• Amir Satvat created a free website with resources for laid-off video-game industry workers.
• The games industry has faced significant layoffs, with an estimated 37,600 jobs lost since 2022.
• Satvat's successful mid-life pivot to gaming made him confident he could be a de facto career guru.

A few years after Amir Satvat landed his first video-game job at the age of 38, layoffs started piling up across the industry at companies such as Xbox maker Microsoft and publisher Electronic Arts. Seeing many of his new peers let go, he became motivated to lend a hand.

Satvat built a website and filled it with a range of free resources tailored for out-of-work game talent. It includes two still-growing lists — one of job postings and another with contact information for hundreds of people he enlisted to provide support, such as résumé reviews and mock interviews.

"I was like, what if I made the most comprehensive job listing site ever?" Satvat told Business Insider of his thinking when he got started on the initiative in late 2022. "I'm good at modeling, scraping the internet."

Satvat also created a Discord group for the site's users to network with each other and he's given away thousands of tickets to industry events that he acquired by partnering with their organizers. He said he doesn't charge or make any money off his career site, describing it as a purely philanthropic side hustle.

Based on user feedback, Satvat said his efforts to date appear to have helped around 3,900 ousted game-industry workers find new jobs, a feat that earned him the inaugural Game Changer award at last year's annual Game Awards show in Los Angeles and this year's Giving Award from the nonprofit Games for Change in New York.

Those honors come as the game industry has been grappling with an exceptionally high volume of layoffs. An estimated 37,600 jobs have been shed since 2022, according to an online tally of termination announcements and media reports compiled by Farhan Noor, a technical artist in California.

Like employers in many other industries, game companies overhired during the pandemic but other factors have contributed to the cuts, too, such as rising production and marketing costs.

Breaking into the video-game biz

Satvat has been a gamer since he was a kid, and by high school, he knew he wanted to work in the industry despite not having artistic inclinations. "I just liked business stuff," he said.

But after earning undergraduate and graduate business degrees, he couldn't find any game jobs near where he lived on the East Coast, and staying close to family was a nonnegotiable. "I come from a very tight knit diaspora of a Persian community," he said.

Satvat spent several years in business-development roles outside gaming, most recently in a remote one at Amazon's cloud-computing unit. In 2021, after his first year at Amazon, a colleague introduced him to Ethan Evans, a leader in the company's gaming division.

Satvat explained that he was a devoted player of franchises like "World of Warcraft" and "The Legend of Zelda," and the conversation ultimately landed him the kind of job he'd long desired.

"It was transparent how much he knew the [game] community and loved it," said Evans, who also didn't start his career in gaming and is now an executive coach. Satvat "wasn't trying to get a promotion. He was trying to move from one thing to another to get closer to something he wanted to do."

About a year later, though, Satvat reluctantly resigned from Amazon because the Seattle-based company began mandating in-office attendance, which meant he'd have to relocate.

He said he landed his current job, a remote business-development position at Chinese game giant Tencent. The person who previously had it reached out over LinkedIn to say he'd just left the company and that Satvat should apply for the role. Satvat later learned that this person found him through mutual LinkedIn connections and was aware of his career site.

Now 43, married, and the father of three boys, Satvat works out of his home in Connecticut and continues to spend about 15 to 20 hours every week updating his career site. He also gets help from about 20 volunteers who are aligned with the project's mission of "empowering gamers at every stage of their career."

Satvat told BI that it was his successful mid-life pivot to gaming from enterprise software and earlier, healthcare, that made him confident he could become a de facto career guru. When asked for his best advice for job seekers, including those looking to change industries, he pointed to old-fashioned networking.

"Spend all your time meeting people," Satvat said. "Every single job I've gotten has been through a relationship."

• I wanted to attend my cousin's wedding, but was concerned about travel costs.
• When I found out kids weren't invited, I scrambled to find a babysitter.
• I changed my mind about going at all when I learned there was no rehearsal dinner.

Outside a café, a stranger and I struck up a conversation. Somehow, it turned to weddings. I explained to her that my cousin was getting married in Chicago this summer, and I was considering going, but it'd be pricey to take my entire family.

"You should go," she said, her eyes boring into mine. "I have learned over the years how important it is to take every opportunity to be with family."

With that conviction, I began planning how to make the trip affordable by using credit card points and asking to stay with the bride's parents, my aunt and uncle, in the Chicago area. I decided we could make the trip work because, as the stranger said, you can't put a price on family time.

Then I called my mom and learned that my aunt and uncle's house had already been claimed. A setback, but I'd see if I'd accrued enough points to cover the hotel.

When the invitation came, it was addressed to only my husband and me. In "etiquette land," that meant my kids were not invited to the wedding.

I respect the decision not to have children at a wedding — it saves money and there's something fun about an adult-only celebration. Still, it does make it difficult for us out-of-towners, who are left with a few less-than-desirable options: either taking the trip without children, hiring a stranger, or bringing a babysitter with us.

In my situation, each option felt complicated. Leaving town without my children meant missing out on the summer memories I had been hoping to make in Chicago as a complete unit. Hiring a stranger in an unfamiliar city felt too unsettling, while bringing a babysitter along meant increasing the trip's already higher-than-anticipated costs.

Then I learned there wouldn't be a rehearsal dinner. That was the last straw — I had to decline the invite.

Rehearsal dinners are one of the most underrated parts of a wedding celebration

I love rehearsal dinners. They feel like a chance to celebrate the bride and groom in a more relaxed environment because, let's face it, wedding days are such a blur. The bride and groom are often pulled in a hundred directions for photographs, formal dances, and toasts, among other things. As a guest, I've never managed to do more than offer them a quick hug or congratulations.

The rehearsal dinner, however, is a break from the chaos — a chance to connect and have a meaningful conversation with the bridal party and family members. They don't need to be hosted at a Michelin-starred restaurant either. In my experience, they are just an excuse to have a mini family reunion.

At my sister's dress rehearsal, I had a long conversation with my great-uncle, connecting over our mutual love of history. It was one of the last times I saw him before he passed away.

Without a rehearsal dinner, we will spend less quality time with everyone who has traveled far and wide to be there, and I know I won't get to see the bride much anyway. I love my cousin, and I'm sad to miss out, but I know we will visit again at a later time when we can spend more quality time together, rather than a rushed "Hi, thanks for coming to our wedding."

