continue supporting Ukraine, but the US was the single largest individual contributor, and some of the most powerful weaponry it was giving Ukraine has no easy replacement.

• President Donald Trump imposed reciprocal tariffs on more than 180 countries.
• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he thinks it's a fitting response to how the US has been treated.
• Lutnick criticized the European Union's tariffs on American poultry, seafood, and beef.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Wednesday that President Donald Trump's new reciprocal tariffs are just a response to how the US has been treated on trade.

"The European Union won't take chicken from America. They won't take lobsters from America. They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak," Lutnick said on Fox News' "Hannity."

Lutnick added that he thought it was "unbelievable" that other countries weren't buying more goods from America. He also accused other nations of ripping the US off.

"Finally, finally, the man behind the Resolute Desk, the man in the Oval Office, Donald Trump, is finally standing up for our farmers, our ranchers, and our manufacturers," Lutnick said. "To let the world understand — either they buy our products, or don't bother coming here unless you are paying for the right to come."

On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order imposing reciprocal tariffs on countries that have placed tariffs on US goods.

"Reciprocal. That means they do it to us, and we do it to them. Very simple. Can't get any simpler than that," Trump said in his remarks.

Trump said he would charge countries "approximately half" of what those countries have been charging. The tariffs will start at a baseline rate of 10% and affect 185 countries, Trump said.

The European Union was hit with a 20% tariff, while India received a 26% tariff. China received an additional 34% tariff. This is on top of the 20% tariff that Trump had already imposed on China last month, bringing the total to 54%.

Lutnick had called for the use of reciprocal tariffs during his confirmation hearings as commerce secretary in January.

"We are treated horribly by the global trading environment. They all have higher tariffs, non-tariff trade barriers, and subsidies," Lutnick said at his Senate confirmation hearing.

"They treat us poorly. We need to be treated better. We need to be treated with respect, and we can use tariffs to create reciprocity, fairness, and respect," Lutnick continued.

Representatives for Lutnick at the Commerce Department did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• RH's stock plunged 26% after a major tariff announcement.
• The company's CEO cursed when he found out the luxury home furnishing company's stock fell.
• Nearly three-quarters of the company's products come from Asian countries.

RH's CEO had a very relatable reaction when he heard his stock was plunging: "Oh shit."

On an earnings call on Wednesday for the company previously known as Restoration Hardware, Gary Friedman cursed when he found out RH's stock fell 26% after hours as investors reacted to a major tariff announcement.

"We're just really well positioned right now. I think that's the headline. If you're going to bet on somebody in this race, and what's our stock now?" Friedman said. "Oh really? Oh shit, okay. I just looked at the screen."

Friedman said that the stock was hit after Wednesday's "Liberation Day" tariffs were announced because investors recognized the company gets most of its luxury home goods from affected countries.

In the year that ended in February, RH reported that 72% of its products were sourced from Asia, with significant chunks coming from Vietnam and China. The rest of its Asia goods come from India and Indonesia, the company said Wednesday.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced a 34% retaliatory tariff on China and 46% tariffs on Vietnam. India and Indonesia were hit with 26% and 32% in duties, respectively.

Friedman said that other home decor and furnishing businesses were going through a similar challenge.

"I know most of the businesses pretty well," he said. "So we're all in the same boat."

RH acknowledged that tariffs could hit its business in its annual report. The company said in the filing that it had begun moving its supply chain away from higher-tariff countries — but that might not be enough.

"Significant uncertainty exists as to whether and when tariffs may be reduced or imposed, and what countries may be implicated. Given that we cannot reasonably predict the timing or outcomes of trade actions by the US government or other countries, the impact of such actions on our business and results of operations remains uncertain," the company wrote.

On Wednesday's call, Friedman also highlighted the challenging US housing market.

"We've been operating in the worst housing market in almost 50 years," he said.

He said that in 1978, 4.09 million existing homes were sold in the US, which had a population of 223 million. In 2024, 4.06 million existing homes were sold — when the US had 340 million people — which "illuminates just how depressed the housing market has been this past year."

"Despite that fact, we are performing at the level most would expect in a robust housing market," he said.

RH reported a 5% increase in 2024 revenue to $3.18 billion, compared to last year. Its stock is down over 37% so far this year.

