• OpenAI has launched Deep Research, a new ChatGPT tool that automates multi-step internet research.
• The agentic AI tool generates "expert-level" reports and is available to Pro users.
• The launch comes as competition heats up for OpenAI from China's DeepSeek and domestic AI rivals.

OpenAI has launched Deep Research, a tool for automating complex multi-step internet research, as the company continues rolling out new products in the face of competition from Chinese startup DeepSeek.

In a Sunday blog post, OpenAI said Deep Research can operate independently to gather information from the internet to meet a user's research needs, completing tasks in "tens of minutes that would take a human many hours."

The AI agent, which is available for Pro users paying $200 a month, is aimed at professionals in finance, science, policy, and engineering.

Unlike other ChatGPT tools, Deep Research operates independently for five to 30 minutes, adjusting its approach in real time as it gathers information.

Deep Research is powered by a fine-tuned version of OpenAI's o3 reasoning model. The tool autonomously browses the internet, pulls data from multiple sources, and produces fully cited reports, OpenAI said. Mark Chen, OpenAI's chief research officer, called it "something that an analyst or an expert in a field might produce."

According to OpenAI, Deep Research has already achieved a new high score of 26.6% on "Humanity's Last Exam," an AI benchmark of expert-level questions, beating GPT-4's 3.3% score. However, OpenAI cautions the model can still "hallucinate" incorrect facts and can struggle to distinguish between rumor and fact.

In an X post on Sunday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman encouraged users to "try it on your hardest work task that can be solved just by using the internet and see what happens."

On Friday, OpenAI launched o3-mini, a cost-efficient reasoning AI model. The two OpenAI launches come just days after Altman said his company would deliver "much better models" and move more quickly in response to the release of DeepSeek's R1 model.

DeepSeek shook the tech industry and Wall Street last month with a model that appears to match the capabilities of those from OpenAI but seemingly at a lower cost.

Last month, OpenAI rolled out its Operator AI agent, while in December it launched the text-to-video model Sora to the public.

• As a reporter covering longevity and health, I'm skeptical of new products or fads.
• As I've met researchers and doctors around the world, I've picked up a few solid tips.
• Here are my seven favorite longevity tools, including foods and supplements.

As I've spent the past few years reporting on the rise of healthy aging and longevity research worldwide, I've seen the full spectrum of antiaging hacks. Some people spend thousands of dollars on supplements, others go to posh clinics for private, highly tailored services.

None of this is for me. Instead, I've picked up a few simple, cheap longevity habits.

Hearing researchers, doctors, and nutritionists lay out their arguments for why certain activities, foods, and pills were good for my long-term health, I eventually incorporated a few research-backed changes into my routine.

Here are my seven favorite daily longevity tips.

I eat more nuts and seeds than I used to

Nuts and seeds are great sources of protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and "healthy" fats. In short, it's all the good stuff that our ultra-processed diets often lack.

At home, I regularly stock different nuts and seeds. I keep a bag of ground flaxseed in the freezer to sprinkle over yogurt, oatmeal, and salads. I also ensure I have chia seeds — a staple for the breakfast balls I often prep in the summertime. And I like having pumpkin seeds around for a midday snack or sprinkled into dinner.

There's one kind of nut in my cupboard that deserves a special shoutout: the walnut.

Walnuts have the highest omega-3 concentration of any nut, which is a big reason Loma Linda cardiologist Gary Fraser puts them on his morning cereal, and why leading nut nutrition expert Joan Sabaté puts them in his daily longevity smoothie. I enjoy walnuts in Greek yogurt or on a lunchtime salad.

I've upped my leafy green intake

Green leaves are rich in nutrients like magnesium, iron, and nitrogen, and they help with digestion and gut health. Greens have also consistently been linked to better long-term brain health and cognition.

Dr. Dean Sherzai, half of the husband-and-wife team known as "The Brain Docs," says if you want to pick out one thing to improve your longevity, "just add green."

Sherzai recommends getting two servings of greens into your diet a day. When I'm doing my grocery shopping, I always add a bag of greens to the haul, whether it's arugula, spinach, or a spring mix.

Tracking my sleep has made some healthy habits stick

I've become one of those people who track their sleep and try to improve their sleep "hygiene" accordingly.

It started in 2024 when I attended a longevity conference in Singapore. It seemed like everyone there was tracking something with a smartwatch or ring. The experts doing some of the most cutting-edge research on how to help people stay fit and sharp into old age were tracking the quality of their sleep.

After a few weeks of using my own smart ring, I started to appreciate the daily insights.

The ring notices, for example, when I drink a beer right before bedtime. That's when my REM sleep (the memory-storing kind) decreases and my nighttime temperature goes up.

Sleep tracking has encouraged me to drink more herbal tea before bed, take more baths in the evenings, and be gentler to myself when I'm premenstrual. All of these changes have added up to slightly better daily sleep scores, as the quality of my sleep has trended upward.

I've committed to more strength training

Any longevity expert worth their salt will tell you the best longevity treatment we have right now is exercise. Some of the most promising research into longevity drugs aims to mimic the many positive effects of exercise.

I used to only do half of the job, though. I loved cardio training and hated weightlifting. My wake-up call came when I suffered a stress fracture from running too hard, too fast, without prioritizing cross-training.

Building muscle through strength training as we age is good for bone health, pain management, and fat burning. In recent years, I've started adding more squats, lunges, and deadlifts into my routine. These are not just helping me get stronger, they're also improving mobility and making me less likely to get injured in the years to come.

A little less butter, a little more olive oil

I've started replacing some of the butter and seed oil in my life with olive oil. This is less about butter being "bad" (though there are plenty of nutrition experts who'd tell you it's not the best choice) and more about the health benefits of olive oil.

Extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) is rich in plant compounds called polyphenols, which are great for brain health, heart health, and reducing inflammation.

Nutrition expert Dr. Artemis Simopoulos recommends mixing olive oil 1:1 with butter for a healthier spread on toast. I haven't tried that yet, but I do sometimes replace butter for 100% EVOO on my toast, and I also sub out prepackaged salads and dressings for greens and olive oil.

Berries have become a near-daily treat

Over the past two years I've upped my daily berry intake, simply due to learning more about their health benefits. Berries are so rich in chemical compounds that they're like power fuel for our cells. Plus, they're better for digestion and gut health than anything sweet I might pick out of a vending machine.

I try to stock at least one to two kinds of berries in the fridge when they're in season, including blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries.

I started taking a supplement. It's not a multivitamin.

Supplements aren't magic pills, but as the name suggests they can help supplement what a person's diet or lifestyle isn't covering. While nutraceutical supplement companies in the US don't have to abide by the same rigorous standards as pharmaceutical drug companies, there are third-party supplement testing outfits that certify some brands.

In longevity circles, people tend to subscribe to a highly personalized version of supplementation. Often, they'll use blood tests and other "biomarkers" like cholesterol, blood pressure, and genetic testing to come up with a daily pill strategy.

About a year ago, on the recommendation of the Miora longevity clinic at Life Time Fitness, I did some bloodwork and started taking magnesium. It's a mineral that most Americans don't get enough of.

The magnesium supplement I buy sets me back about 28 cents per day. It is United States Pharmacopeia (USP) verified, meaning I can be reasonably confident that what's advertised on the label is in the bottle.

I got another blood test recently, and I'm no longer deficient in magnesium. I can't say the difference is obvious, but I have noticed marginal benefits for my muscle relaxation, sleep, and digestion.

• Roboforce raised $10 million in funding to make an AI robotic workforce.
• The startup, founded in 2023, develops robots for manufacturing and outdoor tasks.
• The funding will be used to expand the team, scale robot development, and launch pilot projects.

Robotics startup Roboforce has raised $10 million in an early-stage funding round led by Nobel laureate economist Myron Scholes. Gary Rieschel, who previously spearheaded Softbank's U.S. venture capital group, and Carnegie Mellon University, the alma mater of Roboforce co-founders Leo Ma and Calvin Zhou, also participated in the round.

The Milpitas, Calif.-based startup, which launched in 2023, makes AI-powered robots that carry out manufacturing tasks. The company's robots use artificial intelligence to move themselves and perform duties that require fine motor skills, like screwing in nuts and bolts, with one millimeter of accuracy, Ma told Business Insider.

The robots are also capable of working on physical projects in tough outdoor conditions, like installing solar centers in deserts, he said. They are controlled by an AI model, developed in-house at Roboforce, and some human intervention, though the company intends for the robots to reach full autonomy.

The 15-person company will use the funding to double the size of its team, scale its robot development, and roll out pilot projects with early customers. Currently, Roboforce has a fleet of under ten robots and hopes to reach double digits this year. Veeral Hardev, who runs business development, said the robots will be leased to customers through a subscription model.

Ma previously co-founded and led engineering at Cyngn, an autonomous industrial vehicle company that went public in October 2021. "Building AI robotics is all I do," Ma said. "My heart is in building AI robotics."

Ma, whose parents work in manufacturing, has been interested in automating production since childhood. Over the past decade, he has visited over 200 factories to study industrial automation. "The most tedious, demanding, repetitive, and dangerous work—we really shouldn't have to have a human do it," Ma said.

Ma and Roboforce's co-founder and vice president of engineering, Calvin Zhou, met while they were studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon. Zhou previously worked at Cruise, a self-driving robotaxi subsidiary of General Motors.

A handful of other companies are also developing robots with human-like capabilities. Elon Musk unveiled his robot, Optimus, at Tesla's Robotaxi Day in October 2024. Figure, which raised a $70 million Series A in 2023, builds robots that can complete general tasks autonomously. And Sanctuary AI, another labor market-focused robot startup, is on the market for more funding, The Logic reported on Tuesday.

Here's an exclusive look at the pitch deck Roboforce used to raise $10 million.

• We bought a fixer-upper in Canada while living in Australia, then moved our family across the world.
• Living in active construction for years was much more destabilizing than I ever imagined.
• My husband and I spent double our budget, missed time with our kids, and almost lost each other.

In 2017, we were living in Australia with our daughters and planning our move to Canada when I found my dream house on the internet.

From our home in Brisbane, I video-called and emailed a real-estate agent in Toronto, doing my best to juggle our 15-hour time difference.

Within days, I'd signed an online contract to buy the 1913 fixer-upper without ever setting foot in the house or the neighborhood.

My husband and I thought we could handle it, as we'd both lived in a few different countries and had worked with builders to renovate our Brisbane home years earlier.

However, the reality of our situation was far from what I had imagined.

The house needed more work than expected

When we bought the house, it had been divided into four apartments, so we agreed we'd live in it for a year or so while we drew up renovation plans.