So, I sent the couple a nice gift and plan to gush over the wedding photos when they're posted. Who knows, maybe I'll still eat an honorary piece of cake that night and raise a toast to their union.

• Trump administration policies could deter international visitors ahead of events like the World Cup.
• The Big Beautiful Bill increased visa fees and cut funding to the group that promotes US travel.
• Travel associations say the US also has an image issue that the White House should address.

Major moneymakers for the travel industry are on the horizon, and with them, billions of dollars from overseas into the US.

But the potential windfall from those events could be at risk.

President Donald Trump's policies — and the perception of his policies — could cause some international visitors to rethink travel to the US altogether. This is happening right before several major events that are expected to rake in tourism dollars, including the FIFA World Cup and America's 250th birthday next year, and the Summer Olympics in 2028.

"The overall picture right now is kind of a perfect storm," Lisa Simon, executive director of the International Inbound Travel Association, told Business Insider.

Trump's immigration policies and ICE crackdowns have some international visitors concerned that they aren't welcome in the US anymore. Meanwhile, changes passed in the Big Beautiful Bill, including an increase in visa fees and a funding cut for the organization that promotes tourism to the US, could lead to a further decline in international visitors.

Even without major events like the World Cup, tourism is big business in the US. Travel generated $1.3 trillion in spending in the US in 2024, according to a report from the US Travel Association, and supported 15 million jobs. It's also one of the US's largest service exports, drawing $181 billion in spending from international inbound travelers in 2024.

But the industry has already taken a hit under Trump. Simon said international travel to the US was down more than 6% year-to-date. Noting that foreign visitors typically book far in advance, she said the second half of the year and into next year look even worse, with some IITA members reporting booking declines as high as 40 to 60% in some markets.

While the US is still a top destination for international travelers, its market share has already been shrinking due to other destinations growing faster in popularity, she said.

The US's loss is also another country's gain, and Simon said destinations in Europe and Asia are already winning over travelers who are choosing to skip the US. China, for instance, has been opening up visa-free entry to more countries, drawing more visitors — and their money.

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

The Big Beautiful Bill makes visiting the US more expensive for some

Erik Hansen, senior vice president, government relations, at the US Travel Association, told BI that surveys consistently show there are two primary factors that deter foreign visitors to the US: first, cost, and second, whether the US is a welcoming destination.

"For the One Big Beautiful Bill, it set us back in both areas," Hansen said.

The recently passed and signed spending bill adds to the cost barrier for foreign visitors. For travelers visiting from countries for which the US has waived visas, such as Australia, France, and South Korea, the fee for their travel authorization, or ESTA, was increased from $21 to $40. But for travelers from countries that require tourist visas, like China, Brazil, and India, a Visa Integrity fee of $250 was introduced. That fee is on top of the existing $185 tourist visa, making the new cost $435.

That means a family of four would be spending an additional $1,000 on fees before even entering the US. Hansen said that's $1,000 that's not being spent at American businesses.

The spending bill also cut match funding to Brand USA, the marketing organization that promotes travel to the US, from $100 million to $20 million. Hansen said Brand USA is "our megaphones for welcoming the world and encouraging people to come to the United States."

He said a lot of travel businesses and destinations also count on Brand USA to sell them to international markets, adding it's likely to be smaller and more rural destinations, many of which are represented by Republicans in Congress, to suffer the most from the funding cut.

An image and messaging issue

Simon and Hansen noted that, with the exception of countries affected by the travel ban, the Trump administration has not officially changed the rules for tourists visiting the US.

Still, stories of immigration crackdowns and international travelers having run-ins with ICE, or even being denied entry to the US on some occasions, have many international visitors feeling unwelcome. Several countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom, and Portugal, have even issued warnings or advisories to their citizens about visiting the US.

"I think the Trump administration's focus on illegal immigration has been misinterpreted by many people abroad as they don't want any foreign visitors here, but that's absolutely not the case," Hansen said.

The White House has established a World Cup task force with the goal of ensuring "a successful hosting of world-class international events that reflect the values, security, and hospitality of the United States of America."

Hansen said he has also spoken to cabinet officials who said they share the goal of making the US the best destination for international travel.

But there has been some less-than-friendly messaging, too.

"We want them to come, we want them to celebrate, we want them to watch the game," Vice President JD Vance said during the task force's first meeting in May. "But when the time is up, they'll have to go home. Otherwise, they'll have to talk to Secretary Noem."

The nod to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, one of the faces of Trump's deportation efforts, could be interpreted as not very welcoming.

"It's not that it's necessarily a totally negative message, it's just not the friendliest," Simon said, adding that the administration should focus on getting a welcoming message out.

In addition to pushing for a welcoming message, the US Travel Association is also appealing to the White House and Congress to restore Brand USA funding and cut the increased visa fees, Hansen said.

He added that making it more expensive to come to the US "doesn't make any sense" given the administration's stated goals of growing US exports and lessening trade deficits.

"That's a self-imposed tariff on one of our largest exports," he said.

• Chris Williams is an ex-VP of HR at Microsoft and has over 40 years of executive experience.
• He acknowledges that AI is fueling both chaos and opportunity in the tech industry.
• Williams said despite disruptions, learning has never been easier and there's more money out there.

Tech layoffs are the new normal. The headlines come fast: Meta, Google, Salesforce, and, just recently, Microsoft, are cutting thousands. The jobs are gone, and for many, so is the optimism.

I don't want to minimize the widespread pain for tech workers. But I do see three rays of hope that offer a reason for some optimism, based on my background as the former VP of HR for Microsoft and 40 years of business leadership experience.

Change means opportunity for expansion

AI is fueling both the chaos and the opportunity. Thanks to AI, tech firms are seeing massive productivity gains and doing more with fewer people. Competitive and shareholder pressure means layoffs, but every breakthrough needs people to build and implement it.

Yes, the auto industry displaced carriage makers, but it also absorbed their skills and created countless more jobs. AI could follow the same curve: short-term disruption, long-term expansion.

