• Diageo has scrapped its guidance due to uncertainty over Trump's tariffs on imports.
• Shares fell despite a return to sales growth.
• Tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports could affect Diageo's momentum in North America, its CEO said.

Diageo has scrapped its medium-term sales guidance, blaming macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty surrounding President Donald Trump's tariff threats.

Shares in the Smirnoff and Guinness owner fell as much as 4% in London on Tuesday, bringing the decline over the past 12 months to almost 23%.

The dip came despite a return to growth for organic sales, which rose 1% to $10.9 billion in the six months to December 31. Four years ago Diageo set a target for organic net sales growth of 5% to 7% annually.

CEO Debra Crew said Trump's threat of 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico over the weekend — which have since been paused for a month — could impact Diageo's momentum in North America. That growth has been driven by Canadian whisky brand Crown Royal and Mexican premium tequila Don Julio.

"We are taking a number of actions to mitigate the impact and disruption to our business that tariffs may cause, and we will also continue to engage with the US administration on the broader impact that this will have on everyone supporting the US hospitality industry, including consumers, employees, distributors, restaurants, bars and other retail outlets," Crew said.

Analysts at UBS wrote in a note that better-than-expected growth in tequila was more than offset by weakness elsewhere, and also highlighted the potential negative impact of tariffs on sales.

Operating profit was $3.15 billion, lower than the $3.31 billion for the first half of 2024.

Guinness delivered double-digit growth of 17% for an eighth consecutive half-year, and Diageo said it had doubled investment in Guinness 0.0 to expand capacity to meet rising demand.

• While on a 10-day international vacation, I dropped my phone into the ocean.
• Losing access to my device was inconvenient and stressful. Ideally, unplugging would be planned.
• I'll take steps to plan better for future trips in case I lose my phone again.

"I haven't heard from Brittany in a couple of days." My best friend, Jasmine, frantically reached out to my sister, Ashlie, after trying and failing to get a response from me every way she knew how, from Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), and even email after my location hadn't updated from the Atlantic Ocean for days while I was on vacation.

Here's how the nightmare started: After days of ritzy beach clubs and soaking up the vibrant warmth and wealth of culture in Cannes, the perfect boat day on my 10-day South of France itinerary had finally arrived.

Our group of five settled onto the bow of our chartered yacht, seated with Champagne and snacks off to explore the fabulous French Riviera. Yet, we were met with choppy waters minutes after leaving the dock. Immediate unease seized us all as waves crashed onto the boat, followed seconds later by the captain pounding on the glass, urging us to return to the back of the boat. We scrambled to the back one by one, the walkway slippery as the boat rocked.

As the waves became more fervent, I reached out to hold the railing and watched as my phone hit the water in the sudden upheaval and immediately disappeared into the depths.

I had to figure out what to do while far from home without my phone

For a moment, I stood frozen, eyes glued to the spot where the phone had vanished, thinking, "This did not just happen!" Then, I quickly snapped to reality as the intense waves continued to thrash our boat.

Recounting the details of the now-long-gone phone initially dampened the mood, but as the storm passed, so did the worry. Surrounded by massive yachts, crystal blue waters, and bright sunshine, the energy returned to the boat, and our crew continued on.

For many, that moment would have been the perfect excuse to free themselves from the chains of the device that traps most of us from the moment we rise to the second we close our eyes in a never-ending cycle.

But losing my phone in the middle of a 10-day trip plunged my dream vacation into chaos. It made me rethink phone safety and the steps I wish I had taken before boarding the flight to Nice to minimize travel disruption.

Two-factor authentication made things tricky

I was able to use my friend's phones to contact my family, but I still lost access to a number of essential contact points. I organized the trip, so it was especially inconvenient, as I was now unable to use my phone to connect with Airbnb hosts for check-in; I had no access to WhatsApp or to my Gmail account to confirm reservations.

In the age of two-factor authentication, logging into your account from a new device, even a friend's phone, is nearly impossible without having a way to verify your identity through a second trusted device. Multiple times, I received messages like, "A code will be sent to your phone to verify your identity," which immediately shut me out of various apps. Traveling with a trusted second device, ranging from an iPad, smartwatch, or laptop, would have ensured I was able to regain access to those critical applications.

Additionally, as the content creator of the group, I lost the ability to capture key moments to later repackage for social media and a growing travel blog. I can't tell you how many times I had to ask a friend, "Can I use your phone for a photo?" While everyone was very gracious, I couldn't help but feel like a burden.

It wasn't relaxing to 'unplug' because I didn't plan for it

Returning home and recounting the story, the immediate reaction was always, "Well, wasn't it nice not to be glued to your phone and unplug during the trip?"

Honestly? No.

We've romanticized the idea of unplugging, but when it happens unexpectedly, you lose access to many of the conveniences a phone provides, including the ability to make calls, take photos, or use a search engine, maps, and so much more.

Unplugging is a choice that, ideally, you want to plan for so that if anything goes awry, you still have access to your device. For me, losing my phone meant losing access and autonomy and the loss of income through content creation. While it wasn't the end of the world, it was a wake-up call to always be prepared for the unthinkable.

• Perceptis has raised $3.6 million to automate tedious consulting tasks with generative AI.
• The startup was founded by a former McKinsey consultant and former Apple engineer.
• The cofounders said AI could lead to a lot of growth for small- and midsize consultancies.

Consulting has long relied on manpower, but a new generative AI startup co-founded by a former McKinsey consultant says its software can take over some of the industry's most tedious tasks.

"A lot of the internal processes are extremely manual labor heavy," Alibek Dostiyarov, cofounder and CEO of Perceptis, told Business Insider of consulting workflows, which he said "lend themselves almost perfectly to what GenAI is capable of doing."

He co-founded Perceptis with CTO Yersultan Sapar, a former engineer at Apple, to help consulting and professional services firms automate monotonous tasks, freeing up people at those firms to serve more clients and focus on solving their problems.

"Perceptis is an operating system for the consultants designed to help them win more business and make consulting — their day job — even more enjoyable and focused on the core of their service," Sapar said.

Perceptis has raised $3.6 million in funding led by Streamlined Ventures, along with The House Fund, Tekton Ventures, FEBE Ventures, MOST Ventures, and Silkroad Innovation Hub. They've also gained some prominent angel investors, including Charlie Songhurst, a member of Meta's board of directors and former Microsoft executive; AJ Shankar, founder and CEO of Everlaw, and Peter Kazanjy, author of "Founding Sales" and co-founder of Atrium.

Advancements in generative AI have disrupted the broader consulting industry, with major firms making huge investments in the technology and establishing dedicated AI units, such as McKinsey's QuantumBlack. A senior partner at McKinsey told BI last year that he thinks AI is "going to be most of what we do in the future."