Governments use import tariffs to encourage local manufacturing, but they drive up the cost of production for businesses that rely on foreign raw materials. These duties are likely to raise prices for everyday goods Americans use. While companies might choose to absorb a portion of the costs, customers usually shoulder most of the burden.

"April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again," Trump said during Wednesday remarks.

RH did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

• Mike White initially didn't want to cast Blackpink's Lisa in season three of "The White Lotus."
• White was concerned that the music idol — born Lalisa Manobal — was too famous.
• "I'm just used to not having so much attention; we don't need it," White said.

Fans of Blackpink's Lisa almost missed out on seeing their idol in season three of HBO's "The White Lotus."

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published Wednesday, the show's creator, Mike White, shared that he initially didn't want to cast Lisa — born Lalisa Manobal — in the show.

"I did not know who Lisa or Blackpink was. All I knew was that there was a Blackpink girl in 'The Idol,' and I was like, 'We're not doing that,'" White said, referring to Lisa's Blackpink bandmate Jennie Kim, who was in the 2023 HBO series co-created by Sam Levinson.

"Then I found out that there might be security issues, and I was just like, 'No.' They were like, 'She'll audition,'" White said.

One of the producers on the show, David Bernad, added that the team ended up meeting with Lisa in Thailand.

"We had her come meet us in Phuket at a secret location, and at that point, we'd already met with actresses in Bangkok and had someone we were really interested in. But Lisa was so humble and she'd worked so hard on her performance. This was someone fighting for this part," Bernad told the outlet.

While the music star's audition was "amazing," White said he "still didn't want to cast her" in the show because of her fame.

"I'm just used to not having so much attention; we don't need it. But I wanted to be respectful to Thailand. She's like Taylor Swift meets Princess Diana there," White said.

Blackpink is a South Korean girl group consisting of four members — Jennie, Rosé, Lisa, and Jisoo — originally formed in 2016.

Since their debut, the group has taken the world by storm. In 2023, they became the first Korean act to headline Coachella.

Lisa has 105 million Instagram followers, and she was one of the stars included in Vanity Fair's annual Hollywood Issue cover last year — alongside big names like Zendaya, Glen Powell, and Nicole Kidman.

"I've been performing for a long time, and this opportunity came right when I was trying to find a new challenge. They sent over the script, and I sent a tape back," Lisa told The Hollywood Reporter.

The star added that she took acting lessons before flying to Thailand to meet with the show's creators.

"I was so nervous. I brought my mom," Lisa said.

Representatives for Lisa and White did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.

• Tariffs can help the US prepare for conflict since they can lower foreign reliance, Ray Dalio says.
• Dalio wrote on Wednesday that such taxes are "necessary" in times of an international power struggle.
• The billionaire has regularly said he thinks the world is moving into a time of a high risk of war.

Investing mogul Ray Dalio said tariffs aren't just a matter of tax revenue — they're also a way for countries to prepare their economies for times of conflict and war.

As the Trump administration announced reciprocal tariffs on China, the European Union, and dozens of other regions on Wednesday, Dalio wrote in a LinkedIn post that import taxes were "necessary in times of an international great power conflict."

The billionaire's reason? They tend to lower reliance on foreign supply chains.

Dalio, who founded the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, wrote that the tariffs "can reduce both current account and capital account imbalances."

"Which, in plain English, means reducing the dependencies on foreign production and foreign capital, which is especially valued in times of global geopolitical conflicts or wars," the billionaire added.

He wrote that this makes local companies less efficient because global supply chains are stifled but more survivable as long as domestic consumers can still buy enough of their goods.

Dalio's post wasn't specifically dissecting the Trump administration's tariffs, so he's not necessarily saying that the White House introduced these taxes in expectation of war.

Rather, he wrote about tariffs in general, highlighting their typical effects and the potential motivations for governments to introduce such measures.

For example, the billionaire wrote that tariffs tend to bring inflation to the countries that introduce them and stagflation to the world.

But Dalio's point about a potential "international great power conflict" aligns with the billionaire's regular warnings that the world is moving toward a period of great strife and a high risk of war.

The billionaire published a book about this belief in 2021, in which he predicted that US-China competition would bring fundamental, messy changes to how the world is run.

Either way, US debt must be tackled, Dalio says

In his post on Wednesday about tariffs, Dalio recalled another of his usual points about the state of the world: He believes the US government's debt crisis must be solved. The federal debt-to-GDP ratio is about 120%.