The tech companies, while laying off some, are hiring many others to drive their own AI products. Other companies need help taking advantage of AI. The first wave of easy adoptions may have crested, yet for many firms, the reinvention of their businesses to fully leverage AI awaits the people who can help them do that.

Further, cataclysmic change often leads to vast expansion. Automobiles weren't simply a one-to-one replacement for carriages; they democratized transportation and led to the expansion of entire industries: huge investments in road building and major increases in travel, to name just two. Perhaps it's too soon to tell where that expansion comes from with AI, but I believe it's out there.

AI is laying waste to many traditional white-collar jobs. But for those who are willing to adapt, there's an entire new frontier of opportunity.

Learning has never been easier

An interesting twist of the internet-obsessed and AI-focused era is that learning has never been easier. There are resources everywhere to help you transition into a skilled AI practitioner.

You don't have to enroll in expensive courses, get advanced degrees, or endure yearslong apprenticeships like many other professions; you just need a laptop. There are videos, websites, and forums teeming with everything you ever wanted to know about taking advantage of AI. The guides are free, and the AI tools themselves will even teach you how to use them.

Finally, most of the tech behind AI is wide open for all to see. The heavy competition in AI models means they're all courting — and training — people to work with their systems. In this gold rush era of AI, it's as if the world is begging you to become an AI expert.

New money is out there

There's also a change in the world of tech investments that offers an interesting glimmer of hope. In my work with several startups I've seen that, as wealth concentrates higher and higher, a new wave of investors is creating opportunity. Specifically, I've seen more funding come from family offices, private wealth management advisory firms that handle investments for ultra-high-net-worth families.

For the last several years, the venture capital world has tightened. The smart money is being reined in, taking fewer bold risks. This makes it harder for very new ventures to get funded by traditional VCs.

But at least one startup I work with has had great success approaching this new wave of "angel investors" with these offices. They're intrigued by bold ideas in corners of tech that VCs won't touch. And the recent "big bill" through congress eased regulations on those investments.

This opens new opportunities for people jettisoned by their large tech companies. Many have connections with the very peers who went on to larger success, and they can get funding for new ideas that, just a few years ago, were rare.

Light at the end of the tunnel

No, the world of new startups funded by angel investors is not for everyone. But the last decade or two of tech has minted a new world of opportunity for those who can take this bold risk.

It might feel like AI is coming for every job. But for those who can pivot, build, or back bold ideas, there's still light at the end of the tunnel.

Chris Williams is a former VP of HR at Microsoft. He's an executive-level advisor and consultant with over 40 years of experience leading and building teams.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Justin Nedelman, the 48-year-old CEO of Pressed Juicery based in Los Angeles. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I began my career as a retail real-estate developer, building shopping centers and hotels.

I then started a restaurant group out of the ashes of my real-estate company in the 2008 recession. I was the CEO of Eureka! Restaurant Group from 2009 to 2021.

Pressed Juicery was doing a formal CEO search, and I knew a board member, so I decided to put my hat in the ring. My wellness background, experience, and consumer-oriented mindset made it a perfect match.

I continued in real estate and hospitality until June 2023, when I became the CEO of Pressed Juicery. Here's what a typical day looks like.

Monday to Friday, I wake up naturally around 4:15 a.m.

From 4:15 to 4:25 a.m., I drink a 10-oz glass of water followed by a 5-oz Americano or Pressed cold brew. This is my only dose of caffeine per day. I drink while having quiet time to think and prepare for the day.

From 4:25 to 4:35 a.m., I have five minutes of meditation and breathwork to relax and energize. I check my heart rate variability and resting heart rate from the previous night on my Whoop. I then catch up on business and world news, stock market information, and social media.

I work out from 4:45 to 5:45 a.m., and it takes me 10 minutes to drive to one of the three gyms I belong to. I have multiple memberships because I choose where to work out based on my time and mindset, and I don't want to have an excuse that the gym is closed.

I'll do a CrossFit-style workout with a weighted vest or use a jump rope intermittently between sets. I do weights and quasi-cardio. My workouts are more intense and diverse on the weekends.

I let myself rest every seven to 10 days, when I sleep in until 5:30 a.m., even on the weekends.

After working out, I help my wife make breakfast and lunch for our children

I drive back home to shower. From 6:15 to 7 a.m., I drink a 20-oz water and a decaf Americano with my wife and help her make breakfast and lunch for the children. My children are in high school now. Mornings with my wife and kids are important.

I skip breakfast every three days after a hard workout to do intermittent fasting. For the days I eat, I have a Pressed Greens juice, an avocado, or grilled cold fish with salad, and nonfat Greek yogurt with fruit and seeds.

I always start with fat and protein over carbs, as this energizes me. Once a week, I do a 24-hour fast to reset my metabolism. I also regularly do cleanses.

I drop my son off at school and head to the office by 8:30 a.m.

It takes me 30 minutes to drive to the office. When I joined Pressed, the office had a flexible policy of two days a week. I'm a big believer in bringing people together for collaboration, so I'm in the office at least four days a week.

When I'm not in the office, I'm in the field, either looking at stores or competitors and learning what's happening in CPG or traveling to our manufacturing facility.

I don't have spontaneous calls with anyone. My style is more structured and planned, and I have one-on-ones with folks reporting to me. I even plan time to not have anything planned.

I probably don't take enough time for lunch, but I eat with our team

We cater lunch for the Pressed team, and it's usually a plant-forward, healthy meal. It's an incentive and a perk of coming into the office.

It's helpful to sit with folks from different departments, and it's efficient. I'll eat with the team when I can, a meal with high protein, some greens, a thoughtful carb intake, and no bread unless I'm in Paris.

If I visit stores, it's usually planned weeks in advance with our operations leader, and we're not there to audit them. We meet with the regional operations and store management teams to analyze how good our marketing is and look at opportunities.

My wife will say I leave the office too late, but I try to leave by 6 p.m.

I get home between 6:30 and 6:45 p.m. and try to have dinner with the family — there are days I'm later. My wife cooks, but occasionally, we'll order in.

Our dinners center on protein, vegetables, and a sensible carb. We'll also go to Pressed stores sometimes. The kids like that, and it's fun to get their perspective. They have good insight into what's relevant for their age group.

I don't believe in the separation of work and life. For me, it's about work-life integration, not work-life balance.