How AI helps consultants land jobs

Perceptis is currently focused on the business development side of consulting, or helping firms secure jobs. The AI can do industry research for companies that Perceptis clients are interested in, identify what opportunities there are, and match that up with the clients' specific skills and backgrounds. It then creates a detailed, custom proposal that the client can use to try and secure a job.

Dostiyarov said an average proposal, meaning the work put in before the consulting firm is even hired for a job, can take 20 hours of work or more, adding that with AI it can take a fraction of the time.

Dostiyarov used an analogy for their message to clients: "We are going to find the house on fire for you, and then we are going to help you show up as the perfect firefighter for the job by giving you the perfect proposal."

"Because of all the data and all the capabilities that we have with our AI, we now can tell a perfect story as to why you are the great company to solve this problem," he said.

The co-founders said Perceptis clients are often able to double or triple the number of proposals they send each month and experience higher conversation rates as well as increases in revenue soon after getting started with the program.

Perceptis primarily serves small- to medium-sized firms, which typically don't have the same manpower as the biggest firms nor do they build their own internal AI tools.

The startup saw its biggest growth yet in November and December, doubling its annual recurring revenue, the cofounders said.

AI can't replace human consultants

The Perceptis co-founders said they see AI as supplementing human consultants, not replacing them, and that the technology still has its limitations. They said AI can't replace human judgement, at least for now, or the human-to-human interaction that is needed in consulting.

But they think it could make the industry overall a lot more productive. AI could also potentially help smaller consultancies and even independent consultants compete more seriously in the space by taking over the tedious but necessary work that the bigger firms have more than enough employees to handle.

"Perceptis therefore democratizes access to consulting as an industry," Dostiyarov said.

As a result, they said the consulting industry could become a lot larger, more fragmented, and more specialized — and that the MBBs and Big Fours of the world could become a bit less dominant.

"There are, of course, the goliaths in the industry. We don't think that they're going to go away," Dostiyarov said. "Still, we think that the majority of the growth is actually going to come from these much smaller firms."

Do you work in consulting and have insights to share about the industry? Contact this reporter at [email protected]or via the encrypted messaging app Signal at kelseyv.21.

• Elon Musk's political interventions are beginning to be a problem for SpaceX.
• The rocket firm is attempting to launch Starlink in South Africa even as Musk criticizes the country's laws as "openly racist."
• Ontario ripped up a Starlink contract in response to the threat of US tariffs from Musk ally Donald Trump.

Elon Musk has thrown himself head-first into politics — and that is causing problems for one of SpaceX's most prized assets.

Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by Musk's rocket company, has grown rapidly in recent years, launching in 27 new markets and tripling its internet traffic last year.

Musk's political interventions across the globe and presence in the Trump administration are now complicating the service's expansion drive.

The world's richest person attacked a Black empowerment law introduced by South Africa's coalition government, which requires foreign telecom companies to provide 30% equity to Black-owned businesses to be granted operating licenses, as "openly racist."

Musk, who grew up in South Africa, has also railed against the country's land appropriation law, which allows the government to seize unused land in certain circumstances.

On Monday, President Donald Trump said the US would cut funding for South Africa over the law, which was intended to address the damage caused by colonial and Apartheid-era policies that restricted the ability of South Africa's Black majority population to own land.

South Africa hit back against Trump's move, with President Cyril Ramaphosa writing on X that the government has not "confiscated any land."

Musk's interventions in South African politics come as SpaceX waits to receive permission to launch Starlink there.

The rocket firm has launched its satellite internet service in other southern African nations, but is waiting for regulatory approval as politicians in South Africa debate whether to grant SpaceX an exemption to Black empowerment rules.

South Africa isn't the only place Musk's outspoken political interventions are causing a headache for SpaceX.

After donating more than $200 million to Donald Trump's campaign, the SpaceX founder has taken on a key role in the Republican president's administration, spearheading efforts to overhaul government spending with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency and even becoming a "special government employee."

Musk's status as one of the new administration's biggest personalities has made him a target as Trump has ramped up an aggressive trade war against Canada, China, and Mexico.

On Monday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said the Canadian province would be "ripping up" its $68 million contract with Starlink because of a mooted 25% tariff on Canadian goods, which Trump later paused.

The backlash could spread to Musk's other companies, with Canadian prime ministerial candidate Chrystia Freeland suggesting the country could respond to the tariffs by imposing a 100% levy on Tesla vehicles.

Musk doesn't seem particularly concerned. "Oh well," he posted on X in response to the news that Ontario was tearing up the multimillion dollar contract.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Lee McKeeman found out he was autistic in his late 30s while he was working at Meta.
• Being autistic has made it hard to navigate office politics and communication at work, he said.
• His neuro differences have also set him apart in positive ways, such as with hyperfocus, he added.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with 42-year-old Lee McKeeman, from Texas, about navigating Big Tech as an autistic person. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

As a child, I felt different, but I didn't know why.

When I was a teenager, I found out I had ADD — my mom took me for an evaluation after my teachers gave her feedback that I was sometimes disruptive.

Later in my life, one of my wife's relatives suggested I had some autistic behaviors. As time went on, I read more about autism and became interested in getting an evaluation.

Finding someone who evaluated adults was difficult, but I managed to get an evaluation in my late 30s. It confirmed I was autistic and also had sensory processing disorder. At the time, I was an engineer at Meta.

I've worked in tech my entire career, including for Big Tech companies: Amazon, Meta, and Google. Though I haven't always known I'm autistic, looking back, I can see that it's impacted my ability to handle office politics and communicate in the workplace. However, my neuro differences have also come with superpowers that help me stand out as an employee.

I've struggled to navigate the workplace because of my neuro differences

I got my first full-time job in 2004, shortly after finishing a computer science degree. Multitasking can be difficult for autistic people, and unlike in school, where I had to manage multiple classes and tests, I found it relieving to enter the workforce and have one focus. I showed up, did my job, and went home.

However, it wasn't clear to me how to approach job searching. I didn't know about salary expectations and didn't negotiate my first offer. I'm generally uncomfortable with conflict and wasn't willing to ask questions or look foolish. I feel like this is part of social differences related to autism.

Once I was in the workplace, I found navigating office politics challenging. Early on, I didn't know how to ask for more money or get promoted. I thought that if I kept working, things would go fine, which I now realize is naive.

I joined Amazon in 2012 after a recruiter reached out to me. I hadn't worked at large tech companies in the past and wasn't used to rigorous processes around promotions.

At one point, I was trying to get promoted as an engineer, but there was always some reason it didn't work out. I think some of those gaps were about salespersonship — self-advocacy and visibility — and knowing the right people. I struggled with these things because of a lack of social and situational awareness.

I felt I was doing good technical work and that if I solved senior engineer-worthy problems, then I was succeeding. However, I was often doing this in isolation, and I didn't understand the importance of showing other people or getting their input.