However, as soon as our family moved in, we found that the house needed urgent repairs, including fixing its crumbling foundation and replacing its dangerous knob-and-tube wiring.

My husband, an engineer, decided we had to start work right away, and I didn't say no. In an attempt to cut costs, we hired the first person who said they could save us money and get the work done while we lived in the house.

As my husband commuted to his clean, quiet office for work each day, I tried to write and edit from home. Renovations, on top of the international move, were grueling.

No amount of plastic taped over doors kept the dust out of my hair, my nose, or the rest of the house. I dealt with bathroom floods and burst pipes while juggling being the sole parent and project manager since my husband had to travel for work.

My daughters, ages 9 and 11, missed their friends and our Brisbane home, and so did I.

Builders and the pandemic pushed me to a breaking point

By 2020, we had only finished a quarter of the house, and I finally convinced my husband we should move out during remodel. Before we could, though, our area went into lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Living in renovations during the pandemic exacerbated every problem we already had. We were overwhelmed by decisions and financial pressures, and we were far away from friends in a city we didn't know.

Our daughters wrestled with severe mental-health issues, and family conversations spiraled into quarrels and angry silence.

During one late-night argument, my husband collapsed onto the kitchen floor. I should've taken it as a sign we all needed to step back, but I didn't. I became my worst self, and I hated the house.

I reminded myself constantly that we were lucky to even own a home, but it didn't help my panic attacks. After a particularly severe crisis, my doctor prescribed me medication for anxiety.

Years later, we're happy with our home — but the path to get here wasn't glamorous

All in all, it took us five years, over a dozen tradespeople, and two separate contractors to finish the house. We spent more than $1.4 million Canadian dollars (about $973,000.00), which was double our original budget.

It's hard to say if the renovations were worth all of the struggles. What I do know is that we now have a beautiful home and a new perspective.

Looking back, we realized our family took on far too much.

Our daughters were displaced by the move and destabilized by living with builders constantly in our home. And, by spending so much time working on the house, we missed precious growing-up time with them.

During these renovations, I also struggled to feel like an equal in my relationship. By letting my husband (an engineer and the main earner) make the decisions, I put too much pressure on him — and I was angry at myself for not speaking up.

After 20 years of marriage, we're finally talking about what we've learned and what we want our partnership to look like moving forward. I'm becoming more assertive, building my self-confidence, and prioritizing my mental health.

Above all, my husband and I are looking forward to never renovating again.

• Meta's CTO said 2025 is crucial for Metaverse's success or failure in a leaked memo seen by BI.
• Andrew Bosworth said Meta needs to "drive sales, retention, and engagement" for mixed reality.
• He added Reality Labs plans to launch "half a dozen" more AI-powered wearable products.

Meta's chief technology officer thinks 2025 could be a make-or-break year for its metaverse bets, Business Insider has learned.

Andrew "Boz" Bosworth told staff this year is "most critical" to prove the metaverse is either a visionary feat or a "legendary misadventure," according to an internal memo from November, viewed by BI.

In a post titled "2025: The Year of Greatness," shared on Meta's internal forum Workplace, Bosworth said its Reality Labs division plans to launch half a dozen more AI-powered wearable devices — but did not specify a timeline or provide further details.

"We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR [mixed reality]," he wrote. "And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long-term plans to have a chance. If you don't feel the weight of history on you, then you aren't paying attention."

He added, "This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure."

Bosworth also referred to Steven Levy's book, "Insanely Great," which details how the Macintosh computer was created by small teams of one to three people. Later in the memo, Bosworth added that he has seen smaller teams "achieve better results than our more generously funded teams."

Last week, the Meta CTO announced a series of reorgs in its Reality Labs division, which is responsible for its augmented and virtual reality products. As part of the changes, the unit that Reality Labs COO Dan Reed previously led will now be run by Meta COO Javier Olivan.

Meta also reshuffled the reporting lines of other Reality Labs executives, who now report to other key figures in Meta's core business, signaling the division has become a bigger priority for the company.

Last week, Meta's Reality Labs unit reported a record $1.08 billion in revenue in its fourth-quarter earnings. However, the mixed reality-focused division also recorded its biggest-ever quarterly operating loss of $4.97 billion. The division has racked up losses of about $60 billion since 2020.

Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI, made outside normal working hours.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the company's smart glasses in an all-hands meeting last week, in which he told employees to "buckle up" for an "intense year."

The company sold more than a million units of its AI-powered smart glasses in 2024, which Zuckerberg said was a "great start" but that it is "not going to move the needle and the business in a core way."

He added that Meta's trajectory this year will give it a good indication of whether smart glasses will become a "long-term grind" and whether, in the near term, AI glasses will become a "really prominent computing platform."

Read the full memo Bosworth sent to employees:

2025: The Year of Greatness

Next year is going to be the most critical year in my 8 years at Reality Labs. We have the best portfolio of products we've ever had in market and are pushing our advantage by launching half a dozen more AI powered wearables. We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don't feel the weight of history on you then you aren't paying attention. This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.

I've been re-reading "Insanely Great," Steven Levy's history of the Macintosh computer. If you haven't read it the book chronicles the incredible efforts of individuals working in teams of 1-3 to build a device that more than any other marked the consumer era of personal computing. What I find most fascinating about it is the way that even people who left the program on bad terms (it was not particularly well managed) speak about the work they did there with an immense sense of pride. There was a widespread cultural expectation, set by none other than a young Steve Jobs, that the work needed to be "insanely great."

On paper 2024 was our most successful year to date but we aren't sitting around celebrating because know it isn't enough. We haven't actually made a dent in the world yet. The prize for good work is the opportunity to do great work.

Greatness is our opportunity. We live in an incredible time of technological achievement and have placed ourselves at the center of it with our investments. There is a very good chance most of us will never get a chance like this again.

Greatness is a choice. Many people have ben at the precipice of opportunity and failed to achieve. For the most part they failed to even challenge themselves.

You should be doing the best work of your career right now. You should be pushing yourself to grow where needed and doubling down on your strengths. When you look back on this time I want you to feel like you did everything in your power to make the most of it.

You don't need big teams to do great work. In fact, it may make it harder. One trend I've observed the last couple of years is that our smaller teams often go faster and achieve better results than our more generously funded teams. Not only that, they are much happier! In small teams there is no risk of falling into bad habits like design by committee. You should be so focused on results that being in a bunch of docs or meetings is too frustrating to bear.

The path is clear. You don't need to come up with a bunch of new ideas to do this great work. Most people in the organization just need to execute on the work laid out before them to succeed. It is about operational excellence. It is about master craftsmanship. It is about filling our products with "Give A Damn". This is about having pride in our work.

I will close with an Arnold Glasow quote: "Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire." 2025 is the year. Let's be on fire.

Are you a Meta employee? Got insight to share? Contact the reporter Jyoti Mann via Signal at jyotimann.11 or email at [email protected]. Reach out from a nonwork device.

• The US, UK, and EU have imposed a flurry of sanctions on Moscow's "shadow fleet."
• The fleet comprises often aging, uninsured ships that aim to evade sanctions on Russian energy exports.
• Some countries have begun delisting sanctioned Russian shadow tankers.

Russia's "shadow fleet" is running out of options to export oil.

The US, UK, and EU have all levied heavy sanctions on Russian shadow fleet vessels in recent months as part of an effort to hamper Russian oil exports and hinder the country's ability to fund its invasion of Ukraine.

In January, the US Treasury announced sweeping sanctions on 183 Russian-controlled and shadow fleet ships — the latter of which are often aging, uninsured vessels Moscow uses to evade international sanctions. The EU and the UK have together sanctioned more than 140 such vessels.

Russia's shadow fleet has used a number of different tactics to try to evade these sanctions and deliver Russian crude oil while obscuring its source, including turning off automatic identification systems (AIS), providing false positions, and carrying out ship-to-ship transfers.

However, the fleet, which has an estimated 1,300 ships, is now facing another problem — a growing number of registries delisting sanctioned vessels. Between Barbados and Panama alone, more than 100 sanctioned Russian ships are being delisted.

"These ships lose their legal right to operate under those jurisdictions, making them less likely to access international ports or insurance services," Petras Katinas, an energy analyst at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Business Insider.

To enter a port, vessels typically need a valid flag issued by a country's maritime authority, insurance coverage, and a classification society verification, which verifies safety standards.

With more registries cutting ties, Russian shadow tankers are forced to change flags frequently, a practice known as "flag hopping," according to Ami Daniel, CEO of maritime AI firm Windward.

Russia has long used this tactic to evade the G7's $60-per-barrel price cap on its oil, which has been in place since December 2022, with Panama, Liberia, the Marshall Islands, and Malta among the favored flags used by the shadow fleet's vessels.

"This is a Whack-a-Mole game," Daniel said. Russia's shadow fleet vessels will "go to whatever random flag will take them."

Some of the Russian ships previously registered in Barbados have already switched flags to Tanzania and São Tomé and Príncipe to evade sanctions, according to the Equasis marine database.

Nevertheless, the latest sanctions have proven "very effective" in pushing shadow fleet vessels out of commercial operations, Benjamin Hilgenstock, a senior economist at the Kyiv School of Economics, said.

"The buyers of the oil, banks involved in the transactions, and port authorities fear being hit by sanctions themselves if they interact with listed tankers or their cargo," he told BI.

Financial impact

The crackdown on Russia's shadow fleet could have serious financial consequences for Moscow.

Oil exports, alongside gas, are one of the Kremlin's most important sources of cash. Oil and gas revenues accounted for around 30% of Russia's federal budget in 2024, Alexander Novak, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister, wrote in Energy Policy last week.

And Western sanctions already appear to be having an effect.

The Kyiv School of Economics said Russian oil export revenues dropped by $1.1 billion to $14.6 billion in November amid US, UK, and EU countermeasures.

"The unified 'triple pressure' strategy raises the risks and costs of violations, prevents sanctions evasion, and reinforces accountability for shipowners and third countries," it said.

Reuters reported last week that sanctions have also triggered a surge in shipping costs, prompting China and India — two of the largest importers of Russian crude — to suspend March purchases of Russian oil.

While those countries "continue to import substantial amounts of Russian oil and raise revenue for the Kremlin, they are also reacting to the stick of the US secondary sanctions," said Gonzalo Saiz Erausquin, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute's Centre for Finance and Security.

Analysts say the West must now expand the list of sanctioned shadow fleet ships to effectively hit Russia's oil revenues, as Moscow will likely be able to mitigate short-term impacts with its schemes to evade such measures.