"The production, trade, and capital imbalances (most importantly the debts) must come down one way or another, because they are dangerously unsustainable for monetary, economic, and geopolitical reasons," he wrote.

Dalio warned in February that debt would cause a "heart attack" for the US financial system if left to accumulate.

"You're in a high risk of this heart attack, essentially, and now what are you going to do about it?" he said.

He said at the time that while Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would seek to slash the government budget, those efforts alone wouldn't be enough to fix the debt crisis.

Bridgewater Associates and Principles, Dalio's book brand, did not respond to comment requests for Dalio sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

• Vladyslav Plak's school uses a simulator and practice ranges to teach Ukrainians to fight with drones.
• Only a third of people who try the course actually succeed in becoming a drone pilot, he says.
• Playing music and sewing are two skills that often tell Plak that a candidate is the right fit.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Vladyslav Plak, the CEO of Drone Fight Club, a Kyiv-based company that trains combat drone pilots for the Ukrainian military. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Not everyone can learn how to fly a drone to fight the Russians. But over the years of training pilots, I've figured out ways to tell if someone fits the role.

Since Russia invaded my country in 2022, we've worked with thousands of Ukrainians at Drone Fight Club. Only a third of the candidates who come to us make it all the way to certification. We don't just train men; about 15% of our students are women.

Our country's battle drone industry is still young. But we've already found that most people wanting to be combat drone pilots are not ready for the studying required. Our war environment changes quickly and is difficult to navigate, and we don't have enough time to work with people who are not completely suited for the job.

It's like "Top Gun." Be the best, or get out. At the zero line, you don't get a second chance. You are either alive, or you get killed.

Musicians make for great pilots

Being a good combat drone pilot is more complicated than just quick reflexes. It is about being able to make the right decision at the snap of a finger.

When we screen candidates, we tell them to watch two balls: one green and one red. Then, we tell them which ball to catch. If their reaction speed is slower than half a second, it is not fast enough. This is the top requirement for all pilots.

Fine motor skills are also very important because the drone controls are sensitive. If one of our candidates works with a hammer in their day job, they may be good at big movements, but it may be hard for them to be a drone pilot.

However, if they play the piano or a similar instrument, they will usually learn fast. Knowing how to play music is a strong sign you will be a successful drone pilot.

To be good with music, your brain has to be wired to think ahead. You have to multitask and plan your next steps while you are already using your fingers for finer movements.

When you know how to think ahead, your choices will be made with foresight. Those choices matter when you fly in battle.

Women who excel at sewing are also often great combat drone pilots. Here, it's the same. They need to think ahead to envision the bigger picture of what they want their clothing material to look like while simultaneously making decisions and using fine finger movements.

Generally, our good combat drone pilots are also people who can focus on the task at hand. If your mind is jumping between everything you see, you will lose your concentration.

From the simulator to the range

At Drone Fight Club, basic courses last a minimum of three weeks and have an exam each week. If you fail one exam, you are dropped from the class and advised to repeat the course.

Lessons at our school are split between our simulator, theory lessons, and indoor and outdoor practice ranges.

Our simulator, Drone Fight Simulator, is made to work with two pilots who can team up, and the scenarios are all based on the real missions that our guys fought.

The same rules that we fight with on the front lines are put in our simulator. When the soldiers come back, they tell us exactly what happened, and we update the simulator with their battles.

Just like with learning to fly a plane, you go through a pre-mission checklist, with things like checking the propellers and the data link. On the battlefield, if you forget one of these things, your mission can be a total failure.

After using the simulator, students also go onto our target ranges. Each is in Ukraine and is up to four kilometers (2.5 miles) long.

Our space is limited because of the war, but it's important that the range is large. In the war, our enemy can be 20 kilometers away. To effectively send a drone into combat, you have to understand what it means to fly long distances over different terrain, in different weather, and with jammers affecting your drone.

When this war ends, we might start to help outside nations and militaries with their drones. We will be glad to help friendly nations defend themselves.

It's not a matter of whether the war will end, but when it will end. I believe that this war must stop soon. It is costing too many lives.

• A Fitch economist just issued a warning about recessions globally.
• He said many countries around the world could experience a recession due to new US import tariffs.
• US President Donald Trump announced sweeping new import tariffs on all countries ranging from 10% to 49%.