In 2021, I joined Meta as an engineer. They had a team-matching process, which I really struggled with. It took me months to find a team to join. I didn't know how to approach a new work environment. I'd been at Amazon for almost nine years. I knew how things worked and how to join a team there, whereas now I felt the expectations of me weren't very clear.

I've been working at Google for the last two and a half years. Last year, I was in discussions with managers about improving my performance, and I felt like I was at risk of losing my job.

With autism, I notice that my performance ebbs and changes, and I can get tired quickly. Sometimes, this is because of autistic burnout, but outside this, if I'm struggling with a problem and don't know how to get help, it quickly exhausts me. I worked with a psychiatrist to try to build up my capacity, which I think helped me to overcome some of my challenges.

I struggle to understand some requests. Like when asked to "pull something out" of a document, I wonder whether I'm meant to put that content in a new document or just remove it.

I can be very verbose, thinking that if I provide a lot of extra detail when communicating, I won't be misunderstood. However, this can be distracting for others. One manager suggested I write a TLDR above my message, which has been helpful, but it's still a work in progress for me.

My neuro differences have also helped me stand out in positive ways

Hyperfocus is one of the superpowers that comes with my neuro differences. Where other people might give up investigating a problem, I'll keep digging until I solve it because of my curiosity.

I spend days digging into issues. If it's not high-priority, people can think I'm "wasting" time, but at times when I'd get all my tasks done and solve something additional, it would impress people. It's distinguished me from others during my career.

Since I see things differently when it comes to problem-solving, I often make suggestions when reviewing other people's work. Being able to identify unseen problems is a very valuable skill in my line of work.

However, I've had to learn to get better at communicating those suggestions in a way that can be heard since I've been told I'm too blunt or inflexible when giving feedback.

Getting support is crucial for people with neuro differences

I'm part of a group for autistic individuals at Google. Having support and asking if others have experienced similar problems to me is helpful. You don't have to have an official diagnosis to be a part of groups like this, but getting an evaluation was empowering for me to feel I belonged.

I also use other resources like occupational therapy and psychiatry for support with different aspects of my neuro differences.

If you have neuro differences, finding support is critical. Learning about yourself and how to support yourself can be really powerful.

It's exhausting to think you just need to work harder and be like everyone else to succeed.

Do you have a Big Tech career story you'd like to share? Email the reporter at [email protected]

• Michelin-starred chef Maissmo Falsini has 30 years of experience in hotels worldwide.
• He's encountered many VIP requests and their — sometimes — outrageous requests.
• Falsini shared some of his wildest requests during an interview with Business Insider.

With over 30 years of experience in hotels from Abu Dhabi to Napa Valley, Michelin-starred chef Massimo Falsini has encountered every kind of guest.

So it should come as no surprise that the Italian native — now the director of culinary operations at Rosewood Miramar Beach in Montecito, California — has seen his share of outrageous requests.

"I've done some crazy stuff," Falsini told Business Insider. "I can make a gelato, I can make a croissant, but I can also make a Michelin-starred dish. I've done buffets for 3,000 people. I cooked for 2,000 people in the middle of the desert."

During a sit-down interview with BI at Caruso's, the one-star Michelin restaurant Falsini runs in billionaire Rick Caruso's five-star hotel, the chef revealed some of the wildest requests he's received from VIP guests throughout his long culinary career.

One of those requests Falsini received was when he was an executive chef at the Four Seasons Resort Hualalai in Hawaii. Falsini said the guest had been a regular at the hotel for years and "got really attached to my way of cooking."

For one of her stays in the presidential suite, the guest made her reservation on the condition that Falsini would cook all of her meals.

"So every single day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the resort, I had to go to her suite on the balcony and prepare the meal for her," he continued. "She had to look at me when I was physically cooking; she didn't want anyone else to cook her food."

"Unfortunately, I cannot tell you the name of the guest, or I'd be in trouble," Falsini said with a laugh. "But I can tell you it was a big, big executive in the entertainment industry."

One guest refused to sit in a chair that had been used before, the chef recalled

Falsini recalled another guest who refused to sit on any chair that had been previously used.

"His chair had to be new, and only he could sit on that chair," Falsini said. "So we bought a chair for him, and then we stored the chair, and we wrapped it in plastic every year."

"So every year when he came back to the hotel, we used to open that chair and show it to him. And whatever restaurant he was going to, we were bringing the same chair."

In yet another example of an interesting request, Falsini had to create an SOP or standard operating procedure for one of his past hotel restaurants due to a guest's very specific requests for their fruit salad.

"She wanted the fruit salad cut with every single piece in a 1-inch square," Falsini said. "So I had to make a 1-inch cube for every single piece and mix it together in a certain way, and I had to make an SOP on how to make it. Otherwise, she wouldn't eat it, and she'd make a big fuss, and complain."

Falsini, who started washing dishes at a restaurant in Rome when he was 16, intentionally chose to work at very different places because he wanted to keep improving his culinary skills.

"I've done ultra-luxury hotels. I've done resorts. I've done theme parks," he said. "The beauty of food is that every day is a new day, and every day is different. That's why I feel like I've never worked a day in my life."

Now Falsini's attention is on Caruso's at Rosewood Miramar. The five-star resort in Montecito — a haven of celebrity mansions in California's picturesque town of Santa Barbara — has attracted numerous stars, but Falsini said he isn't fielding wild VIP requests nowadays.

"People, when they are celebrities, they probably travel a lot. They probably eat out a lot. They probably entertain a lot," Falsini added. "So when they come here with families or significant others, they just want to have a good time. They just want to relax, and just have simple, really good food."

• The founder of a ghostwriting business in London, Tom Scourfield, traveled to the US for a workshop.
• He was shocked by the contrasting approach to entrepeneurship in the States versus back home.
• Scourfield said he found his American counterparts were less risk adverse and more confident.

I help founders tell their stories on LinkedIn. Recently, I spent $5,000 to fly 5,000 miles from London to Arizona for a mastermind event which helps ghostwriters build and scale their businesses.

The main workshop lasted one day, but the real magic happened while networking with other founders. I shared an Airbnb with writers, had group dinners and stayed up late talking business. I spent $2,000 on the event and another $3,000 on flights, hotels, and expenses. It was a big investment.

As a digital nomad, I'd been surrounded by encouraging American friends and founders for years. But when I returned to London, I felt a shift. If I talked about my business goals, people would smile politely and change the subject.

I flew to Arizona, hoping to feel that American energy again.

These two weeks showed me why British founders often feel stuck and changed how I view British business culture forever.

The enthusiasm gap

Brits are more likely to have tall poppy syndrome. People are less open to talk about goals and encourage ambition than in the US.

An American founder said he wanted to build his net worth to $10 million the next decade. Nobody flinched. Instead, they asked questions about his plan and offered ideas. Back in London a week earlier, I'd heard a friend call a £100,000 salary "unrealistic." That's the UK mindset — we talk ourselves out of ambition before we even start.