On Thursday evenings, I play tennis with my wife or daughter, followed by time in the sauna. On Fridays, I swim or surf with my son in the ocean. Fitness through swimming, surfing, mountain biking, tennis, or hiking keeps life exciting.

After dinner, I'll watch a show or read a book with my wife

I'm reading Elon Musk's biography, and I'm having my son read it, too — I try to connect with him that way.

My wife and I will also catch up on the day without the kids and watch our favorite show, The White Lotus. I also like the BBC and will watch some news to catch up on what the world is saying about America.

I'm a fan of social media, but I limit my consumption. I enjoy scrolling through Instagram. I study how brands present themselves, and I'm always fascinated.

I'll also take a Pressed calm shot before bed. I aim to go to sleep at 10 p.m.

I try not to do intense work on the weekends

I try not to do work that requires multiple hours of concentration because if I do, it's hard to pivot back into family and personal time. I do light work that requires 30 minutes of focus or less.

My weekends are committed to hanging out with family and integrating fitness. I came to Pressed because I love wellness and fitness, and Pressed is an extension of those.

It's easy to come to work every day and talk about this seven days a week because it doesn't feel like work — it feels like I'm just living my life.

Everything is intentional. Self-prioritization as a leader is important.

• Everyone seems to be talking about the "Gen Z" stare."
• It's when someone, often in a customer service situation, stares blankly at you.
• But if you're getting the stare, here's a tip: Maybe it's you who is causing the problem!

Let's say you're at your favorite coffee shop. You order a customized drink — the same one you've ordered hundreds of times. The 20-something barista says it's not available today.

Exasperated, you explain that you've ordered it many times in the past.

You're met with a blank stare.

You repeat yourself, anxious to fill the dead silence, but the barista isn't budging — and neither is her face.

Let's face it. You just got the "Gen Z stare." But, consider this: Maybe you deserved it! And maybe the Gen Z barista is onto something.

First things first: Is the "Gen Z stare" even real? I'm not entirely sure; I've never noticed it myself (but I'm also a socially capable and polite person who doesn't act like a jerk in customer service situations).

Still, judging from the number of TikToks I've seen on the topic — even Gen Zers themselves admit this is real. I've watched dozens of videos where a young person acts out a situation they experienced working in a retail or service job: In these reenactments, an older person comes in and asks for something unreasonable, leaving the zoomer agog and agape, speechless and staring.

Anyone who has worked any kind of customer service or retail job will tell you that these kinds of baffling and frustrating experiences happen regularly. People can be rude, entitled, and ask for completely unreasonable things.

I have some experience with this, although I'm an elder millennial, so I'm dating myself with this reference: I was behind the customer service desk at a movie theater when three college-age people came up and asked for a refund for their tickets to "Me, Myself & Irene" because they found the content too racy. (To be fair, there is at least one really funny visual joke involving bodily fluids.) The idea that you would ask for a refund for a movie simply because you didn't like it was shocking to me. (They did, indeed, get their refunds.) Who does that?! Who expects that the world works like that?!

But I worked in customer service for a long time, and I became seasoned at it. After a while, nothing shocks you about the unreasonable ways that some customers behave — and you build a skill set of how to handle demanding people.

One thing I learned is that sometimes silence is the best way to handle a situation. In other words, you might say: Give 'em the "Gen Z stare." If someone keeps pushing, eventually you have to leave some silence hanging in the air — no more room for them to negotiate.

As a journalist, I know the value of staying silent. Allowing for an awkward silence is one of the few tricks reporters have up their unfashionable sleeves. It makes the other person want to keep talking to fill the silence, which is exactly what you want them to do.

"Silence is very powerful," René Rodriguez, a communication and negotiation coach and author of "Amplify Your Influence," told Business Insider. Still, it's a pretty bold communication choice — and Rodriguez used a golf analogy.

"The caution I'd give is that a driver is a very good tool — but it's not a good tool if you're on a putting green."

Rodriguez warned that deploying silence can win a negotiation, but hurt a relationship, and should be used sparingly. "If you had a disrespectful, highly dysregulated customer who made threats, that's what works — the gray rock, as people call it," he said.

So if you find yourself on the receiving end of the "Gen Z stare," think a little bit about how you got yourself there. Like Ava Max (technically a young millennial) says, maybe you're the problem.

• Ring founder Jamie Siminoff has led a broad overhaul of the company since his return in April.
• He recently reinstated Ring's original mission.
• The founder has also stressed productivity and cost-efficiency, following Andy Jassy's core message.

Amazon's Ring division is re-embracing founder mode, part of a broader cultural and operational crackdown by CEO Andy Jassy.

In April, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff rejoined Amazon to run the internet-based doorbell company again. He replaced former CEO Liz Hamren.

Just months into his return, Siminoff is making sweeping changes.

One of his first moves: scrapping Ring's socially driven mission — "Keep people close to what's important" — which Amazon introduced last year.

In its place, Siminoff reinstated Ring's original mission statement, "Make neighborhoods safer," which suggests the business is going back to its founding identity as a crime-prevention tool.

"So excited to be back working on our mission to make neighborhoods safer!" Siminoff wrote in a companywide email on his second day back. A copy of the memo was viewed by Business Insider.

The shift marks the beginning of a broader reset led by Siminoff, who returned after a two-year hiatus. Alongside the mission reboot, he's pushing for faster execution, greater efficiency, and a deeper reliance on AI, according to internal emails and conversations with current and former employees. These individuals asked not to be identified because they're not authorized to discuss internal matters.

Ring's transformation reflects broader shifts within Amazon, where Jassy emphasizes productivity and cost-efficiency across the sprawling e-commerce and cloud giant. Other Big Tech companies, from Google and Meta to Microsoft, are making similar changes.

"We are reimagining Ring from the ground up with AI first," Siminoff wrote in a recent email to staff. "It feels like the early days again — same energy and the same potential to revolutionize how we do our neighborhood safety."

A Ring spokesperson declined to comment.

A Return to Surveillance

While Siminoff was away, Ring softened its public image under Hamren's leadership. The company leaned into a more community-focused brand and distanced itself from the surveillance tools that previously sparked privacy concerns.

Hamren retired a controversial feature that allowed law enforcement to request footage from Ring users through the Neighbors app and introduced a more approachable mission statement last year.