Erausquin said Western countries should also look to crack down on third-country intermediaries, brokers, and fraudulent registries that allow substantial amounts of Russian crude to be imported.

"We have to make sure that we're making life harder for Russia's shadow fleet," Erausquin said.

• Many fan-favorite stars, including Beyoncé, Chappell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter, were Grammys winners.
• Kendrick Lamar took home 5 awards for "Not Like Us," his diss track about Drake.
• Lamar's awards amplify Drake's defeat after their intense rap beef.

Fans are calling Sunday's Grammys one of the best nights for the awards show in years after Beyoncé, Chappell Roan, and Kendrick Lamar won big.

But Lamar's success made Drake, the rapper's biggest rival, the event's biggest loser.

After more than a decade of being snubbed for the top award, Beyoncé finally won the prestigious album of the year for "Cowboy Carter." Rising stars Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Doechii, and CharliXCX dazzled with performances of their most popular tracks and each took at least one award.

There was some disagreement about Billie Eilish going home empty-handed, but many fans on social media seemed to think there were no major snubs this year — something of a rarity for an awards show.

Lamar, who had a resurgence in 2024 after beating Drake in a diss track battle and dropping a chart-topping album "GNX," also took home five awards for "Not Like Us," his most popular diss track about Drake. Lamar won the most awards for any artist on Sunday and won in the top categories: song of the year and record of the year.

Although Drake skipped the Grammys this year and was not nominated for any awards against Lamar, the song's success is a further embarrassment for Drake.

The Recording Academy gave five awards to a song that accuses Drake of pedophilic behavior and also played the song during the event, where Beyoncé and Taylor Swift can be seen dancing along.

Drake denied the pedophile allegation in his response song "The Heart Part 6," released in May 2024.

In November 2024, Drake tried to sue Universal Music Group, the record company that owns Lamar's and Drake's labels, accusing it of using illicit methods to boost "Not Like Us." In January, he dropped another lawsuit against Universal that alleged defamation over the song's allegations.

UMG has denied Drake's allegations of boosting "Not Like Us" and of defamation.

Sunday's result is unsurprising because the Recording Academy has always embraced Lamar, who now has 22 Grammys, and famously snubbed Drake, who has only won five times from 55 nominations.

Drake has been critical of the Grammys in recent years, writing in an Instagram story in 2024: "All you incredible artists remember this show isn't the facts it's just the opinion of a group of people who's name are kept a secret 🤫😂 (literally you can google it). Congrats to anybody winning anything for hip hop but this show doesn't dictate shit in our world."

But "Not Like Us" continued success shows that Drake can't lawyer his way out of his rap beef defeat and win back favor with the public.

Drake's year of humiliation is not over. Lamar's next stop is the Super Bowl halftime show on February 9, and fans expect him to perform his diss tracks one last time as a final blow to Drake.

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

Welcome back! Global markets have been rocked after the Trump administration ordered 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico and a 10% tariff on China, which are set to start on Tuesday. All three countries vowed to retaliate.

Business leaders are urging Trump to reconsider, fearing a global trade war that could wreak havoc on American industries.

In today's big story, last week's DeepSeek drama is a good opportunity for investors to reassess their positions.

What's on deck

Markets: Crypto coins hoping to surge thanks to celebrity endorsements. What could possibly go wrong?

Tech: Meta is showing no signs of slowing down this year.

Business: Trump's deportation plan is set to be big business for private prisons.

But first, some lessons learned.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

Preparing for next time

It was the shock heard around the world until it wasn't.

DeepSeek's arrival hit the market, especially tech stocks, hard and fast. Things eventually stabilized before turning catastrophic, but the episode provided a valuable lesson for investors on the risks that come from a market so heavily focused on one theme.

Business Insider's Matthew Fox unpacked the DeepSeek crash by looking at five investing lessons learned from the saga. His findings include everything from understanding the different layers of AI to the considerations that need to be made for cheap AI's impact on the bond market (Hint: It's a good thing.)

It's an interesting and useful exercise considering there's likely more volatility ahead due to the market's structure: a handful of stocks at record valuations all focused on the same thing dictating where the rest of the market goes.

For some, DeepSeek was the first break in the AI-built dam. "You have a small little chip on the glass. Now they realize, oh, it's not infallible. Maybe I should revise," "Black Swan" author Nassim Taleb said last week.

Others are much less bearish, feeling it was more a product of investors rethinking the already sky-high valuations in the tech sector.

Regardless of where you fall on the AI-belief spectrum, it's not something you can ignore as an investor. With seemingly everyone talking about how the tech will impact their industry, failure to acknowledge feels akin to investing negligence.

So, the key lesson from DeepSeek might be that, for better or for worse, AI rules the roost.

News brief

Top headlines

• Musk says DOGE is working 120 hours a week.
• Robinhood's media arm Sherwood lays off staff as it looks to 'streamline team structure.'
• Jefferies CEO slams 'vitriolic attacks' over young banker's death, and offers support to junior staff. Read the memo.
• RTO mandates have workers looking for alternatives to companies like Amazon and JPMorgan.
• Beyoncé wins album of the year for 'Cowboy Carter' at the 2025 Grammys — her first triumph in the awards show's biggest category.

3 things in markets

1. Who's behind the celebrity meme coin scams? Celebrity meme coins are prime targets for classic pump-and-dump schemes, which can leave investors with suddenly worthless tokens. One crypto sleuth tracked down the culprit but was left with a bigger question: Were the celebrities in on it?

2. Trump might need to get out of his own way regarding the Fed. The president has repeatedly demanded the Fed lower interest rates, which Fed Chair Jerome Powell has shrugged off. Though Trump blames Powell for inflation, Wall Street forecasters think the bigger obstacle to lowering it is the president's own trade plans.

3. #noregrets. Okay, well maybe a few — but these four older Americans told BI how they eased into retirement without much they'd change in retrospect. "Do I wish I had more money? Yes, but I would not have done anything different," one said.

3 things in tech

1. Can't stop, won't stop. If the first few weeks of the year are any indication, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making good on his promise that 2025 will be the company's "year of intensity." It's already made content moderation changes and realigned itself with Trump, and there are shifts in the workforce and AI development still to come.

2. President Trump's proposed US government stake in TikTok could be a legal nightmare. The government owning a piece of a major social app would be new territory — and for it to work, the dealmakers would need to set up editorial guardrails to protect users' First Amendment rights. Still, legal analysts told BI that TikTok's content moderation could create an avalanche of legal challenges and make the app hard to run.

3. The race is on to recreate DeepSeek's market-breaking AI. Companies like Amazon and Microsoft have already adapted versions of the R1 model for their cloud platforms. Many are also attempting to replicate it from the ground up — and putting DeepSeek's claims to the test. As DeepSeek's model continues to gain traction, some cloud service and AI interference providers say they're noticing increased demand for Nvidia H200 chips.

3 things in business

1. The quiet winner of Trump's mass deportation plan. Trump's aggressive stance on immigration has already propelled stock prices in one industry: private prisons. The sector, which was on the outs with the Biden White House, stands to rake in millions more from immigrant detention.

2. Hotels for the homeless. Some US cities are taking part in a bold new experiment: buying and renovating hotels to house the homeless. Affordable converted hotels can be a "lower-barrier-for-entry option" for those struggling to find a home — especially as neighborhoods like Brentwood in Raleigh face threats of urban sprawl and gentrification.

3. Trump issued a series of executive orders aimed at reshaping the American education system. They examine redirecting federal funds to private schools that align with the president's politics, and changing curricula. It's unclear how his plans will be implemented, and the orders will likely face legal challenges. Still, they could have "a chilling effect" on schools, one education expert told BI.

In other news

• Trump's calendar: When tariffs, RTO, buyouts, and a TikTok cut-off are set to go into effect.
• Exxon Mobil CEO says natural gas can meet surging data center demand on a faster timeline than nuclear power.
• The list of CEOs voicing support for their companies' DEI initiatives is growing.

• Mark Zuckerberg said he has no plans to change Meta's hybrid work policy: 'The status quo is fine.'

  ---

What's happening today

• President Trump speaks with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, following his tariffs order.
• Court hearing in lawsuit filed by Blake Lively against costar Justin Baldoni.
• Israel and Hamas expected to begin phase two of ceasefire talks.

• Blue Origin New Shepherd rocket launch.

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The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Hallam Bullock, senior editor, in London. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York. Elizabeth Casolo, fellow, in Chicago.

• Sylvia Kang, 40, is a multimillionaire who lives in the Bay Area.
• Her business success and wealth have strained her relationships with her friends.
• She now focuses on people with shared hobbies, even if she can't share everything with them.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sylvia King, founder and CEO of Mira. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I founded Mira, a women's hormonal health company, in 2018. The company really took off during COVID-19, and I became a millionaire about three years ago. Today I'm 40, and I'm a multimillionaire.

Despite that, I still live in a three-bedroom house in a middle-class neighborhood with my son and husband. I like to keep a low-profile life. I drive a Tesla Model 3, but that's more about convenience than luxury — self-driving makes my life easier.

Although I try to live modestly, my wealth and business success have had a big impact on my friendships. I used to have lots of close friends who I could talk to about anything. But these days, I don't have any one person who I can share all aspects of my life with.

Friends treat me more formally because of my success

As my wealth and business profile have grown, I've noticed that my friends perceive me differently. People seem to respect me more, which makes them act more formally. We no longer just get together on a whim or grab a bite to eat. Instead, friends feel they need to schedule things well or book a fancy restaurant. Something that should be casual and fun has become an event.

It's not all my friends' fault. It's also harder for me to relate to them because so much of my attention and mental energy is dedicated to my company. My friends and I used to talk about getting promotions, seeking a raise, or dealing with our husbands and kids. I can still vent about my husband and son, but my day-to-day running of a company is very different from my friends who work for someone else.

Some friends want me to be their mentor. That can make things feel one-sided. Other people are genuinely curious about my life. Even then, talking with them is hard because running a business is so complex. I tend to give them a brief update when they ask, then turn the conversation back to them.

I have friends in different areas of my life

I talked with my therapist about this loss of connection. She told me that no one will be able to fulfill all my needs. I won't have that one best friend who understands all facets of my life.

Instead, I have many friends and acquaintances with whom I can share hobbies. I have people I can go on hikes with, or discuss my meditation practice. When I want to talk business, I turn to mentors and acquaintances. Other young-ish entrepreneurs understand aspects of my life that people who haven't started a company wouldn't get.