In Arizona, when someone shared a big goal, the Americans asked "How will you get there?" instead of "Are you sure that's possible?"

Back home in London, I'd keep quiet about my wins. When I do share goals, I find myself adding disclaimers to couch my ambition.

In Arizona, I could talk openly about my successes without feeling like I was bragging. When I shared concerns, people helped me see them as challenges to solve, not roadblocks to stop me.

The energy was contagious. I felt calm about where I was and excited about where I could go. Instead of questioning if things would work out, I started asking how much bigger they could get.

Now back in London, I notice how quickly our culture can pull you back into doubt. It's like we're playing two different games: In the UK, we compete to spot problems. In the US, they compete to spot opportunities.

Entrepreneurship as a viable career

I think young people are more likely to start businesses in the US because it's deemed a legitimate career path.

Whereas, I was pushed to get higher education and a steady job as a young person in the UK.

At 17, I knew I didn't want to spend £50,000 — the average price of British university — on a degree, all to get a job I didn't want. In the UK, you're expected to go to university or trade school. When I said no to both and spoke about starting a business, my teachers were lost.

My family pushed me to get a "safe" job like accountancy. The subtext was entrepreneurship wasn't a real career. It was a phase I'd grow out of.

In Arizona, I met successful founders from every background imaginable. Some had fancy degrees, others never finished high school. But they all saw entrepreneurship as a natural path to success.

The difference being whether people in America or the UK go on to start businesses isn't about intelligence or education. The problem is how entrepreneurship is perceived.

This mindset gap starts early. While American kids grow up hearing stories about startup founders, as a British student I was raised to aim for job security.

Taking risks is normal

It took four failed attempts to build a business until I finally started seeing results.

Growing up, I learned that getting things wrong meant judgment and criticism. I built up walls and was less open about my struggles.

One of my first business ventures was becoming a personal trainer at 19. My peers found my website and sent anonymous emails mocking me. I quit after a year, but my family could never understand why.

It wasn't the fear of failure that was holding me back, it was the fear and embarrassment of being judged by others for trying.

But failure was proof I was building. Each start-up taught me about business, systems and myself.

Every founder I met at the mastermind had at least one failure story. They didn't hide them because they saw failure as proof that you're in the game and are resilient.

Infectious energy in the US

Spending time with American entrepreneurs felt like meeting a cousin who was raised with more confidence.

One of the guys in our group was training for an ultra marathon. He had some of the highest levels of self-belief and conviction I've seen.

He convinced us all to run a practice marathon with him. With no training and two hours of sleep, we set off at 3 a.m. I had to drop out after the 18th mile, but that's still further than I've ever run before.

I'd likely never have attempted it alone, but being around this level of confidence was infectious.

Around 9,500 millionaires left the UK in 2024, while the US gained 3,800. We spoke at the mastermind about why so many British founders are looking to exit the UK.

In my opinion, it's about the country's energy as much as tax changes. In those two weeks in the States, I felt a source of energy I'd never experienced.

Despite the jet lag and constant socializing, I tapped into the enthusiasm of my peers and it meant I had unlimited energy to keep going.

Back home, it's hard to not let the grey energy creep in. I have to be rigorous about self-care and my personal routines to maintain a steady baseline of energy.

While I was in the States, the positivity and ambition of the people around me was like riding a wave that kept pulling me along.

The UK's missing ingredient

London has access to European talent, free healthcare, and reasonable taxes. We should be an innovation powerhouse, but something's missing.

I believe it's a cultural problem. We need push ourselves to think bigger.

Growing up in a remote British village, I was taught to keep my head down and expectations low. "Be realistic," they said. But ambition and optimism are good things and we shouldn't hold back those who aspire for more.

• Ukrainian forces have fought against North Korean troops in Russia's Kursk region.
• A Ukrainian commander described to BI what it was like to face them in combat.
• He said the North Koreans would charge forward like something out of a movie and were "cannon fodder."

North Korean soldiers who fought in Russia lacked sufficient training for the war in which they were thrown into and were treated by the Russians as "cannon fodder," a Ukrainian commander who went into battle against them told Business Insider.

Konoval Ihor Ihorovych, commander of the reserve group of the 4th Company of the 33rd Assault Regiment, said North Korean behavior in battle was at times confusing and reminiscent of past wars.

Around 11,000 North Korean troops were deployed to Russia's western Kursk region last fall to help Moscow repel enemy forces and recapture territory that Ukraine had seized after it launched a stunning invasion there in August.

Ihorovych, call sign Sahara, joined an operation in early January to take Makhnovka, a settlement in Kursk. The goal was to secure key positions and wait for reinforcements to arrive.

He recalled how, at one point, his soldiers came across North Korean troops who were inexplicably running back and forth between buildings while getting pounded by artillery fire around 500 meters away from the Ukrainians.

Ihorovych said he wasn't sure why the North Koreans were running. He speculated that they either didn't know what to do or that there was no commander on the ground with them. Even Ukrainian soldiers in an adjacent unit were surprised by their strange behavior.

The war in Ukraine is a very different kind of conflict compared to what North Korean forces have trained for, and they are suspected to have received only limited training from the Russians.

"In combat, they would just charge forward from the tree line, like in a World War II movie," Ihorovych recalled. Assaults during the Second World War were often high casualty. He said his troops killed a number of North Korean soldiers they saw running from their positions.

Ihorovych said his unit completed their operation without taking any losses, adding that the North Koreans are "cannon fodder."

His description of their battle style falls in line with an assessment from the Biden administration, which said at the end of December that the North Koreans were using human wave tactics that weren't very effective.

A White House spokesperson said at the time that Russian and North Korean military leaders viewed the troops as "expendable" and were sending them on "hopeless assaults" against Ukrainian defenses. Prior to their deployment to Russia, Pyongyang's military had not experienced major combat operations in decades.

The Pentagon and Ukraine's military leadership have described the North Koreans as well-disciplined, competent, and capable soldiers skilled in combat but who are new to modern warfare and unprepared for its challenges.

According to new Western intelligence assessments, Pyongyang is taking heavy losses — around 4,000 troops are estimated to have been killed or wounded fighting in Russia. Britain's defense ministry said last month that the high rate of North Korean losses in such a short period of time is negatively affecting their ability to conduct combat operations in Kursk.

Conflict analysts at the Institute for the Study of War think tank warned in mid-January that if this trend continues, Pyongyang could lose all the troops it deployed in just a matter of weeks. North Korean forces, notably, haven't been seen on the front lines in weeks, fueling speculation they were pulled back amid the heavy losses.

Russia and North Korea have strengthened their defense ties during the Ukraine war and signed a pact over the summer that pledged military assistance if one country is attacked. In addition to soldiers, Pyongyang has also sent Moscow artillery shells and missiles.