Now, Siminoff is rolling back much of that vision, steering Ring back to its original role as a neighborhood crime watchdog.

As part of that pivot, Ring announced a partnership with Axon in April that effectively revives the video-request feature for police. The company is also exploring a new integration with Axon that would enable livestreaming from Ring devices for those who consent, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Privacy and civil liberties groups have criticized Ring's video-sharing capabilities, citing a lack of transparency and concerns about unethical use. In 2023, Amazon agreed to a $5.8 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations of privacy violations. Amazon denied wrongdoing.

Several Ring employees told BI they remain uneasy about the partnership with Axon, which is famous for making Tasers, which are used by law enforcement to zap people with electric shocks.

These Ring employees said customers may not don't fully understand what they're opting into, and it's unclear how video footage will ultimately be used. Data security also remains a concern, they added.

Siminoff's influence is also showing up in Ring's product roadmap and internal policies.

The long-delayed home surveillance drone, originally unveiled in 2020, is expected to launch soon, according to people familiar with the plans. Siminoff has been testing the drone in the office, though it's likely to debut in limited quantities, they said.

In June, Ring introduced a new text alert feature that provides real-time updates about activity captured by its devices. According to a recent internal email, Siminoff told employees the alerts would soon be refined to notify users only when "something unusual happens."

"My vision has always been that Ring would help super power our neighborhoods for good," Siminoff wrote in an April email.

'Bigger impact'

Siminoff, who founded Ring in 2011, sold the company to Amazon in 2018 for about $1 billion. His official title now is VP of product, but he signs off his emails as Ring's "Chief Inventor and Founder."

In practice, he oversees not only Ring but also Amazon's Blink security cameras, Key in-home delivery service, and the Sidewalk wireless network. Ring doesn't have a formal CEO anymore.

When Siminoff returned, some staffers were apprehensive about changes he might make. That concern was reinforced when he introduced a new travel policy in April requiring employees to email the company about the purpose of each business trip. He cited high travel costs and said the emails would serve as documentation when "auditing things."

After some employees pushed back, Siminoff doubled down in a follow-up message, reaffirming the policy. That second time, he pointed to a recent Jassy annual shareholder letter, which emphasized building a culture that encourages employees to ask "why" as a path to smarter decision-making.

"If we all keep doing this, I am certain we will be able to have such a bigger impact on the world," Siminoff wrote.

Since his return, Siminoff has also made changes to Ring's leadership and operations. In late April, Chief Product Officer Mike Harris and Chief Technology Officer Mike Balog both exited. In their place, Siminoff brought back longtime lieutenant Jason Mitura to lead the product and technology teams across Ring, Blink, and Sidewalk, according to an internal email.

Siminoff has also consolidated Rings office footprint for "speed" and "efficiency." Ring's Santa Monica office is shutting down, while Amazon's Hawthorne and Amsterdam locations have become headquarters for the combined Ring, Blink, Key, and Sidewalk teams.

'Double our output immediately'

Internally, Siminoff has scrapped Ring's monthly all-hands meetings and replaced them with a steady stream of companywide emails. Many of these messages focus on eliminating bureaucracy and encouraging creativity with AI.

In April, he launched a dedicated inbox where employees could submit new ideas (something Jassy has also done since becoming CEO of Amazon). While praising some of the more unconventional submissions, Siminoff also urged employees to vet their ideas through AI tools first to avoid duplication, and to consider the resources required and messaging clarity before pitching.

Siminoff has made it clear that AI will be central to Ring's future.

Starting in the third quarter, every promotion will have to prove that the employee used AI to improve operational efficiency or customer experiences, according to a recent email. They will also have to explain how they "accomplished more with less," the email said.

In mid-June, Siminoff also encouraged employees to use AI at least once a day to improve productivity. The following day, he circulated a memo from Jassy that warned job cuts could result from AI-driven efficiencies.

"If we all lean in on AI, could we launch 10% or 10 times more shit?" Siminoff asked in a recent email. "My guess is if we really all fully leaned in on AI and pushed ourselves hard to create constraints that only could be overcome with the use of AI, we could double our output immediately."

Not all of Siminoff's communications focus on technology. In one instance, he addressed a cultural issue: the excessive use of acronyms in meetings.

He noted that acronyms often obscure meaning and slow down decision-making.

"The best thing we can do is use data and clear language," he wrote. "It allows for faster and more accurate decisions."

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• 31-year-old Sam Awrabi has raised $10 million to invest exclusively in AI startups.
• Banyan Ventures will back 36 AI infrastructure and software companies, mostly at the seed stage.
• Here's the pitch deck Awrabi used to build his warchest.

31-year-old venture capitalist Sam Awrabi has raised $10 million to exclusively invest in AI startups, calling the technology "the dominant force of our lifetime."

AI advancements will be "bigger than both mobile and web combined," Awrabi said, in part because "the average person's productivity will be increased 50% to 75% in the coming years."

Awrabi's AI Fund I will operate within his VC firm, Banyan Ventures, named for the tree whose prop roots enable it to spread. The fund specializes in AI infrastructure and software startups that have had the technology at their core since inception.

On the infrastructure front, Awrabi said startups working to reduce AI costs — from inference chips to cooling technology — have a massive opportunity.

"Nvidia is already worth $4 trillion, and we're still in the early days," he said. "Imagine what the new winners across the AI-native infra stack could be worth 30 years from now?"

On the app front, Awrabi seeks startups with "unique data access" and "high-leverage workflows" that could standardize how work gets done in a particular field.

To date, Banyan has invested in 14 companies, including AI inference chip company Positron, GPU server cooling startup Akash, and Italian AI legal assistant Lexroom.

It will invest in 36 startups in seed and pre-seed stages, most of which have already achieved revenue, and will cut checks ranging from $200,000 to $425,000.

Awrabi serves as the fund's only general partner, and he's entering a fiercely competitive AI landscape. Large VC firms dominate funding, though he believes Banyan's specialization in AI gives it a unique edge.

It's also increasingly hard to get in on seed rounds, Awrabi said, because AI startups generally require less funding, are generating more revenue, and are moving to Series A rounds more rapidly.