Many countries around the world are likely to face economic downturns following US President Donald Trump's new tariffs on imports, an economist said.

"This is a game changer, not only for the US economy but for the global economy. Many countries will likely end up in a recession," wrote Olu Sonola, the head of US economic research at Fitch Ratings, in a note on Wednesday.

Sonolo's assessment came after Trump announced tariffs of 10% to 49% on imports from all countries with tariffs on US goods.

The new levies bring the US's tariff rate to around 22% — a level last seen around 1910, according to Fitch's analysis. It's also sharply higher than 2024's 2.5% rate.

"You can throw most forecasts out the door, if this tariff rate stays on for an extended period of time," wrote Sonola.

It's unclear how long these tariffs could last. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bloomberg in a Wednesday interview that Wednesday's tariffs were "the high end of the number, barring retaliation."

"We'll see where it goes from here," Bessent said.

Asia is hit particularly hard. The region's largest economy, China, faces 54% levies, including 34% in reciprocal tariff announced on Wednesday and pre-existing duties of 20%.

US allies Japan and South Korea face 24% and 25% in reciprocal tariffs, respectively. India faces 26% duties.

Southeast Asian countries — many of which have become supply chain hubs for companies diversifying manufacturing activities from China — are some of the most impacted by the new US tariffs.

Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia face tariffs of 46%, 36%, 32%, and 24%, respectively.

Meanwhile, Trump hit the European Union, a key ally, with 20% in tariffs.

• President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on over 180 countries.
• "Shark Tank" star Mark Cuban said people should "buy lots of consumables" now before prices go up.
• Cuban said retailers will raise prices and "blame it on tariffs" even if their goods are US made.

Mark Cuban has a suggestion for Americans: "Buy lots of consumables now."

Cuban made a post on Bluesky on Wednesday shortly after President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs that would hit more than 180 countries:

"It's not a bad idea to go to the local Walmart or big box retailer and buy lots of consumables now. From toothpaste to soap, anything you can find storage space for, buy before they have to replenish inventory," Cuban wrote.

"Even if it's made in the USA, they will jack up the price and blame it on tariffs," Cuban added.

Cuban declined to comment further when approached by Business Insider.

On Wednesday, Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on all countries that have imposed tariffs on US goods. The tariffs, which Trump said will start at a baseline rate of 10%, will affect 185 countries.

"April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again," Trump said.

While companies might absorb some of the cost increases from tariffs, American consumers are likely to see higher prices on items like cars and groceries.

Last month, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told reporters that "a good part" of the Fed's rising inflation forecast stems from Trump's tariff plans.

Experts BI spoke to, however, said Cuban's concerns that tariffs would raise prices are valid — but panic buying may hurt supply chains and cause prices to go up, too.

"Just as I said during COVID, no one should be panic-buying toilet paper and Clorox, and no one should be doing that now," Margaret Kidd, an associate professor of supply chain and logistics technology at the University of Houston, told BI.

Kidd said consumers need to be "conservative with our resources" since price increases are "happening across the board."

"We don't know how this is going to play out," Kidd said.

Chris Tang, a UCLA professor and expert in global supply chain management, told BI that Cuban's suggestion could result in "bigger problems."

"This kind of shift in demand would actually exacerbate this price increase. If the demand is more stable, then the price is more stable. If everyone starts stocking up toothpaste and toilet paper, the prices go higher," Tang said.

To be sure, this isn't the first time Cuban has been critical of Trump's tariff policies. The "Shark Tank" star endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign last year, calling her a "pro-business" candidate.

In September, Trump said he would impose a 200% tariff on John Deere if the agriculture equipment company moved its manufacturing to Mexico.

"This Lack of Understanding of Business is insane," Cuban wrote in an X post then.

Imposing higher tariffs on American companies than their Chinese counterparts meant that "Chinese products will be cheaper to sell in the US than the American company," Cuban added.

"Good way to destroy a legendary American company and increase costs to American buyers," Cuban wrote.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment from BI.

• Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs took aim at an unlikely party — Antarctic wildlife.
• The president imposed a 10% tariff on remote Australian territories near Antarctica.
• One affected territory was the Heard and McDonald Islands, inhabited only by penguins and seals.

President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs on Wednesday took aim at unlikely targets — a collection of remote Antarctic territories uninhibited by humans and best known for penguins, seabirds, and glaciers.