• Intense pressure from Chinese rivals drove innovation at Uber, cofounder Travis Kalanick said in a recent podcast episode.
• He said competitors copied what Uber rolled out at dizzying speeds.
• Eventually, persistent copying led to genuine creativity, he said, allowing China to out-innovate some US companies.

In the thick of the 2010s, Uber was waging "all-out war" in China.

Travis Kalanick, Uber's cofounder who resigned in 2017, said that the sheer speed at which Uber's Chinese competitors copied the company's innovations was maddening.

And the way he sees it, that relentless approach eventually gave way to true innovation — the kind of ingenuity recently displayed by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek that sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley.

"There's no way I could express the frenetic intensity of copying that they would do on everything that we would roll out in China," Kalanick said on a recent episode of the "All-In Podcast." "And it was so epically intense that I basically had a massive amount of respect for their ability to copy what we did."

In 2016, the company was in a fierce battle for market share with Chinese rideshare rival Didi Chuxing, to which Uber would later sell its China operations in 2016. But before DiDi absorbed Uber's China business, the pressure to outpace each other created a veritable arms race.

"I just couldn't believe it. We would do real hard work, make it, we'd dial it, and it would be epic and it would be awesome," Kalanick said. "We'd roll it out, and then like two weeks later — boom! They've got it. A week later — boom! They've got it. And, of course, I used that to drive our team."

The competition pushed Kalanick to recruit "over 400 Chinese nationals," which he said created a sort of subculture within Uber's Silicon Valley office.

"We had a whole floor for the China growth team and it was primarily Chinese Nationals," Kalanick said. "We had billboards on the 101 in Silicon Valley in Chinese — Uber billboards to join our team in Chinese — to serve the homeland, right? It was like an all-out war. It was really epic."

Eventually, Kalanick said, that furious pace of development — and getting used to working at that speed — gave way to innovation.

"What happens is, when you get really, really good at copying, and that time gets tighter, and tighter, and tighter, and tighter, and tighter, you eventually run out of things to copy," Kalanick said. "And then it flips to creativity and innovation."

In some cases, Kalanick said that Chinese companies are now getting ahead of their American counterparts.

"But as they exercise that muscle, it gets better, and better, and better," Kalanick said. "So, if you want to know about the future of food, like online food delivery, you don't go to New York City — you go to Shanghai."

In part, Chinese companies are well-positioned to take advantage of circumstances that are unique to their country, Kalanick said.

"You know, they're taking advantage of their economics on labor and things like this," Kalanick said. "It wouldn't exactly work that way here, but a lot of the innovation you will see coming out on Uber Eats or DoorDash — like the stuff that's coming out now — is stuff that existed three years ago, four years ago in China. Maybe longer."

CloudKitchens and DiDi Chuxing did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

At some point along the way, Chinese businesses went from lagging behind to setting the bar on innovative features, Kalanick said.

"Eventually you cross that threshold of copying, and you're innovating, and then you're leading," Kalanick said. "And I think we see that in a whole bunch of different places."

When Daphne Gordon first tried MDMA, everything changed. She had grown up steeped in the "just say no" messaging of the '90s, which taught that any amount of illegal drug use was a gamble with your life. But she was also a big raver. Consuming MDMA — also known as molly, ecstasy, or, back in the '90s, E — with people she trusted helped her experience music more deeply and connect with friends and loved ones on a whole new level. When she and her husband became parents in 2009, their drug use didn't stop.

Sixteen years later, the couple, who are in their early 50s and live in Toronto, remain embedded in what Gordon describes as "a drug-positive social culture." Their friend group, which grew out of the electronic dance music fan community, is now made up of middle-age, established professionals with families. Many of them continue to attend parties and DJ events and use drugs on a fairly regular basis. In some ways, Gordon said, drugs are part of the identity of her social life. Having this outlet, and the community that surrounds it, helps her be a more present parent, she said.

But navigating drug use while raising kids isn't always easy.

"Everybody's a parent now, and everybody's coming to the parties, and sometimes people even rent an Airbnb for the kids to stay at and hire a babysitter who is capable of handling five kids," Gordon told me. "People are developing their lives around the drug-positive culture, but then it's like we have to cover our kids' ears when we go back home. It's kind of weird."

Hers isn't the only friend group dancing between nightlife and parenting. A 2022 Department of Health and Human Services report said that between 2015 and 2019, more than 21 million US children lived with a parent who used illicit substances, which the report distinguished from parents who had a substance use disorder. As drug use has become more common in recent years, more adults are regularly partaking of both licit and illicit substances. The Global Drug Survey, a nonscientific survey that has grown into the world's largest annual survey of recreational drug use trends, found that self-reported use of drugs such as cannabis, LSD, and "magic" mushrooms was growing in the US. In 2022, the last year with available data, one-third of 30- to 39-year-olds and nearly one-quarter of 40- to 49-year-olds said they'd taken cocaine in the past 12 months. The same shares reported using MDMA in the past year. In a 2023 study of 226 American parents, 13% said they had used marijuana in the past six months.

In an age when Burning Man is the unofficial wellness retreat for aging tech bros, none of this should come as breaking news. Business leaders have gone on the record in recent years to sing the praises of mind-altering substances such as LSD and MDMA, with some even insisting that "tripping" had made them better at their jobs. At the same time, researchers are discovering therapeutic benefits for psychedelic drugs such as ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms). As the health risks of alcohol become clearer, drugs are increasingly stepping in as the preferred indulgences for a good time.

For a growing number of white-collar parents, getting high has become a critical avenue for staying sane amid the demands of parenthood. And they're hoping to send their kids a better message than "just say no."

This past spring, Katie, 37, rented a cabin with a friend in upstate New York and spent the weekend tripping on magic mushrooms. It wasn't a weekend to get loose with party drugs but a quiet getaway to embark on "a little trip together for more intellectual purposes," she said. While she was exploring the outer edges of her consciousness, her 8-year-old son was home with his dad.

Recreational drug use is a common feature of weekend get-togethers among Katie's New York City circle — a constellation of academics, creatives, and white-collar professionals who are mostly in their 30s and 40s. It's not unusual for her friends to pass around baggies of MDMA or cocaine to fuel hours of dancing at a club or to consume mushrooms for a cozy night of soul-searching. Drugs are a conduit for shaking off the pressures of everyday life, for living in the moment with friends, and for Katie — getting back in touch with herself.

Katie, who asked that I keep her identity private, splits custody of her son with her ex-husband, an arrangement that has allowed her to reengage with nightlife. Before they separated nearly two years ago, late-night parties and drug use were off the table — not because it interfered with being a mother, she said, but because of the societal expectations modeled by her ex and the other parents around her. "The way I am as a parent is maybe different — lighter and easier and freer — because I don't feel like my life is limited in that way," she told me.