Having worked in AI technical sales since 2018 at Samsung-owned MissingLink.ai and then at Comet and as an advisor to various AI startups, Awrabi said his long relationships in the field provide a window into prospective deals and talent looking for fresh opportunities.

Here's a look at the pitch deck Awrabi used to raise $10 million for Banyan Ventures' AI Fund I. Some slides and details have been redacted in order to share the deck publicly.

• Oracle is disputing the property value of its Stargate data center site in Abilene, Texas.
• The company is eligible for an 85% property tax abatement.
• Protesting property value is common in Texas, where the law favors owners.

Everything is bigger in Texas — just not the taxes.

Oracle is disputing the property valuation of its Stargate data center site in Abilene, Texas, local officials confirmed to Business Insider.

Oracle is eligible for an 85% property tax abatement for the Abilene data center, thanks to an agreement with the city's local economic development corporation. A lower property value, in addition to the abatement, would shrink the software giant's tax bill even further.

BI has previously reported on the vast disparity between Big Tech's eye-popping data center investments and the seemingly minimal economic benefit they bring to local economies.

In Abilene, Stargate developer Crusoe has committed to spending up to $3.5 billion to build the data center site in exchange for its property tax abatement. Crusoe has also committed to creating 357 new full-time jobs. As Crusoe's sub-lessee on the property, it's Oracle that ultimately benefits from the agreement.

Companies often insist that tax breaks are crucial factors in choosing where to expand. Economic development officials say that any additional revenue to cities and towns is good, even if that revenue could have been higher without tax abatements.

Oracle did not respond to a request for comment from BI.

Oracle's executive chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison, is no stranger to property tax appeals himself. In 2008, he successfully lobbied San Mateo County to lower the value of his property, a 23-acre site with an 8,000-square-foot residence inspired by the country estate of a Japanese emperor. The county awarded him a $3 million tax break.

Taylor County officials weren't surprised that Oracle filed a protest. The money-saving maneuver is often used, even if the company is already receiving other tax breaks or incentives. Texas law also gives any property owner (or an eligible sub-lessee, like Oracle) the right to challenge an appraisal.

"It is a very large property," said Gary Earnest, Taylor County's chief appraiser. "But at the same time, you approach value in the same manner as you would any large company — Costco, Sam's, Walmart, or any of those guys."

Earnest's appraisal valued the Stargate site at about $200 million for the 2025 tax year. He said it would be impossible to calculate what Oracle would pay in taxes at that valuation and with no abatement, because Texas property tax rates fluctuate from year to year and can be unpredictable.

Elijah Anderson, Taylor County's auditor, said that more than half the county's new property value this year came from Lancium, the company that owns the land underneath the Stargate data center. He estimated that Taylor County would have gotten about $3 million in tax revenue from Lancium properties had the valuation not been challenged.

The majority of Taylor County's $79 million general fund comes from property tax revenue, said Anderson, so an additional million or so dollars isn't exactly transformational.

"It's not a doubling of anything," he said. "But it's a significant amount that could go toward new programs."

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• Google hired Windsurf's top talent for $2.4 billion.
• Usually, big acquihires like this leave the remains of the target startups floundering.
• This time, though, Cognition swiftly snapped up the remnants of Windsurf. Here's why.

A new type of deal has swept through Silicon Valley in the past year or so, driven by the AI boom and antitrust limitations.

I call these transactions "acquihires on steroids," and they have some of the unsavory flavor of steroid use in sports. If you're a Big Tech company, you can't do big acquisitions as easily anymore because of antitrust scrutiny. So, instead, you pay handsomely to hire the top talent and license the technology, leaving the remaining business and employees to soldier on alone.

Crucially, Big Tech is not technically acquiring these startups, so the deals are not subject to the same antitrust rules. Depending on who you ask, the attorneys who devised this way to avoid the spirit of US law should either be awarded a Nobel Prize for business or imprisoned.

Remains of the prey

I'm not here to judge that. I'm focusing on what happens to the remains of these startups — and why the latest example, Windsurf, differs from the rest of these big, gnarly acquihires.

OpenAI planned to buy Windsurf for $3 billion. The deal fell apart, and instead, Google paid $2.4 billion to hire Windsurf cofounder Varun Mohan and other senior researchers and purchase a Windsurf license.

For a day or so, it looked like the remaining Windsurf business and staff would be cast to the wind, so to speak. Similar acquihires of Inflection, Character.ai, and Scale AI have left the remains of those startups floundering. For instance, an unprofitable Scale AI cut hundreds of jobs this week after Meta hired away its CEO, Alexandr Wang, in a $14 billion deal.

A different outcome for Windsurf

Windsurf's story took a different turn. Another AI startup, Cognition, quickly snapped up the Windsurf remnants. Why? The answer relates to one of the main ingredients for success in generative AI: data.

You need AI talent, for sure. This is the main reason Google paid so much for a handful of Windsurf leaders and researchers. You also need infrastructure, including GPUs, data centers, and huge amounts of electricity. Tech giants spend hundreds of billions on that.

The third ingredient, data, is less talked about. That's because AI companies don't want to pay for data, so they pretend it's not that important. Yet data is crucial for AI model development, and it's a real reason the remains of Windsurf were bought so swiftly.

The IDEs of July

Windsurf's main product is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). IDEs are coding tools installed on developers' computers — a bit like PowerPoint for writing software. They have become the go-to interface between professional programmers and their code.

When Cognition CEO Scott Wu announced the Windsurf deal this week, he described the main assets he's getting — and put Windsurf's IDE at the top of the list. He wrote that combining that product with the "rapid adoption" of its AI software engineering assistant, Devin, will be a "massive unlock."

Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang highlighted the same point, saying the combination of Congition's autonomous coding agents with Windsurf's IDE will lead to "breakthrough developer experiences."

Unique, granular data model fine-tuning

IDEs are valuable in AI because they provide a massive stream of unique, granular data on how human developers write, fix, ship, and update software code, said Armando Solar-Lezama, a distinguished professor of computing at MIT.

"This is why you're seeing so much dealmaking activity around some of these startups," he told me in an interview this week.

Big Tech and AI companies aim to make AI models really good at coding. Solar-Lezama said that one way to stand out is to use the data from IDEs in the post-training phase of AI model development.