I could retire, but my work gives me purpose

The more money I make, the less interested I am in spending. I used to be motivated by material things: I thought I had to have the right designer purse or fancy car to show my status. Part of that was because, as an Asian woman who immigrated to the US, I needed to look and act a certain way to attract investors to my business.

Now that I've launched a successful business, I've grown more confident. I know who I am, and I don't feel the need to prove myself to anyone.

So, instead of buying luxury items to show my wealth, I spend only on things that bring me spiritual joy. I love visiting historical sights in Greece and Italy and have a trip to Turkey planned this year. I've hiked in Patagonia and have an excursion to New Zealand coming up.

If I wanted to retire and never work again, I probably could. Yet my work — improving women's health — is what really gives me fulfillment. Once I realized that, reaching financial freedom became less appealing than I had imagined before.

• My daughter spent 45 minutes in the Target toy aisle comparing toys to maximize her $25 gift card.
• Gift cards can be a powerful tool for teaching kids financial literacy.
• She also saved an Amazon gift card balance to buy a bigger toy — a lesson in delayed gratification.

On a trip to Target last September, my 5-year-old sprawled out on the floor of the toy aisle, her birthday gift card dangling from one hand while she weighed her options. A Barbie in a sparkly dress to her left and an assortment of tiny Ily doll accessories to her right — shoes, purses, and the world's smallest laptop. "The Barbie's pretty," she said, "but I could dress up my doll a million different ways."

My child is not yet in kindergarten and was doing a cost-benefit analysis.

She made a great choice with the money she had

I'm the person who sees my checking account balance drop and thinks, "We should eat at home." Meanwhile, my daughter is turning into a miniature accountant when considering how to spend $25. Unlike my credit card — which she considers the magic card that buys anything — her gift card came with limits she understood.

That Target moment was just the beginning. After 45 minutes of comparing prices and possibilities (and lots of parenting patience), she chose the accessories. "This way," she said, "I can play with my doll different ways every day instead of just having one new doll."

Gift cards continue to teach my daughter lessons

Through gift cards, my daughter has learned financial lessons I'm still struggling to apply. After weeks of playing with her doll accessories, she told me, "I'm glad I got these instead of the Barbie. I can make up so many more stories this way." Sometimes, the practical choice really does beat the pretty one.

When the holidays rolled around, she received an Amazon gift card and, with it, a new lesson about money. She spotted a $40 unicorn-themed craft set on the site, and I braced for the inevitable meltdown. Instead, she looked at her $25 balance and said, "I'll wait for my next birthday money."

A week later, a late present arrived in the form of another gift card. She remembered the unicorn-themed set — something I can't even do with items on my own wish list.

The day her second gift card arrived, she ran straight to my laptop and said, "Now I can get the unicorn craft set!" The excitement in her voice made it clear — delayed gratification wasn't a burden, but part of the fun. She'd discovered that waiting makes something more special. A budget, to her, wasn't a restriction; it was a plan. She didn't see it as a list of things she couldn't buy, but as a way to get exactly what she wanted when she was ready.

I'm hoping her wisdom rubs off on me

I've gone through cycles of steadily saving money and then burning through my bank account more times than I care to admit. But when I was 9, I learned my own savings lesson at an arcade. Determined to win one of the massive stuffed animals perched on the skeeball machines, I hoarded tickets for a year instead of spending them on erasers and bouncy balls.

When I finally counted them at age 10, I still didn't have enough — but the arcade manager, impressed by my dedication, gave me the stuffed lion anyway. The lesson should have been about saving and planning. Instead, I mostly learned that stuffed lions don't fit in cars.

At 39, watching my daughter methodically plan her gift card purchases is reemphasizing those lessons.

Recently, we went back to Target; this time, she spent exactly three minutes picking what she wanted. "I already know how much everything costs," she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how we spent $200 on "just a few things."

No, my daughter doesn't yet understand complex financial concepts like compound interest, but she understands that money isn't about how much she has; it's about how thoughtful she is when she spends it.

Maybe her wisdom will rub off before my impulse dollar section purchases.

• Lucy Moon, an influencer from London, wanted to drink less but worried people would think she's boring.
• She upset a loved one while drinking and decided she needed to change.
• Her health, performance at work, relationships, and mental health have greatly improved, she said.

Lucy Moon doesn't remember her first drink, but knows that she has never been able to drink "normally."

"I felt like I was trying to fool everyone into thinking I was a normal drinker, when really I would watch everyone's glasses to work out when the appropriate time would be for me to have my next drink," Moon, a 29-year-old fashion and lifestyle content creator from London, told Business Insider.

"I was thinking about alcohol a lot of the time. I was drinking every day, and I couldn't even imagine taking two days off," she said.

Three years ago, Moon decided to go sober after upsetting someone she loved while drinking. She joined the Gen Zers and millennials who are drinking less than past generations, in a trend that is improving people's health — and profits for non-alcoholic bars.

Moon said her life, in and out of work, is "much better" now she's sober.

Going sober benefited Moon's career

As an influencer, she attends a lot of press events with plentiful free alcohol, including Champagne or mimosas in the morning. She felt she needed to "be the life and soul of the party," so would never say no to a drink and was always the last person to leave.

"When I stopped drinking, I was worried I was going to be boring and awkward in work events, and thus maybe compromise my potential for making money," she said.

But she has had the opposite experience. She goes to just as many events, but knows that any worries she had about socializing were in her head and won't be fixed by alcohol. Plus, she remembers more of her interactions, which has helped her network.

Moon said she is also more reliable, particularly with her paid partnerships, and uploads content more consistently.

"My life is more predictable in a very positive way. I don't have blank spots in my memory, and I feel much more in control of my finances and my decision-making," she said.

Moon wasn't an "alcoholic," but couldn't drink "normally"

Moon prefers to describe herself as someone with an "alcohol problem" because she can't drink "normally" or safely, rather than an alcoholic, which carries stigma.

There were always "consequences" when Moon drank. She would often black out; lose her keys, wallet, and passport; spend more money than she had; or get lost and injure herself. After three or four drinks, she would forget what happened that night and wake up the next morning "filled with anxiety" that she'd upset loved ones or made a fool of herself.

"I'd come to and not know where I was," she said. "I was simply not in control. Once I had one drink, I lost the ability to be able to stop."

"Being young, there's this idea of 'Oh, well, things didn't get that bad for you.' But things got bad enough that I have enough proof that I can't drink safely. And if that were to carry on for another 20 years, it wouldn't be good," she said.

"That is ultimately why I gave up drinking when I was 26. I looked at those last five years, and I looked at how I was at 18 and I was like, 'Oh my god, I'm not growing out of this. Nothing has changed from the way I drank when I was 18.' And that's scary."

Getting sober was hard but felt like the only option

Moon knew she would struggle alone, so went to a local recovery group to find support to stop drinking.

"The first three or four months absolutely sucked. I was very low and just trying to get through day by day. It was a real struggle, but I just knew that if I got my head on the pillow sober at night, then that day was a success," she said.

By month five, things started to look up. But until then, she was motivated by her belief that it was her only option.

"My life had stagnated, and everything was really hard to deal with. I realized that drinking wasn't an option anymore if I wanted my life to improve. Drinking was causing pretty much all of the issues in my life, and I was the only person who could change that," she said.

She added: "My lips used to be chapped all the time, and I used to lose my voice — now they're both rare. I was nearly always ill, and now I get sick much less frequently.

"My relationships have developed and grown in such a beautiful way. And I don't wake up with crippling anxiety every day."

• Carmakers won't evenly be impacted by President Trump's tariffs against Mexico and Canada.
• Some US companies rely heavily on Mexico or Canada to produce and import their cars.
• Even those with a strong US presence, such as Tesla and Rivian, will still feel the effects.

For American automakers, the consequences of President Donald Trump's tariffs are likely unavoidable, even for those with a strong US manufacturing presence, such as Ford, Rivian, and Tesla.

A 25% levy on incoming goods from Canada and Mexico will impact almost all US carmakers because they've come to rely on their North American partners for not just large tasks such as vehicle assembly but also for smaller components such as engines, seats, and wiring.

The effects won't be even across the board.

General Motors, for example, could feel more of the blow from Trump's tariffs than others. In 2024, GM produced nearly 900,000 vehicles in Mexico, according to Statista data.

GM CEO Mary Barra said in an earnings call in January that the automaker has measures that it could take to soften the impacts of tariffs, in part by looking toward its other international sources.

"So there's plays that we can do on that perspective to minimize the impact if there are tariffs either on Canada or Mexico," Barra said at the time.

A spokesperson for GM did not respond to a request for comment.

US carmakers pivot

Even companies that manufacture most, if not all, of their cars in the US will have to strategize around mitigating the costs of tariffs.

Final assembly for Teslas, for example, takes place in the US. Still, a filing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that between 20% and 25% of the components from Tesla's 2025 model-year vehicles come from Mexico.

"There's a lot of uncertainty around tariffs," Tesla's Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said in an earnings call on January 29. "Over the years, we've tried to localize our supply chain in every market, but we are still reliant on parts from across the world for all our businesses. Therefore, the imposition of tariffs, which is very likely, and any will have an impact on our business and profitability."

Rivian, an EV startup based in southern California, also produces pickup trucks and SUVs in Illinois, with another Georgia plant planned for construction.

Still, CEO RJ Scaringe recognized the importance of Mexico's role in the US auto industry during a roundtable interview with reporters in January. He has also said that the company has been bracing for tariffs from the Trump administration.

"The auto industry, uniquely for the United States, is dependent on Mexico as a source of a lot of our supply chain. That's sort of been built over many, many decades," he said, adding that the sourcing will need to be "remapped" if tariffs were implemented.

Vidya Rajagopalan, Rivian's senior vice president of electrical hardware, told reporters during a tour of the company's Palo Alto office that contract manufacturers haven't "been sleeping" and will start to ramp up sourcing in Vietnam or other countries not levied with tariffs.

Spokespeople for Tesla and Rivian did not respond to a request for comment.

Ford might not feel the effects of Trump's tariffs as much as its legacy counterpart, GM, even though it, too, produces some of its vehicles in Canada and Mexico. The Bronco Sport, Maverick, and Mustang Mach-E are assembled south of the border. The company announced last year that it would assemble its F-Series Super Duty pickup trucks in Ontario, Canada, starting in 2026.

At the Barclays Global Automotive and Mobility Tech Conference in November, Ford's Chief Financial Officer John Lawler said that the carmaker is the "number one producer in the US," but the impacts of tariffs will be uncertain.

"Remember, it's four years," Lawler said at the time, appearing to reference the length of Trump's second term, "and we don't know how lasting this will be."