Her parents grew up in the Soviet Union, where it was typical to start families in your early 20s while continuing to enjoy late weekend nights of well-lubricated merriment, with friends taking turns staying in to watch everyone's kids. But Katie has found that things are different in the US — American culture doesn't prioritize having a robust social life while raising a family. For parents like her, there's a double taboo: the lingering stigmas surrounding recreational drug use combined with a widespread wariness of parents, especially moms, who manage to lead full, fun lives outside the confines of home. A mother who routinely nurses half a bottle of wine in her kitchen at the end of a long day will likely be judged less harshly than one who takes a psychedelic with friends on the occasional Saturday night.

"Using drugs doesn't necessarily feel at odds with parenting," Katie said. "In many ways, it feels complementary or helpful."

Though her son is a constant presence in her plans, during conversations, and at the dinners she hosts for friends, the majority of her inner circle is child-free. Other parents she's encountered don't seem to have a blueprint for the kind of community she has — one that isn't centered on the kids.

Drug taboos get tricky to navigate when other people's children may be involved. "It becomes this thing you don't talk about because kids can't really be explaining to their friends on the schoolyard what Mommy and Daddy said last night about drugs," Gordon said. "It's such a socially enforced taboo. Any kind of conversation about anything good about drugs is seen as encouraging experimentation — like, 'Can't wait until you get to do some!'"

The taboos are a major reason many parents keep their drug use confined to a close-knit group of friends. Joyce, a 44-year-old mom of three in Melbourne, Australia, said it's not unusual in her high-income neighborhood to gather at someone's house, open up a nice bottle of wine, and discreetly visit the master bathroom for a line of communal cocaine. She and her neighborhood friends have been doing it for years.

"These are the same people who are taking vacations two, three, four times a year," Joyce told me. "They drive nice cars. They live in beautiful homes. You walk down a street in the nicest suburbs, and you would never even think that the people behind the gates would be having themselves a little '70s disco party in the kitchen. It's totally seen and not heard, but everybody does it." All the while, everyone's kids are squirreled away somewhere else in the house, preoccupied by movies and snacks, happily oblivious.

Despite the live-and-let-live attitudes in her immediate friend group, Joyce — who asked that we keep her identity private — is well aware of the legal and reputational risks that come with using drugs. Getting found out might not affect her as severely as it would if she were not a well-off white mom, for instance, but it wouldn't be trivial, either. The penalty for cocaine possession in Australia carries a fine of 2,000 Australian dollars, or about $1,240, and/or up to two years in prison. The social ramifications could be higher if the wrong person caught on. Joyce said she knows that her occasional sharing of "a little plate of something" with friends would be seen as irresponsible, or even flat-out reckless, by many others in her extended community. For these reasons, Joyce and her friends are stringent about concealing their recreational drug use from their children — even those who are now adults. Making sure the kids know nothing is the absolute rule.

There have been some close calls. "Once I had my best friend over, and I said to her, 'Can you watch in the hallway just in case little footsteps come running while I prepare something?' And, well, she was not fast enough," Joyce said, chuckling. "One of my kids slammed on in. But the beauty of hiding is that you're sort of always ready." By a stroke of luck, her secret escaped notice.

"It's kind of like a naughty little secret that I guess keeps everybody feeling attached to their youth — the good fun days," Joyce said.

Most of the parents I spoke with hadn't let their kids in on their drug secret, saying they would maybe disclose details on a need-to-know basis. But Gordon and her husband are working to establish a more open dialogue about drugs with their teenage son. Before going out, they've begun talking through their substance-use game plans for the evening in front of him: "Like, 'How are we going to drink tonight? You know, let's not because I'm going to bring a joint,'" she said. He might not chime in, but they know he's listening. Mainly, they're focusing on the harms that could come from the substances he's likely to encounter within his friend groups — cannabis, vapes, and, especially, the tobacco pouches whose bright, round canisters poke out from the trash bins of his hockey rink. Gordon has also self-published a zine to help guide other families' conversations about conscious substance use, informed in part by new research that suggests the cognitive dissonance between antidrug messaging and the way substances are presented by peers and on social media makes scare tactics ineffective.

Rhana Hashemi, a coauthor of the drug education study, is the founder and executive director of Know Drugs, a nonprofit aimed at replacing the D.A.R.E. model of antidrug education in US schools with a harm-reduction curriculum that speaks frankly and nonjudgmentally about the role of mind-altering substances in people's lives — legal and illegal, good and bad.

"There's a difference between normalizing drug use that's healthy and normalizing drug use that's problematic," Hashemi told me. As she sees it, that distinction depends on the role that a particular substance is playing in a person's life at any given time. A healthy adult life revolves around competing priorities: romantic relationships, social relationships, a career, and physical and mental health. Healthy drug use happens in harmony with the bigger picture. It's the pinch of a certain something that helps make memories with friends without becoming the crux of the relationship, or that washes away the residues of a tough week at work without becoming a contingency plan for getting through the next one. It's the ability to be honest and step away if and when drugs begin disrupting the balance between everything else — turning into a need instead of an occasion.

Hashemi said it's also critical to emphasize that different substances carry far greater potential for harm to the still developing brain of a person in their teens or early 20s: "There's a difference between a parent using cannabis on a regular basis — or psychedelics or MDMA — and a child. These are all nuances that should be very explicit."

The drug talk is still a few years away for Katie, the single mom in New York City. But when the time comes, she plans to be forthright about her experience using drugs. She wants her son to know how careful she is about what she takes, the amounts she ingests, and where she gets her product. She wants her son to have the information he needs to make smart decisions. "I'll tell him how it's an important part of my life," she said, "and I'll explain to him why."

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

• Amazon's robotics could save the company $10 billion annually by 2030, Morgan Stanley analysts say.
• Amazon has introduced six new robotic systems since 2022.
• Next-gen fulfillment centers are costly, but Amazon has the cash to invest, the analysts write.

Amazon has stepped up its robotics development in recent years, and it could save the e-commerce giant as much as $10 billion annually, Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a research note on Sunday.

The company's fleet of more than 750,000 robots now works across every part of the fulfillment process. They help with storage and inventory management, picking, packing, and sorting, and they transport packages to the fulfillment center's loading dock where they are then sent to customers.

Since 2022 Amazon has introduced six new models. They include a fully autonomous mobile robot called Proteus, three types of robotic arms, and a containerized storage system called Sequoia. Amazon also has robots that can create custom packaging based on an item's specific dimensions.

Amazon opened its first "next-generation" fulfillment center, incorporating all of its latest robots, in Shreveport, Louisiana, in September 2024. The company has said it expects to see a 25% improvement in fulfillment costs during peak periods at the Shreveport warehouse.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that if 30-40% of Amazon orders in the US were fulfilled through next-gen warehouses by 2030, the company could save as much as $10 billion a year.

However, they note that fully scaling robotics will take time.