At a high level, building AI models involves two main stages:

The first is pretraining, where tech companies vacuum up all the data on the internet and use it in huge training runs so the models learn a general understanding of how the world works. Everyone has already stripmined the web for this information, so there's not much advantage to be gained here in the AI race anymore. It's table stakes.

Then comes the second stage, known as post-training, that fine-tunes AI models and polishes away bad behavior while giving them their distinctive style. This is where things differ from company to company, and you get custom, proprietary approaches, Solar-Lezama said.

"All these companies, once they have exhausted all the data on the internet, there's no second internet to mine for data. They are all hunting for alternative data sources," he said. "One of the big advantages of IDE companies like Cursor and Windsurf — they have access to a rich stream of data that some AI model providers don't get to see directly."

An IDE provider like Windsurf can see every keystroke and every time programmers run their code, as well as how they run it and how they debug it, through the IDEs installed on developers' computers.

"This provides unique access to a lot of information about what people are doing with their code, versus just what they might enter into the prompt box of a more simple coding website — that's a lot less," Solar-Lezama said.

The big AI companies often provide the underlying models that power IDE products. For instance, Anthropic models mostly power Windsurf's IDE. However, these AI labs may have access to less detailed coding data.

"IDEs have a level of granularity that's impossible to get any other way," Solar-Lezama said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech giants 'copy anything that's good'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional reporting by Olena Lysenko.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Netflix spokesperson declined to comment ahead of earnings.

Life after the password-sharing crackdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gen Z's entry-level opportunities are drying up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Millennial and Gen X managers are caught in the Great Flattening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baby boomers increasingly need jobs past retirement age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Joe Foster, cofounder of Reebok, said it is difficult to move apparel manufacturing West.
• It is hard to find workers willing to spend hours in front of a sewing machine outside Asia, he said.
• Until manufacturing automation progresses, apparel production will "stay in the Far East," he said.

It's hard to move apparel manufacturing West because no one wants to sit in front of a sewing machine for hours, Reebok's founder said.

Joe Foster, a 90-year-old Reebok veteran who cofounded the footwear and clothing brand in 1958 in the UK, spoke on a Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid podcast interview, released Monday.

When asked how tough it was for companies like Nike, Adidas, and Reebok to move production out of Asia, Foster said that's "virtually impossible" to accomplish on a short timeline.

"If you want millions, as we wanted, millions of products, you've got to go somewhere where you've got a lot of people who are quite willing to sit on a machine, women on the sewing machines, men on the production line, and that doesn't happen overnight," Foster said.

"In the UK, we can't get people to do that. They won't do it, they've moved on to whatever different things, and I think the States are exactly the same," he added.

He said that to move manufacturing West, a faster method of making shoes with robots and automation is needed. But automation for complicated sneakers, which he said have more than a hundred pieces, was difficult.

The industry had not progressed to that stage, and the apparel and footwear business was "going to be in the Far East for a long time," he said.

Reebok's manufacturing is concentrated in Asia, particularly in countries like Vietnam and China. The private company has been headed by CEO Todd Krinsky since 2022.

It is owned by the NYC-based Authentic Brands Group, which also owns other apparel brands such as Champion, Billabong, Van Heusen, and Ted Baker.

Retailers have been grappling with the effects of Trump's tariffs, which have targeted Asian countries heavily involved in apparel manufacturing. Goods entering the US from Vietnam and China are now hit with a 20% and 30% levy, respectively.

In a June earnings call, Nike announced it would raise prices for US customers because it anticipated a $1 billion cost increase from tariffs.

Other companies have announced that they will move manufacturing to the US to mitigate the impact of the tariffs. In April, French luxury giant LVMH said it was considering increasing the capacity of its production facilities in the US.

Representatives for Reebok did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Drone warfare is driving the creation of a new type of bullet in the Ukraine war.
• A Ukrainian version is designed to fire from a NATO rifle and spread pellets to kill drones from afar.
• With unjammable drones on the battlefield, troops need ways to defend themselves with physical force.

Anti-drone rifle bullets are emerging in the Ukraine war, potentially giving ground troops a safer option against the cheap drones that are now the battlefield's No. 1 killer.

While Russian troops were seen experimenting with such ammo since at least last year's winter, Ukraine's defense innovation program debuted its own version in late June.

Brave1 published a video of a soldier filling a cartridge with black and grey-tipped 5.56mm rounds, before loading it into a CZ Bren 2 assault rifle and firing at a drone in a test range.

"The goal is for every infantryman to carry these NATO-codified cartridges, enabling them to react quickly to aerial threats," the government organization wrote, adding that the bullets "dramatically increase the chances of downing FPV drones."

Brave1 did not publish footage of the bullet's interior design.

However, United24 Media, an outlet run by the Ukrainian government, wrote that the bullets use a "custom-designed warhead that creates a dense and rapid fragmentation effect upon firing."

In short, the tech would allow soldiers to fire a bullet that travels some distance before dispersing a spread of pellets to strike a first-person-view drone or quadcopter.

That could allow infantry to start shooting at attack drones from a safer distance, compared to the last-resort measure of trying to down the threat with a shotgun, which is now the norm across Ukrainian units.

The shotgun tactic has become especially needed against the rising use of fiber-optic drones by both sides. These drones receive their signals through long, thin cables instead of radio, meaning they can't be jammed via electronic warfare.

As a result, many units carry 12-gauge shotguns with them. A new anti-drone bullet could allow infantry to simply bring extra rifle cartridges instead of a whole separate firearm.

Brave1 did not respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

Russian troops are making anti-drone bullets

Notably, a similar style of bullet has appeared among Russian forces before.

In November, Russia's 74th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade published a photo of a 5.45mm bullet, which is fired by the AK rifle. It was tipped with a heat-shrinking tube.

Within the tube, the brigade wrote on its Telegram channel, there are four buckshot pellets meant to disperse and hit Ukrainian drones. It added that when handloading cartridges, troops should alternate between these new bullets and standard rounds or tracer rounds.

This design appears to be more of a DIY creation and is distinct from the version that Ukraine's Brave1 showed. It's not clear if the bullet was made widely available for Russian forces.