A Ford spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

• A 64-year-old United Airlines employee was seriously injured on Saturday.
• He was driving an aircraft tug which collided with an American Eagle plane that had just landed.
• The tug flipped over and pinned the driver underneath, Chicago police said.

A man was seriously injured on Saturday after an aircraft tug collided with a plane that had just landed.

The incident happened at Chicago O'Hare Airport around 7 p.m. local time.

Chicago police said the tug flipped over after colliding with the wing of the plane, pinning the driver underneath the tug, CBS News reported.

The injured man is 64 years old and was taken to hospital in critical condition with injuries to his head and lower body, it added.

A Bombardier CRJ-200 operated by Air Wisconsin had just landed from Michigan's Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

Air Wisconsin is a regional subsidiary of American Airlines, operating under American Eagle.

Passengers safely deplaned and were bused to the terminal, the FAA added.

"Nothing is more important than the safety of our customers and team members, and we are reviewing this incident," an American Airlines spokesperson said in a statement.

The tug driver is a United Airlines employee, the airline said in a statement also shared with several outlets.

"We are ensuring he receives any necessary support and care," it added.

United did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider outside of US working hours.

The incident is the latest in a series of aviation incidents in the US.

On January 28, a 66-year-old American Airlines employee died after being hit by an airport ramp vehicle at North Carolina's Charlotte Douglas International Airport, NBC News reported.

The following day saw the country's first major airline crash in nearly 16 years, when an American Airlines plane collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter in midair above the Potomac River in Washington, DC.

• Henk Rogers is a video game designer who helped make Tetris a global gaming phenomenon.
• After experiencing a near-fatal heart attack, he stopped "chasing the almighty dollar."
• Now, Rogers' big concerns are the climate crisis and building human settlements on the moon.

Henk Rogers may be the man behind Tetris, but gaming is no longer top of his agenda.

Along with the Tetris creator, Alexey Pajitnov, Rogers is best known for bringing the best-selling video game out of the Soviet Union to the masses in the 1980s.

The Tetris origin story is one filled with twists and turns, enough to inspire a 2023 Apple TV thriller starring Taron Egerton.

But reality is a different story, and the game of sliding colorful blocks into place is just one chapter in the life of the Dutch-born game designer.

Rogers met with Business Insider at Outernet, an installation in central London that hosted a huge multiplayer Tetris game to mark its 40th anniversary.

He was awestruck to see the game played across 23,000 square feet of high-definition screens: "I came here not really knowing what it was going to be, and it was way better than I imagined."

As much as Rogers played a pivotal role in making Tetris a global phenomenon, his own story took a left turn after a near-fatal heart attack in 2005.

"In that ambulance on the way to the hospital, I said, 'No, I'm not going,'" Rogers said. "'I still have stuff to do.'"

New mission: Solve the climate crisis

After his brush with death, Rogers stopped "chasing the almighty dollar" and refocused his attention on several new missions.

One of the most pressing agenda items is the climate crisis, which Rogers wants to help tackle through initiatives like the Blue Planet Alliance and Blue Planet Energy, organizations he founded to help governments and communities achieve a fossil fuel-free future.

"We are all living in what I would consider a lifeboat, and the lifeboat has holes in it," he said. "There are people who have the jobs to make to drill more holes in the lifeboat. That's insane. That is not a job. That's a crime. A crime against humanity, a crime against nature, and we have to recognize it as such."

That might sound gloomy, but Rogers is optimistic: "I don't have hope — I have determination."

Still, the climate crisis is just one item on Rogers' to-do list. Others include discovering "how the universe ends," finding a means to end wars — a goal Rogers admits he hasn't "gotten anywhere" with yet — and last, but not least, bringing people to space.

Carving a niche in the new space race

It's no secret that there's a "billionaire space race" going on — there's Elon Musk with Space X, Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, and Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic, to name a few heavyweights.

The field may be crowded, but Rogers isn't focused on competing.

"Everybody else is thinking about how to get there," he said. "I'm thinking about what do we do when we arrive."

The answer to that, Rogers said, is building settlements suitable to sustaining human life on the moon, Mars, and beyond. The goal is lofty, but he's actively working toward it through the International Moonbase Alliance, an organization he started in 2017 in Hawaii, where he spends a lot of time whenever he's not at home in New York.

"As far as we can tell, there's no other place in the universe that has our life as we know it," Rogers said. Therefore, it's "an unacceptable risk" not to have a "backup of life," he added.

Working with NASA, the alliance has completed five missions, during which people spend months at a time in a facility simulating environments on other planets.

Although Rogers is not particularly a fan of President Donald Trump, who has indicated that space exploration is a priority of his second term, he is open to funding from the current administration.

"A lot of the business leaders have said, 'You know what, we got to put up with this for four years. So let's figure out how we can move the ball forward instead of fighting,'" Rogers said.

Once a gamer, always a gamer

Rogers may be busy with other projects but hasn't totally abandoned the gaming world.

He remains the president of The Tetris Company, which he founded with Pajitnov, and keeps an eye on the changing video game industry.

Esports, for example, have become "a little too violent" for Rogers' taste. "I made a vow early in my career as a computer game designer that I would never work on a game that I didn't want my children to play."

While he no longer considers himself a gamer, he still scratches the gaming itch from time to time.

During his visit to Outernet's Tetris installation, Rogers said he was in awe seeing the game he helped become a cultural phenomenon played across 23,000 square feet of screens.

"I came here not really knowing what it was going to be, and it was way better than I imagined," he said.

But in his day-to-day, Rogers said racket sports have become his gaming go-to — table tennis when he's in New York and pickleball whenever he's in Hawaii.

Roger said racket sports are how he gets in his "cardio." He doesn't enjoy exercise without an element of competition and there's little chance you'll catch him at the gym: "If I had a trainer that was gamifying it, then I might."

• Paul Travis started his career as a marketing consultant but left the industry after a layoff.
• He launched a dating program for singles over 40 during the pandemic called The School for Love.
• Now, Travis is a certified sex educator and embraces a digital nomad lifestyle.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Paul Travis, the 59-year-old founder of The School for Love based in Bainbridge Island, Washington. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm a sex educator and the founder of The School for Love. I have a BA in mathematics and computer science and completed the Harvard Executive Program in Brand Management.

After a two-year stint as the VP of marketing for Net Nanny Software in the early 2000s, I took my Harvard postgrad executive branding work into consulting for a variety of client engagements, from rebranding to new product launch to marketing systems implementation, in industries from food manufacturing to laser lighting to SaaS services.

In December 2013, I was engaged to implement a customer community program for Avalara, a fintech company. Eighteen months later, I transitioned to full-time employment as a senior program manager for the web marketing team.

After losing this job, I decided to leave consulting behind and become a sex educator.

I was laid off in September 2020

Avalara brought its first CMO aboard in late 2019. In January 2020, my manager told me that the two program management roles inside marketing would be eliminated. I set out to find another position within the company, but with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and financial uncertainty, most hiring came to a standstill.

As we entered spring, I mentally braced for losing more than $10,000 monthly in income and benefits. I was earning six figures a year when I left Avalara. I'd enjoyed growing with the company through an IPO, but at the same time, I was tired of the increasing energy drain and uninterested in another corporate gig.

I was excited and uncertain when I was laid off in September 2020, but I trusted that I was embarking on the next big chapter of my life.

I knew I was interested in midlife dating

As David Bowie said, "Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should've been." I learned how important variety is to me, so returning to a past chapter like consulting (like returning to a past lover) didn't call to me — I wanted to build a company.

I researched a few ideas that had been in the back of my mind and decided to focus on midlife dating, with which I was extremely comfortable after my divorce following a 19-year marriage.

Given the lockdowns and masking during the pandemic, I understood how difficult this was for singles — many of whom say it was already more challenging than during the last 10 years.

Given my years of study in nonviolent communication, tantra, and interpersonal work, I felt a passion brewing to help people in this very different realm of training, propelled by COVID-19.

I started an online program for singles over 40

In February 2021, I launched my twelve-week online program, "The Great Dating Reset," for $999 under the umbrella Pandemic.Love to help spiritual singles over 40 cultivate "authintimacy" — a portmanteau of authenticity and intimacy.

I found my initial clients from advertising on Facebook. It was heartwarming to help Sue, a 52-year-old woman, navigate a new relationship and save her from being taken advantage of for a few thousand dollars. Equally so for Sally, who had been painfully dumped from a seven-year relationship and found esteem and self-love through the homework exercises.

Since rebranding in January 2022 as SchoolForLove.com, I've run two to three group programs online each year. Later in 2022, I created and hosted a summit for this same audience, "Dare to Date Differently," along with 12 other speakers.

I next became a certified sex educator

In speaking regularly with people about their dating lives and our program, I found just how often singles brought up sexuality as a core area of worry, shame, or frustration. I set out in 2023 to study with Dr. Martha Tara Lee in Singapore and became a certified sex educator, certified by AASECT (the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists).

I haven't yet reached my former salaried income level, but I've lowered my expenses by renting out my house and having a tight budget. I downsized into my Sprinter van and embraced van life. I'm thankful technology allows me to work as a digital nomad. I've traveled more in the past three years than ever.

I'd make the choice all over again

I'm delighted to make a genuine difference in people's love lives rather than in corporate software and marketing.

I'm writing a book on "Authintimacy," so I spend a lot of time on social media and marketing systems, talking to clients and prospects, and managing several freelancers. I'm in the process of launching my second program, Authintimacy Brotherhood.

I work six to seven days a week from anywhere between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., but I take time every day to be in nature, play with my dog, and nurture my spirit away from the computer.

Society teaches us to get on the "life escalator," and everything will eventually work out for retirement. That's not how my life has worked, but I have no fears about retirement.

I've had some devastating detours, awesome advances, and circuitous change-ups. I have no career regrets and appreciate the various chapters and people in my life.

• Many companies are requiring workers to return to the office.
• Employees who've been more isolated during remote work might need time to acclimate to the office again.
• Etiquette experts shared tips with BI to help smooth the transition back to in-person work.

You've been called back to the office and someone walks over who you've only ever talked with on Slack or Zoom.

What do you do?

Or maybe you recently traded the privacy of your living room office for a hot desk in an open-floor plan and your friend FaceTimes you.

Should you answer at your desk?

It's etiquette questions like these that workers who became used to remote work might need to brush up on as more companies mandate a return to the office. And for some Gen Zers who graduated during the pandemic, remote work may be all they have ever known in their careers.

While there may not be a one-size-fits-all approach to how to behave at the office, BI talked to etiquette experts to get their advice on smoothing the transition back.