"Looking ahead, we expect AMZN to continue to expand its warehouse network (to support growth) while also upgrading the footprint toward next-gen robotics in new builds and retrofits," they write. "The question of how quickly Amazon shifts volumes to robotics enabled warehouses will likely come down to reasonable and improving paces of build/retrofit (current new robotics plants still take 1-2 years) balanced with not wanting to cause near-term disruption to AMZN's retail service."

Next-gen fulfillment centers are significantly more expensive to develop than Amazon's traditional fulfillment centers. The analysts cite news reports that say the robotic-powered warehouses cost about $450 million to develop, compared to $200 million for traditional development and $100 million to retrofit an older warehouse with robotics.

"We estimate AMZN will have $60bn of net cash as of year-end '24 and will generate ~$150bn of aggregate free cash flow in '25/'26," they write. "As such, investment capital is unlikely to be a constraint to how quickly AMZN shifts to next-gen robotics...which means if they can build and shift without service disruption they likely will do it."

The analysts also said that if Amazon invests further in bringing robots to sorting centers and in scaling the technology internationally, it could see more savings.

• Powerconnex notified state regulators of plans for a 120 MW natural gas plant in New Albany.
• The plant would serve as the primary source of electricity for a data center on the same site.
• As energy demand from AI strains the grid, developers seek ways to bypass it entirely.

A developer is planning to power a data center in Ohio by building a natural gas-fired plant on the site, a public filing showed.

Lawyers for Powerconnex Inc. notified the Ohio Power Siting Board last week of the company's plans to build the plant, which would serve as the data center's primary source of electricity. The power generation facility, named the New Albany Energy Center, and the data center would be built on the same 48.6-acre site in New Albany, Ohio.

Construction on the plant is expected to start as soon as the fourth quarter of 2025, according to the letter. This means the data center could be up and running by the first quarter of 2026.

It would have a generating capacity of up to 120 megawatts, which is enough electricity to power a large hyperscale data center by today's standards. However, it's a fraction of the electricity developers of AI megaprojects have said they'll need. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, said the company is building a data center in Louisiana with over two gigawatts of capacity.

The data center development boom has caused electricity demand to surge in the US after nearly two decades of stagnation. Data centers are energy-intensive facilities that run 24/7, and as Big Tech continues to push into artificial intelligence, their projected future energy use is expected to create an enormous strain on the country's electric grid. Frustrated by regulatory bottlenecks in crowded data center markets, developers are seeking alternative solutions, Jones Lang LaSalle said in a report last month.

Already, developers are facing regulatory bottlenecks in crowded data center markets, and are seeking out alternative solutions — like building on-site power plants — to waiting for access to the grid.

Business Insider reported last week that developers for an Oracle data center in Abilene, Texas — widely thought to be the first Project Stargate location — are building a 360.5-megawatt natural gas turbine plant to help power it. This sort of arrangement is known as "behind-the-meter" in the utilities industry — it means that the electric generating facility is not connected to the grid, and local utilities can't monitor or measure its use.

Christine Pirik, a Dickinson Wright attorney representing Powerconnex, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pirik is a former deputy legal director for both the Ohio Power Siting Board, which grants permits for electric generating facilities, and Ohio's Public Utilities Commission.

Business Insider could not confirm who is behind Powerconnex Inc. However, there is a Virginia-based Powerconnex Inc. that shares a business address and three executive officers with data center company EdgeConnex.

EdgeConnex operates over 80 data centers in the US, Europe, and Asia. It is developing a data center in New Albany, Ohio, according to its website. In September, private credit company Sixth Street Partners announced it had acquired a minority stake in EdgeConneX.

New Albany, Ohio, a rural suburb northeast of Columbus, is home to several major data center projects. Amazon has committed to spending more than $23 billion on data center development in the state, and Microsoft, Meta, and Google also have projects in Ohio.

Recently, electricity demand in the region has soared. AEP Ohio, the Columbus utility that serves the major data centers, said last year that it had received 30 gigawatts of service requests. It asked state regulators to approve a separate rate class specifically for data center customers to protect other ratepayers from incurring additional costs due to the facilities' demand. Hearings for the matter were held in January, although the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio has not yet issued a final order.

Do you work in or have knowledge of the data center industry and have insight to share? Get in touch with this reporter at [email protected] or reach out via the encrypted messaging app Signal at +1-929-524-6924.

• Canada and Mexico have secured a 30-day reprieve on tariffs from US President Donald Trump.
• In exchange for a tariff pause, Canada and Mexico agreed to boost border security and curb illegal activities.
• A 10% tariff on Chinese goods was not delayed, prompting China to slap retaliatory tariffs on the US.

US President Donald Trump has just shown the world how the Art of the Deal works.

In a matter of days, Trump threatened three key partners — China, Canada, and Mexico — with tariffs over illegal immigration and fentanyl. The threats paid off for the short term: He got a temporary deal with Canada and Mexico.

"President Trump has started his second term with his tariff guns blazing, and so far it has worked extremely well in achieving his policy goals," Rajiv Biswas, the CEO of Asia-Pacific Economics, a Singapore-based research firm, told Business Insider.

On Saturday, Trump, using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, imposed a 25% tariff on most goods from Canada and Mexico.

The tariffs were initially set to take effect on Tuesday. But after an early morning stock market downturn on Monday, talks with Canada and Mexico resulted in a 30-day tariff delay.

In exchange for the pause, Mexico agreed to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops to its northern border to curb illegal activities. Canada agreed to a set of initiatives targeting drug trafficking, money laundering, and border security.

"Mexico and Canada have immediately capitulated to the threat of US tariffs and agreed to enforce tougher border security measures, which is what President Trump had clearly requested them to do weeks ago, even prior to his inauguration," Biswas said.

The US is trading off, too

While Trump's deals with Canada and Mexico may have been swift, the tradeoff is ill will toward the US in both countries and uncertainty in the international trade order.

"The trade rules are valuable because they create a predictability and certainty for countries and for companies that do business in North America and in the world," said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Fore­­­ign Relations. "And to mess with those rules for no good reason is truly irresponsible."

"He has no evidence to show he is able to use tariffs to achieve significant concessions, economic or otherwise," he added.

Some experts said the agreements could have been achieved without threatening tariffs.

"Using the issues around fentanyl and illegal immigration to justify a trade war is somewhat bizarre," said Romel Mostafa, an assistant professor in economics and public policy at the Ivey Business School in Ontario. "It seems like we put the cart before the horse here, which is we basically went into this tariff imposition and counter-tariffs and then came to the discussion table."

Alden said the agreements are "not in the slightest" a significant concession because the Mexican government has long had an interest in cracking down fentanyl smuggling and better controlling its border. As for Canada, he pointed to data from the US Customs and Border Protection showing that the northern neighbor accounts for 0.2% of US border fentanyl seizures.