Z Parabellum MD, a pro-war Russian Telegram channel, published a separate video on November 29 showing several men working at a table to snap off the tips of 5.45mm rounds. In the footage, one of the men places heat-shrinking tubes on the bullet by hand.

The channel also posted a video of a Russian soldier demonstrating the rounds, shooting them at a metal sheet in a firing range.

In another example, a photo that circulated among Ukrainian channels in May showed a presentation board with an assortment of small-arms rounds used to destroy FPV drones.

One of these was a 5.45mm round tipped with a casing containing six pellets.

The growing appearance of such bullets on both sides shows how rapidly drone warfare is evolving in real time, with roughly three years of war driving a back-and-forth series of new technologies and tactics studied closely by militaries around the world.

• Billy McFarland, 33, became notorious for organizing the failed Fyre Festival in 2017.
• The disgraced founder said he auctioned off the branding rights for the event on eBay for $245,300.
• McFarland was ordered to pay $26 million to the investors, concert-goers, and vendors he defrauded.

Billy McFarland, the founder and CEO of the Fyre Festival, said on Tuesday that he has sold the branding rights for the infamous event.

McFarland, 33, wrote in a statement on X that he had auctioned off the Fyre Festival's brand and intellectual property on eBay. He added that the auction was the "most-watched non-charity listing on eBay."

McFarland's listing received 175 bids and was ultimately sold for $245,300, per its eBay auction page. He said in his statement that he looked forward to working with the buyer to "finalize the sale."

"Fyre Festival is just one chapter of my story, and I'm excited to move onto my next one," McFarland said in his statement.

McFarland also teased his next venture, "a tech platform designed to capture and power the value behind every view online." He did not elaborate further but said the project would be "coming soon."

Earlier, McFarland had expressed disappointment at the final sale price.

"Damn. This sucks, it's so low," he said in a livestream on Tuesday, per NBC News.

McFarland had gained notoriety following the failure of the Fyre Festival back in 2017. McFarland had marketed the event as a luxury music festival in the Bahamas.

McFarland managed to raise over $26 million from investors and recruited influencers like Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber to promote the event. He ended up selling over 5,000 tickets, some of which went up to $75,000.

But McFarland's customers were in for a rude shock when they arrived at the Bahamas in April 2017. What was supposed to look like paradise ended up resembling a disaster drill.

Disaster relief tents from FEMA replaced the villas they were promised. Instead of gourmet meals, customers were served cheese sandwiches and salads. Bahamian locals who worked as the event's caterers and laborers said they did not receive their salaries.

In 2018, McFarland pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud related to the festival and was sentenced to six years in prison. He was also ordered to pay $26 million to investors, concert-goers, and vendors.

McFarland was released from prison early in March 2022. He apologized for his actions during an interview with Good Morning America in November 2022, saying that what he did was "wrong" and "bad."

"I let people down. I let down employees. I let down their families. I let down investors. So I need to apologize," McFarland said.

McFarland, however, was not done with the Fyre Festival just yet. In April 2023, he wrote in a now-deleted post on X that a sequel to the Fyre Festival was "finally happening."

McFarland initially announced in February that Fyre Festival 2 would take place on Isla Mujeres, a Mexican island. The location was later changed to another Mexican tourist hot spot, Playa del Carmen, after the Isla Mujeres government said it had "no knowledge of this event."

In April, the event's organizers said the festival would not be held at Playa del Carmen either. The organizers said in a statement to The New York Times published on April 16 that the event was "still on" and they were "vetting new locations."

That changed again on April 23, when McFarland said in a statement on Instagram that he was selling the brand rights to the Fyre Festival.

"For Fyre Festival 2 to succeed, it's clear that I need to step back and allow a new team to move forward independently," McFarland said.

Representatives for McFarland and eBay did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

• Jason Kelce says he will "never ever" tell his wife, Kylie, to do household chores.
• The former Philadelphia Eagles center says he prefers when she tells him what to do.
• "I like coaching. I've been coached my whole life. I want people to tell me. I need that," Kelce said.

There's one thing that former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce will never say to his wife, Kylie Kelce.

"I have never ever, and I will never ever, tell Kylie to do something around the house, because, I don't know, she does enough," Kelce said on the Wednesday episode of the "New Heights" podcast, which he cohosts with his brother, Travis Kelce.

"If something doesn't get done, it's like, yeah, well, I should be helping out on this. Tell me what I can do because I am worthless unless you tell me that," Kelce said.

Kelce has been married to his wife since 2018, and they share four daughters: Wyatt, Elliotte, Bennett, and Finnley, who was born in March.

While he will never tell his wife what to do, he doesn't mind if the roles are reversed. In fact, the retired NFL player says he responds to being nagged at "really well."

"Tell me to get my lazy ass up, and take the goddamn trash out. If you tell me to take the trash out, I'm not going to be like, 'Oh, I can't believe she's telling me to take the trash out.' I'm like, 'Yeah, you're right. I should be doing that. OK, I'm sorry,'" he said.

Kelce says he "likes the nagging" and needs it because he can be forgetful sometimes.

"She's like, 'Jason, I don't want to tell you to do these things.' And I'm like, 'I get that. I'm just like, you know, it's not going to get done unless you tell me to do it,'" Kelce said.

"I am pro-nagging. I think nagging is a great thing to do," he added.

After all, Kelce says he's used to being told what to do after years of playing on the field.

"I like coaching. I've been coached my whole life. I want people to tell me. I need that," Kelce said.

Kelce's comments highlight a common relationship challenge: dividing responsibilities without resentment.

Splitting household chores 50/50 with a partner might not be the most effective, per couples therapist Lori Gottlieb.

"You can't treat a relationship like a spreadsheet. It has to be more organic than that. Each couple needs to find their own rhythm, where each person is participating in a way that makes you both feel like you're getting a good deal," Gottlieb told Jo Piazza, author of "How to Be Married."

In a personal essay for Business Insider, Melissa Petro wrote that she and her husband struggled with an uneven division of household chores until the pandemic prompted them to ditch traditional gender roles and switch to a shared family to-do list.

In another personal essay for BI, Maria Polansky wrote that she and her husband divide household chores based on the tasks they both enjoy and care about most — a method that's worked well for them.

A representative for Kelce did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by BI outside regular hours.