Arden Clise of Clise Etiquette says the biggest complaint she's heard from clients is that workers need to brush up on their social skills and remember "the niceties that we can get into a habit of doing when we're spending more time with people, but have gotten forgotten when we're isolated in our homes."

So whether you're re-entering the corporate office world after a few years of being remote or starting your first in-person job, here's a refresher on post-pandemic office etiquette.

Business attire: A little self awareness goes a long way

Many white-collar workers are dressing more casually when they return to the office today compared to pre-pandemic.

"As I'm working with HR and companies, I see every one of them dusting off an old dress code policy," said Lisa Richey of The American Academy of Etiquette.

Daniel Post Senning of The Emily Post Institute said it can be helpful to "think about what the floor of your formality is for a professional environment or interaction."

"That's going to be different for different people in different industries, different jobs, different work cultures," he said. "But making an effort to think about how you want to present professionally and setting some baseline standards for yourself, and then adhering to them, is a really good place to start."

Take note of what your peers are wearing and consult your official dress code policy if your organization has one. In lieu of company guidance, you can ask what might be appropriate if you don't know, the experts advised.

Besides your clothing, grooming and hygiene are also integral to how you present yourself at work.

"How you choose to dress and present isn't just about personal expression, it's also about showing respect for the people and environments that you're operating in," said Senning.

Don't get too personal when meeting a colleague in person

The return to office means you might see a coworker in person for the first time after knowing them as a virtual head-and-shoulders for the past few years — or you might see a colleague again for the first time in a while.

It's perfectly appropriate to shake hands in either case, but be careful not to make insensitive comments about how someone might look different than you expected, or how a coworker's appearance might have changed since you last saw them in person, the experts said.

Saying a simple hello and goodbye when you come and go are easy "'gimme' social interactions," as Senning calls them.

"They cost you nothing, and done well, and repeatedly, they really forge important social bonds," he said. "They build a sense of connection and trust that is going to carry you through tense meetings, critical feedback, miscommunications, things like that later on."

Shared spaces are exactly that

The pandemic made hot-desking, where multiple workers share the same desk at different times, more common.

If you're hot-desking, make sure you clean up before you leave and remove any of your personal items from the desk for the next person.

As for conference rooms, check in with your company's reservation system to make sure you're not using a room someone else has reserved.

"Conflict can arise around a shared resource if people aren't taking a certain level of care," said Senning.

Being on time is particularly important for in-person meetings as opposed to virtual ones because of the extra effort your colleagues made to get to the office, he added.

And, unlike in virtual meetings, where you might secretly give your attention to other browser windows or IRL happenings at the same time, you should put your phone away in an in-person meeting and give your fellow attendees your undivided attention. (If you don't, they'll certainly notice.)

The age-old wisdom on avoiding fish at the office stands, says Clise. Remember to clean out anything you stored in the communal fridge periodically. And if you're taking the last cup of coffee, make a new pot of it.

Take lunch in the breakroom or cafeteria versus at your desk to "have more opportunities to chat with others," Clise suggested.

Depending on your office setup, you should also be careful to approach phone calls a certain way.

"It's been true for years that one of the biggest complaints about coworkers' behavior in open office environments is people talking too loudly on phones," said Senning.

When returning to the office, step away from your desk to take personal calls. Don't use speakerphone in a cubicle or open-plan office; you can if you have your own office, but close the door.

"Being able to project your voice at home versus working at an open space in an office is very different," said Clise.

At social gatherings, you're still at work

Happy hours, learning lunches, and other team outings may pick up as employees work from the office more frequently.

"You're still accountable at business social events," said Senning. "These are still your colleagues and your coworkers, and you want to be aware that those relationships will still exist the next day in those work and professional environments."

Don't feel pressured to drink or to need to explain your reason for teetotaling. For those who are drinking, it can be a good idea to stick with the one-drink rule.

"Enjoy the conversation, interact with your coworkers, and know when it's time to go home," said Richey.

'Every interaction counts'

Some etiquette guidance far predates the pandemic and may hold up just as long after: Avoid sensitive topics like religion or overly personal matters, as well as swearing.

It's also in your best interest to steer clear of gossip, Clise says.

"Typically when someone gossips with us, they gossip about us," she said. "That can create an environment where you don't feel safe because you're not sure who you can trust and people are talking about other people beyond their backs."

A good rule of thumb is to remember that "every interaction counts, whether it's a virtual meeting, an email, or an in-person interaction," said Richey.

For Clise, it's about "being really self-aware and realizing that work is not just us, it's a team."

"We need to be sure we're being helpful and encouraging others to share their thoughts, to feel that they belong, that they're included," she said. "We're not coming in thinking, 'Oh, it's just me and I'm just doing my job.' It's all a team effort."

And while it's true many employees "could use a little polishing" on their soft skills coming out of a long period of remote work and social isolation, says Senning, "it's really comforting to know that while these skills can deteriorate, they also come back."

It's hard to know where to look in the flurry of activity from the opening days of President Donald Trump's second administration. There's Elon Musk at DOGE, a potential trade war with Colombia, a sweeping pardon of Capitol riot participants, and the chaotic back-and-forth of the funding freeze. On immigration, the president is moving swiftly, cracking down on immigrants who entered the United States illegally. While all these moves have attracted copious attention, flying under the radar so far is one industry that stands to see a major windfall as Trump's plans fall into place: private prisons.

The president signed a barrage of executive orders and actions on his first day in office. Among them: the revocation of an executive order signed by President Joe Biden directing the Department of Justice not to renew contracts with private, for-profit prison companies to house people convicted of federal crimes. By late 2022, the Bureau of Prisons had ended all its contracts with private prisons, per Biden's order. Now, under Trump, the flip has been switched back on again. The move isn't surprising — for a decade, private prisons have been in a bit of an on-again, off-again situation with the DOJ. The Obama administration moved to phase them out, Trump 1.0 reversed it, Biden phased them out again, and Trump has once again reversed that decision. The industry anticipated as much. George Zoley, the executive chairman of the GEO Group, a for-profit prison company, said on an earnings call in November that he expected Trump to reverse all of Biden's orders on "day one."

While private prison companies won't mind getting business back from the BOP, that's really not where the opportunity is. CoreCivic, another major US private prison operator, acknowledged in an investor call in 2021 that the bureau didn't really have much of a need for private facilities anymore since the federal inmate population had declined — and less than 10% of those inmates were in private prisons. The opportunity is Trump's plans for the mass detention and deportation of immigrants. Both Democratic and Republican administrations kept up work with for-profit prisons on immigration — the Biden administration, for example, deported more people than Trump's first administration did and often detained those people in private prison facilities. But Trump says he plans to really ramp things up now, moving hundreds of thousands of migrants through the system in a way that would be a huge boon for the companies.

"This is, to us, an unprecedented opportunity to assist the federal government and the incoming Trump administration towards achieving a much more aggressive immigration policy," Zoley said on the earnings call.

Despite going relatively unnoticed in the opening days of the administration, private prison companies are a secret weapon for the president in his war on immigrants, and they stand to reap some major profits in the process.

While the average American may not be aware of how good Trump's immigration plans might be for private prisons, Wall Street certainly is. The stock prices of GEO and CoreCivic have soared by 105% and 50% since the 2024 election.

"The thing that really has driven the stock price since the election basically is Trump's stance that he's going to deport millions of people," said Joe Gomes, a managing director of equity research at Noble Capital Markets.

There are three main areas in which the private prison companies stand to make money on Trump's deportation plans, said Bianca Tylek, the founder and executive director of Worth Rises, a group that advocates against the commercialization of the criminal legal system. One is detention, as in holding migrants in facilities until their court hearings or until they're expelled from the country. The second is surveillance of migrants who aren't detained, and the third is transportation around, and possibly out of, the US.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has funding to maintain 41,500 beds for detained migrants, but the president's border czar, Tom Homan, has suggested he needs at least 100,000 beds to carry out Trump's deportation plans. The recently enacted Laken Riley Act that requires the detention of migrants accused of crimes such as theft could necessitate 60,000 more beds. Private prison operators will be key to helping this expansion, though they won't be the only ones — Trump has said he also plans to use space at Guantánamo Bay to house detainees.

GEO, the largest contractor for ICE, has about 13,500 beds for migrants, but executives said it was well positioned to scale up to more than 31,000 beds in the near future. Similarly, CoreCivic told The Wall Street Journal it could get its capacity to 25,000 beds by reopening facilities it recently closed. It has also looked into sites for detaining families, and its CEO told the Journal that the company was "very willing" to discuss detaining unaccompanied children, too.

GEO also operates ICE's Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which monitors migrants as they go through legal proceedings as an alternative to detention. GEO says that about 182,500 people participate in that program daily, but that number could grow significantly. On the company's earnings call, Zoley said GEO believes it has the technology and resources to scale up the ISAP contract to "several hundreds of thousands and upward to several millions of participants."

About 11 million people are thought to be living in the US illegally. Gomes said that if the government were to monitor a certain percentage of those people, it would be a "huge positive" for GEO and could bring in others, too. "If that contract got extremely big, there would potentially be other players like CoreCivic that could potentially also benefit from that," he said.

On the transportation end, private prison companies contract with ICE to move migrants on the ground and in the air. GEO said on its earnings call that it expects its air subcontracting services to generate $25 million in annualized revenue and that it believes it could scale if need be, too.

In a statement to Business Insider, a GEO spokesperson said the company was investing $70 million toward "increased housing, transportation, and monitoring capabilities and services to meet the anticipated requirements of the federal government's immigration law enforcement priorities." A CoreCivic spokesperson said the company "stays in regular contact with ICE and all our government partners to understand their changing needs, and we work within their established procurement processes."

It's not an accident that the private prison companies wound up in this situation. For years they've been hard at work buttering up public officials, lobbying, and making campaign donations, especially to Trump and other Republicans. While many corporate executives have come around to the idea of wooing Trump in his second term, the private prisons were there all along.

In the 2016 election, GEO donated $225,000 to the pro-Trump super PAC Rebuilding America Now through a subsidiary. (The advocacy group the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, saying the money violated a ban on political contributions by federal contractors, but that was dismissed because of a deadlock on the FEC.) GEO and CoreCivic each gave $250,000 to Trump's 2016 inauguration. GEO held its annual conference in 2017 at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami, and one GEO executive who lobbied the Trump administration stayed at Trump's hotel in Washington, DC. Pam Bondi, Trump's new attorney general, lobbied for GEO as recently as 2019.