At the press conference held at the White House Rose Garden, Trump revealed a large poster as a visual aid for his announcement. The poster displayed tariffs and other "currency manipulation and trade barriers" that countries have supposedly imposed on the US.

The column beside that showed his reciprocal tariffs on those countries, ranging from 10% to 50%.

Among them were the Heard and McDonald Islands, which, notably, are not countries but Australian external territories with no permanent human residents.

According to Trump's poster, the Heard and McDonald Islands had imposed a 10% tariff on the US. The White House confirmed to BI that the islands were hit with reciprocal tariffs because they are Australian territories.

Located in the southern Indian Ocean, the Heard and McDonald Islands span roughly 37,000 hectares — slightly larger than Philadelphia. They are covered in glaciers and volcanic rocks and are home to large populations of rockhopper penguins and their predator, the southern elephant seals.

The islands are located about 2,500 miles southwest of Perth, Australia. The territory is managed by the Australian Antarctic Division, which oversees conservation efforts and climate research.

The islands are also recognized for their natural values and are protected under the World Heritage Convention.

The Christmas Island and Cocos Keeling Islands, which are also Australian external territories, were hit with 10% tariffs. According to the latest available data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Cocos Keeling Islands have a human population of less than 600 people.

Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs hit some countries harder than others. China was hit with a 32% tariff, the European Union with 20%, and India with 26%. Australia, like its external territories, was hit with a 10% tariff.

In response to a request for comment from BI, representatives for the Australian Antarctic Division directed BI to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which did not respond.

• President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced sweeping tariffs on imports of goods from around the globe.
• Two countries, Canada and Mexico, were notably spared from the latest round of tariffs.
• However, the two neighboring nations are still subject to pre-existing 25% tariffs.

President Donald Trump's latest round of tariffs had two surprising omissions: Mexico and Canada.

Many countries, including China, were slapped with large reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday. After Trump's announcement, CNBC reported that Chinese goods could receive a 54% tariff when combining the new tariffs (34%) with ones that have been previously announced. European Union goods will be subject to a new 20% tariff.

According to the White House, this doesn't mean the US's neighbors are off scot-free. Pre-existing 25% tariffs on most Mexican and Canadian goods will remain.

USMCA and Trump's previous tariffs

Under Trump's previous order, a 25% tariff was applied to all Mexican and Canadian goods that are not compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

The White House has said the tariffs are necessary because the two countries are not doing enough to stop illegal immigration and the smuggling of fentanyl into the United States from the northern and southern borders. Leaders of both countries have disputed this claim.

The USMCA trade deal, which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement in 2020, maintains NAFTA's zero-tariff treatment for most agricultural products, textiles, apparel, and other goods that meet the trade agreement's rules of origin.

Non-compliant energy and potash from the bordering nations remain subject to a 10% tariff; the latter was viewed as the White House bowing to pressure from the farm industry worried about a key ingredient in fertilizers.

Chris Tang, a UCLA professor and expert in global supply chain management and the impact of regulatory policies, told Business Insider the Trump administration's choice to leave Canada and Mexico off the tariffs list on Wednesday may be a symbol that the president recognizes the neighboring nations' significance to the US economy — but it's also likely a negotiation tactic.

"So, for example, right now, the products that comply with the USMCA are still tariff-free," Tang said. "But that's temporary. Trump has said, 'Well, that may adjust.' And that gives him still some wiggle room to negotiate."

If Trump's prior order were terminated, a spokesperson for the White House told Business Insider all non-USMCA compliant goods would be reduced to a 12% tariff.

Margaret Kidd, an instructional associate professor of supply chain and logistics technology at the University of Houston, told Business Insider, "It's not in our best interest for the United States to alienate our two closest trading partners."

She added that there was about $945 billion in trade between Mexico and the US in 2024, with most of the products exchanged flowing through Texas. The tariffs on the southern country, she said, have an outsized effect on the border states, which rely on the local economy built around international trade.

"It's all intermingled," Kidd said.

Tang said he's hopeful that the omission of Canada and Mexico from Wednesday's tariffs could act as a sort of olive branch with the nation's allies to soothe the trade tensions that have increased since Trump took office.

"Really, our economies are interlinked," Tang said. "So, hopefully, they can really sit down and work it out because these are our allies, our neighbors — this is very important. So I hope there is a possibility that these three countries can work together."