Early in 2024, GEO maxed out its donation to Trump's campaign and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Trump-affiliated super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. Individual executives at GEO and CoreCivic have made large donations to Trump and affiliated PACs as well. An ABC News analysis found that private prison companies donated more than $1 million to Trump's reelection, and now they're hoping all their efforts pay off.

"We can assume, given their exuberance after the election, that they are really excited about the possibilities for making money and expanding the 'demand' that will be going up for them and their services right now," said Setareh Ghandehari, the advocacy director at the Detention Watch Network, an advocacy group that opposes immigration detention. She added, however, that expanding detention capacity isn't something the administration can achieve overnight. "It's going to take time to build the infrastructure," she said.

Trump's plans won't just take time — they'll also take a whole lot of money. Companies such as GEO and CoreCivic are hoping to get a cut of that cash, but it's unclear where exactly it would come from. Even before the president took office, ICE was facing a $230 million budget shortfall, NBC News reported, citing two US officials. To execute Trump's immigration plans, the administration could move money around within the Department of Homeland Security from places such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Coast Guard, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It may also pull in other agencies for assistance. But ultimately it would need Congress to appropriate more money toward its project.

"That's also a huge tax on taxpayers," Tylek said. "Their entire business is reliant on the government paying for more people to be incarcerated."

PJ Lechleitner, who served as the ICE director under Biden and spent 20 years at DHS, said that adding 10,000 to 15,000 beds in a few months was feasible, "perhaps twice that many." But the numbers the Trump administration is floating, he said, would require "years of infrastructure for the high-end estimate."

"If they're going to aggressively continue to pursue this, which I have every indication that they are, they're going to need a lot more money and find places to put these people," Lechleitner told me.

Even if every dollar is approved, building new facilities takes time. That may force the Trump administration to employ the practice known as "catch and release," Rick Su, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, told me. While it may not be exactly what Trump had in mind, it's a good deal for private prison companies, which will be eager and able to help with migrant monitoring.

Whatever your position on immigration, the idea of criminal detention being a commercial enterprise is uncomfortable. "What's best for my shareholders" does not always align with what's best for the community or country or public safety. Also uncomfortable is the way the stocks of private prison companies seem to ping-pong based on which party is in the White House. Back in 2016, private prison stocks crashed when Hillary Clinton had a good debate performance. Though, for what it's worth, these companies have fared quite well under administrations of both political stripes — both Democrats and Republicans have employed them for various immigration-related reasons.

"Both the Obama administration's and the Biden administration's relationships to private prisons set some guardrails," said Matt Nelson, the executive director of Presente, a national civil and human rights organization, but neither addressed the federal government's biggest use of private operators, which was immigration and ICE. "If you look at even what Trump did, he didn't have to roll back very much," he said.

Now companies such as GEO and CoreCivic find themselves at the center of what's likely to be a very lucrative storm for them. Their executives may not have been seated behind Trump at the inauguration, but they didn't need to be — they might prefer to fly under the radar anyway, and they're already on track to get what they've wanted. They need Trump, but Trump also needs them, and everyone knows it.

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

In Raleigh, North Carolina's Brentwood neighborhood, standing out among the pawn shops, auto repair garages, and warehouses that dot the city's arterial Capital Boulevard, is a telltale new site: the Broadstone Oak City Apartments, a chic complex of muted earth tones, modern fonts, and a manicured lawn. The sprawl of one of America's fastest-growing cities hasn't quite reached Brentwood yet. But if the Broadstone and its cabana-draped pool and resident business center filled with podcasting gear is any indicator, gentrification is coming.

Anticipating the influx, the city of Raleigh did something unusual: It bought a hotel.

In 2021, the city used $8 million in funds from the COVID-era American Rescue Plan Act to purchase Hospitality Studios, a 117-room extended-stay hotel across the street from the Broadstone. As the city revamps the building, the goal, says Emila Sutton, Raleigh's director of housing and neighborhoods, is twofold: "to preserve tenancy for the folks already living there" as local rents are surely soon to rise, and to provide permanent housing for Raleigh's homeless population, which from 2021 to 2024 grew by 200%. Homelessness is surging nationwide: Some 770,000 people lived without housing in America in January 2024, 120,000 more than in 2023, and nearly 200,000 more than in 2022.

"Due to prior evictions and credit history, many people are turned away from housing," Sutton says. The hotel, which the city has renamed the Studios at 2800 Brentwood and dramatically reduced room rates, "provides a lower-barrier-for-entry option for those people."

While people at risk of homelessness have long found refuge in nightly or weekly rentals at hotels and motels, that number swelled during the COVID-19 pandemic, often with the help of state and federal funding. In New York City, 9,000 people were relocated from shelters into hotels. California's Project Roomkey moved some 62,000 people experiencing homelessness into hotels across the state. For many, this was life-changing. In a study published in the Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness, Deborah Padgett, a professor at New York University's Silver School of Social Work, and two colleagues interviewed more than a dozen formerly homeless people who stayed in hotels during stretches of the pandemic. "Benefits of hotel housing," the authors wrote, "included improvement in physical health, sleep, personal hygiene, privacy, safety, nutrition, and overall well-being." They concluded that "an unprecedented opportunity has arisen from the pandemic to end homelessness for many."

Raleigh joins several cities across the country attempting to make hotels a more permanent housing solution. In October, the city of Chicago purchased the historic Diplomat Motel, rechristening it Haven on Lincoln, which provides people experiencing homelessness with access to their own rooms. In Brooklyn's ultraexpensive Dumbo neighborhood, the recently renovated 90 Sands will provide housing — along with a gym, computer lab, and bicycle storage — to hundreds of people who had been living on the streets. In early 2024, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a Democrat from Oregon, introduced the "Project Turnkey Act," which if passed would provide $1 billion annually, via the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to purchase and convert unused hotels, schools, hospitals, and office buildings across the country into housing or to add to shelter capacity.

Housing people without homes is not purely altruistic, Sutton adds. She notes that a 2017 study by the National Alliance to End Homelessness found the taxpayer cost of supporting homelessness (for public services from shelters to hospitals) can range anywhere from $35,000 to $96,000 a year, per person. If those people are housed, that cost drops to between $18,000 and $34,000. "It's more affordable to house people, overall," says Sutton. "And most of these people just need light-touch support, such as housing."

But Raleigh's and the country's other hotels-to-housing projects remain nascent, and face many hurdles to success.

Not everyone has been on board with the hotel-to-housing concept. Because they take away cities' hotel inventory, nightly rates at hotels around them can increase. Last May, The New York Times reported that one in five of New York City's hotels had entered a migrant shelter program, leading rates to jump sharply. (Some of that increase is also due to the city's crackdown on Airbnb properties along with general global inflation.) In contentious town meetings where hotel conversions have been proposed, residents have also shared fears that they'd make their neighborhoods more susceptible to crime.

In some cities, especially New York, hotel housing projects have faced significant opposition from hotel unions, as well as prohibitive remodeling expenses necessary to meet local zoning regulations and building codes, which are often stricter for affordable housing than they are for hotels. Some hotel elevators and doorways, for example, are smaller and shorter than what residential buildings require, and additional requirements that each unit have a full-size fridge, stovetop, and sink can be particularly pricey. In a 2022 Politico article, one New York architect called the city's stringent conversion legislation a "classic case of the perfect being the enemy of the possible."

In Raleigh, however, there hasn't yet been any noticeable pushback to the hotel project, says Sutton. For one, the Brentwood neighborhood is still a ways off from feeling the effects of Raleigh's sprawl. The city also decided to circumvent regulatory rigmarole by keeping the building zoned as a hotel. That said, getting the building ready has been a yearslong project.

The Studios at 2800 looks every bit the typical extended-stay hotel, with banks of rooms running along an exterior sidewalk on the first floor and an elevated walkway on the second, a cluster of oak trees out back, and a filled-in pool sitting among tangled weeds and cracked concrete.

Shortly after purchasing the property, the city received a $15 million quote from a local architect for a complete renovation. Given the steep cost, Raleigh took something of a triage approach in order to be able to move people in more expediently. After reviewing four bids for a property manager, Raleigh chose CASA, a 30-year-old nonprofit that specializes in providing stable and affordable housing for the homeless across North Carolina's Research Triangle region. Together, the city and CASA decided to first update the fire alarms and sprinklers, add a new WiFi system, and rebuild some of the hotel's crumbling exterior staircases. Since then, CASA has been rehabbing rooms as they become available, moving existing residents into recently finished rooms in order to tackle the outdated ones. Currently, 70 units are operational, all of which were occupied when I recently spoke with CASA's CEO Everett McElveen.

"It's important that we don't displace anyone while we renovate, which is why we have to do it in phases," he says.

A few days before I spoke with McElveen, employees from Sutton's office filled six rooms with people who were previously living in encampments scattered in and around Raleigh. Erika Brandt, Raleigh's assistant director of housing and neighborhoods department, said those rooms were filled with a mix of participants in Bringing Neighbors Home — a $5 million two-year pilot program aimed at mitigating homelessess that the city launched in the fall — and "a few folks who are not part of the pilot but who were referred to the Studios due to extreme medical vulnerability making it high priority to move them indoors."

Those rooms were given what McElveen calls "light facelifts" — a fresh paint job and new furniture — "so it feels more like an apartment than a hotel room." Once a new bank of rooms is ready, McElveen says, the residents in the facelifted rooms will be moved and those areas will be gutted for more thorough renovations.

The city and CASA plan to convert a small number of the building's suites into conference rooms within the next few years to provide on-site support services and office spaces for CASA's behavioral health intervention team to work with residents.

CASA also plans to turn the hotel's filled-in pool into a common area, with grills, green grass, chairs, and benches for residents to relax and socialize, and to convert the entire building to solar power to lower utility costs. All these updates require additional funding, and Sutton's office has been submitting a capital improvement plan request to the city to continue to support the estimated $11 million in remaining improvements over the next five years.

Because the building remains a hotel, to book a room, prospective tenants can simply call or visit the front desk. A room at Hospitality Studios could cost as much as $379 a week. For now, most rooms go for $200 a week. Though there's no work requirement to get a room, tenants who are employed can get a lower rate if they provide income documentation to the city, which ensures that no one pays more than 30% of their income for rent. If there's no vacancy, the city will work with people to help them find housing elsewhere.

Lynnette Moore is the hotel's longest-tenured resident. In her 17 years there, she's seen hundreds, if not thousands, of people come and go.

"People mostly stay to themselves. It's quiet. People are just trying to live," she says, adding that the recent changes have begun to foster more of a sense of community. "Now people seem to talk a bit more. Maybe when that area is done," she says, referring to the planned common space, "we'll all get to know each other."

CASA hopes to have the Studios at 2800 fully renovated by 2030. By then, Raleigh's sprawl will have likely swallowed up the Brentwood neighborhood, transforming it into something wholly unrecognizable.

Michael Venutolo-Mantovani has written for The New York Times, National Geographic, Condé Nast Traveler, Wired, and many others. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife and their two children.

• Programs like Medicaid and SNAP are means-tested and based on the poverty line.
• Some older Americans face a dilemma: working more can reduce crucial benefits.
• Navigating benefit thresholds is complex for retirees looking to boost their income.

Claudia Rufino, 72, tries not to make too much money.

She's one of millions of Americans that rely on programs like Medicaid and housing assistance, and she said earning a higher paycheck could reduce her benefits.

"I want to be contributing to society because that's the right way to do things," Rufino, who first retired in the early 2010s, previously told Business Insider. "But I get punished if I work too much."

Unretirement is growing among older Americans who hope to stay social and supplement what's in the bank. But some crucial social safety nets like Medicaid, SNAP, and rental assistance have income limits for providing aid, pushing many older adults like Rufino to make sure they aren't earning too much to cut off their benefits.

Rufino primarily lives on her $1,103 monthly Social Security and earns a few hundred dollars a month as a stipend working with foster children in Salt Lake City. She said the school district she works with recently offered her a higher-paid position, but she had to turn the offer down because it would put her income slightly over Utah's Medicaid threshold, spiking her out-of-pocket costs for care and prescription drugs.

She added that a higher paycheck could reduce her rental support benefits, pushing the cost of her means-tested housing unit beyond what she can pay. She wouldn't be able to afford rent in her area because she has very little savings, she added.

"Going back to work is not worth it for me in my situation," Rufino said. "I don't make enough money to make it worthwhile."

We want to hear from you. Are you an older American comfortable sharing your retirement outlook with a reporter? Please fill out this quick form.

Some low-income older Americans struggle to navigate benefit thresholds

The share of Americans receiving government aid has increased over the past several decades. Programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and Social Security made up 18% of total personal income in the US in 2022 — totaling $3.8 trillion — which is a 9 percentage-point increase from 1970, per a report published in September 2024 by the Economic Innovation Group. The report said that the aging US population and skyrocketing healthcare costs are the main reasons for the shift.

At the same time, the US poverty line has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. The threshold, which is currently $15,650 annually for one person, is adjusted each year for inflation but does not account for local cost of living or changing economic conditions.

Qualification standards for safety nets like SNAP and Medicaid are largely based on this measure — Americans making up to 133% of the poverty line can receive individual Medicaid benefits in states that expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act, for example — but exact limits can vary by program and state. Millions of low-income Americans live slightly above those aid cutoffs, but can't afford essentials.

Judith Murray, for example, relies on her $1,311 monthly Social Security and $1,174 monthly SNAP allotment to get by in central Illinois. The 64-year-old said she has to stretch her monthly checks to cover basics for her seven-person household, which includes some of her children and grandchildren, and her fiancé, who recently lost his job: "It sounds like a lot of money, but it's really not." she told BI.

Murray said she's been low-income for her entire life and hasn't been able to build savings. She has been out of the labor force for several years and receiving disability benefits, but is now considering going back to work to help her family pay their housing and utility bills.

Still, Murray said she's worried that any changes to her current income would reduce her SNAP benefit and make it difficult to buy enough groceries for her household. She added that her monthly SNAP was reduced this month because of the annual Social Security cost-of-living increase she received, and her household is a few months behind on bills because her fiancé lost his job.

"It makes no sense," she said. "It is scary as hell for people to not be able to take care of their families."

Tim Shaw, director of the benefits transformation initiative at the Aspen Institute and the senior policy advisor for the Aspen Financial Security Program, said that benefit qualification thresholds can be stressful to navigate, especially for older adults reentering the workforce.

"Often eligibility for different programs like SNAP, Medicaid, SSI, housing, they're not the same," he said. "If a household qualifies for multiple benefits, they're trying to track the income limits of several programs at the same time, which can get really confusing and cause people to not take that new job or not take that raise."

Shaw added that some safety net programs, like SSI, which provides benefits to disabled Americans, have asset limits. People receiving SSI can't hold more than $2,000 in assets — like the value of their homes, cars, and savings accounts — without disrupting their benefits. Other programs, like SNAP, have both work requirements and income caps, which leaves beneficiaries walking a tightrope with how much they can earn.

Going back to work helps some retirees boost their income, but it's a trade-off

Although some low-income older Americans like Rufino and Murray feel caught in a benefits catch-22, others find that returning to the labor force is in their best financial interest. BI has heard from older adults who chose to work beyond retirement age or 'unretire' during their golden years as a way to stay active or supplement their savings.

Social Security retirement benefits also do not have the same income restrictions as poverty line-based programs — recipients can hold a part- or full-time job without it impacting their monthly checks.

Karen Smith, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, said that qualifying for safety nets isn't "an all-or-nothing game." She said staying in the workforce or going back to work can help older Americans stretch their savings longer and boost their monthly earnings. For some, she said this increased income can reduce or negate their need for safety nets altogether.

"I would say most people absolutely would benefit from going back to work," she said.

Murray isn't sure what she will do next. Because she's over age 60 and has been out of the workforce for years, she's concerned she won't be hired. Even if she does land a job, she said she needs every dollar of benefit support she receives to keep her family afloat.

"This is by no means an easy road," Murray said. "We still have birthdays to celebrate. We still have Thanksgiving to do and other holidays. When you see me out there buying a birthday cake with my SNAP benefit card, just to understand that I don't want to let my little ones down anymore than you do."

Are you struggling to navigate benefits thresholds? Are you open to sharing your experience with a reporter? If so, reach out to [email protected].

• Return-to-office mandates have worried some Americans who want to keep working from home.
• Some have been applying for new jobs or turned down roles at prominent companies with RTO policies.
• Amazon and JPMorgan are among the firms that have called workers back to the office full-time.

Some Americans facing return-to-office mandates are doing whatever they can to keep working from home.

Take Richard, who began working for Amazon as a finance manager last year. He said that the company's three-days-a-week in-office policy wasn't ideal because his prior job was fully remote, but he accepted the role because he felt Amazon offered better growth opportunities.

However, when the company announced that in 2025, it would be ramping up its return-to-office policy to five days a week, Richard decided to try to jump ship.

"I immediately started applying for remote jobs," said Richard, whose identity was verified by Business Insider but asked to use a pseudonym due to fear of professional repercussions. "I wanted to get ahead of the rush of people that would be applying once the policy went into effect."

Richard is among the Americans reacting to their companies' return-to-office mandates. In recent months, corporate giants like Amazon, AT&T, and JPMorgan have issued timelines for when employees must return to the office five days a week. In response, some workers have begun searching for remote or hybrid jobs so they can quit and avoid returning to the office full-time.

A Pew Research survey of 2,315 US adults conducted in October found that, among Americans who work from home at least some of the time, 46% said they would be very or somewhat unlikely to stay in their current role if their employer no longer allowed them to work from home. This included 61% of respondents who work from home all the time. However, finding a new remote role isn't easy: Job seekers have encountered a challenging labor market and intense competition for roles that allow work from home.

Richard, who's in his 30s, said he hasn't had much luck in his job hunt so far and that he's expanded his search to hybrid roles. He hopes that hiring will pick up later this year.

"There are less and less fully remote roles and more people trying to fill them," he said. "It has been hard to get far in the interview process."

In a September memo to employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that "the advantages of being together in the office are significant." In a January memo, JPMorgan's operating committee said that it thought bringing workers back to the office was "the best way to run the company."

How employees are trying to work around RTO mandates

Some Americans managed to secure work-from-home roles before the market became more challenging.

In 2022, George was working remotely as an IT professional in the financial industry. When his employer began discussing return-to-office plans — some teams were asked to switch from remote to hybrid — he found a new remote role.

George, 39, kept his original job and juggles both roles simultaneously to help ensure he'll always have at least one remote gig. He's earning about $250,000 annually — roughly double his prior income.

"I ultimately decided to try it since I could easily just drop one if it was too much," George, whose identity was verified by Business Insider but asked to use a pseudonym due to fear of professional repercussions, previously told BI.

While some workers might be fine with hybrid working arrangements, there's no guarantee a company won't later issue a stricter return-to-office mandate. This is among the reasons Steven, an e-commerce professional based in New Jersey, prioritized a fully remote working arrangement during his job search.

After being laid off two years ago from a job that allowed him to work remotely, Steven applied for a mix of in-person and remote roles. Last February, he landed an offer from JPMorgan that would require him to work from the office three days a week in Manhattan.

As he mulled over the offer, he estimated that his commuting time would total nine hours a week — or roughly 450 hours a year. Parking at his local train stain and taking the New Jersey Transit would cost him roughly $7,200 in annual commuting costs.

Around the same time, Steven received another job offer — this one for a remote position that offered an annual salary that was around $5,000 lower than the JPMorgan role. When he compared the jobs in terms of the money he'd earn for every hour he'd have to "invest" in them — including commuting time — he said it was an easy choice to pick the remote role.

"JPMorgan just could not compete," he said, adding, "A 40-hour week plus nine commute hours is basically a 50-hour week for the salary that they were offering."

Steven said he's particularly grateful he turned down the offer because, on January 10, JPMorgan announced that most employees would be required to work from the office five days a week beginning in March.

Meanwhile, Richard is still looking for a remote role while commuting to his current job. Due to space constraints at his office, he said he doesn't have to comply with Amazon's five-day-a-week policy until April. In the meantime, he's found ways to minimize his in-office time.

Richard said he typically goes into the office three days a week but estimated that he only works from the office between nine and 12 hours a week across the three days. He thinks he can get away with this because he's the only one from his team who works at that particular office location.

"I would go into the office for a few hours, avoid rush hour, and fulfill my badging requirement," he said, adding that he plans to take a similar approach once the five-day-a-week policy takes effect.

George said his second employer appears to have permanently embraced remote work, but that he still has some concerns that his original employer will eventually require him to return to the office. He said he lives roughly 14 miles from the nearest office — an hourlong commute with traffic and about 30 minutes without.

Steven said his employer has called some workers back to the office, but that he's been told this won't impact him because he was designated as a remote worker when he was hired. He thinks his company offers workers in certain roles this perk to attract and retain talent.

"If you want to be able to find the right kind of people, you're going to be much more successful at finding people if you allow remote work," he said.

Has your employer asked you to work from the office more? Reach out to this reporter at [email protected].