"The bigger question is whether potentially we could come back again a month later and there could be other demands coming in," Mostafa said of Trump's actions.

China retaliates

While Canada and Mexico have secured brief reprieves from Trump's tariffs, China hasn't. Blanket tariffs of 10% on Chinese goods took effect at 12:01 a.m. ET on Tuesday.

China hit back swiftly, announcing tariffs on a range of US goods, including coal, liquefied natural gas, crude oil, and agricultural machinery.

"The US's unilateral imposition of tariffs seriously violates the rules of the World Trade Organization," China's Finance Ministry said in its tariffs announcement. "It is not only unhelpful in solving its own problems, but also undermines the normal economic and trade cooperation between China and the US."

China has said fentanyl is the US' own problem and that Beijing would challenge the tariffs at the World Trade Organization.

"The US needs to view and solve its own fentanyl issue in an objective and rational way instead of threatening other countries with arbitrary tariff hikes," a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said on Sunday.

Trump is taking the same brinkmanship approach to China, said Alex Capri, an international trade specialist and a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore's business school.

"Trump will take the same approach to China and I think Beijing will, in fact, welcome this transactional way of doing business," Capri said.

• I've spent hours talking to college students about personal finance.
• Many of them don't fully understand how compounding works and, importantly, how to benefit from it.
• More high schools in the US are requiring students to take a personal finance class, but we need to keep talking about it.

Every January, Middlebury College invites me to its campus to talk to a group of students about money.

The guest lecture ranges between 90 and 120 minutes in length and is titled "Good Financial Hygiene — Lessons in Personal Finance."

I'm not a financial advisor, nor do I pretend to be, but in my decadelong career reporting on money and asking wealthy people, "What do you wish you'd known about money in your 20s?" I've learned some key lessons.

Most of these lessons — pay yourself first, automate your savings and investments, etc — are surprisingly simple and don't require a finance degree, or even a degree at all, to understand and use to your advantage. Had I understood them earlier and started building smart money habits in my late teens and early 20s, I'd be in a stronger financial position now at 32.

I try to convey that to the students: Time is on your side. Don't wait. Start now!

A two-part lecture: The reason we save is to invest

The crux of the lecture is that putting your money to work is a powerful way to grow your wealth over time.

But before we pull out the compound interest calculator and discuss investment strategies, we start with two prompts: How do you feel about money? How do you want to feel about money?

I ask them to pull out their notebooks and do two to three minutes of independent thinking.

The answers to the first prompt represent their starting point. Everyone has a different starting point — we all come from different financial backgrounds — but where they start from really isn't all that important. What matters is that they have some level of control over their trajectory, and they get from what they wrote down for prompt No. 1 to what they wrote down for prompt No. 2.

Next, we get into two components of personal finance that can impact trajectory: Saving — how to keep a portion of your income — and investing, which is the key to building wealth.

I acknowledge the importance of paying yourself first. When they ask how much, I point to the 50/30/20 rule of thumb, which suggests putting 50% of your income toward needs, 30% toward wants, and 20% toward savings. I emphasize that starting with a small savings rate of even just 1% is better than nothing.

Most students are familiar with the concept of budgeting, even if they don't actively budget. I challenge them to think about budgeting not as restrictive, as it's often portrayed, but as liberating. If they successfully divvy up their paycheck according to the 50/30/20 rule, for example, they have 30% of their income to spend on whatever fills their cup.

Part two is all about growing your savings by putting it to work, taking advantage of compound interest, and understanding that time is on your side as a young investor. Every year, without fail, this is the moment when the energy in the room shifts. Ears perk. Hands shoot up.

This is when I'm reminded that young people are fascinated by the concept of investing — and data shows this generation is curious enough to take action: Gen Z started investing at a much earlier age on average, 19, than baby boomers (35) and millennials (25), according to the 2024 Schwab Modern Wealth survey.

Still, a handful of my students don't fully understand how compounding works or how it relates to an investment account. They're smart kids, but chances are that they didn't engage with this material in high school: In 2022, just 23% of high school students in the US were required to take a personal finance class, up from 16% in 2018, according to research from Next Gen Personal Finance. That percentage has continued to increase: As of 2024, more than two-thirds of all states require personal finance classes for high school graduation.

We analyze compound interest charts that show just how much of an edge they have simply by starting young, including this one from the St. Louis Fed comparing an investor who starts at 25 and another who starts at 35. The one who starts early ends up with a significantly bigger portfolio, even though they invest for 20 fewer years than the investor who started at 35.

We also plug numbers into a compound interest calculator and figure out how much money they'd have to save a month to become millionaires by 50. It's often less than they think.

The tricky lesson to convey is how to actually take advantage of compounding: How to start investing.

This is where there seems to be a significant lack of understanding. The common misconceptions I've picked up on are:

• Investing is for rich people
• Investing is for people who know a lot about finance and economics
• Investing means buying individual stocks
• Investing is risky

As we discuss passive investing strategies and how anyone can invest in funds that track the S&P 500 with a small amount of money, I can sense the eagerness and excitement as the students start to understand that they can actually participate — that investing isn't just for rich people — and that they can contribute starting today.

I'm reminded every year I step into the classroom that there's an appetite for financial literacy. We just need to keep talking about it.

• President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order to start a US sovereign wealth fund.
• He said that the fund could be used to buy TikTok, which is facing a looming ban in the US.
• He has floated numerous other ways to save the app, like having Elon Musk or Larry Ellison buy it.

President Donald Trump floated the idea of buying TikTok with an American sovereign wealth fund, which he signed an executive order on Monday to create.

"So other countries have sovereign wealth funds, and they're much smaller countries, and they're not the United States. We have tremendous potential in this country," Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday.

Sovereign wealth funds pool money that comes from the government, often a surplus from economic activities like producing oil. Some funds invest in stocks and bonds, while others invest directly, buying real estate, companies, and other assets. Norway has the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund, with $1.7 trillion in assets.

"And as an example, TikTok, we're going to be doing something, perhaps, with TikTok, and perhaps not," he said. "If we make the right deal, we'll do it; otherwise, we won't."

"But I have the right to do that and we might put that in the sovereign wealth fund, whatever we make, or if we do a partnership with very wealthy people," Trump added.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the fund would be set up within the next 12 months.

Time's running short for TikTok

TikTok has until April to devise a game plan as it fights against the Supreme Court's divest-or-ban law. It went dark for its 170 million US users on January 18, a day before its original deadline, but was restored hours later.

Shortly after his inauguration on January 20, Trump signed an executive order to delay the ban by 75 days. He then suggested that the US should own half of TikTok.

"I think we would have a joint venture with the people from TikTok. We'll see what happens," Trump said after taking office.

A day later, he said he would be on board with Tesla CEO Elon Musk or Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison buying TikTok.

Neither businessman has publicly expressed interest in buying the app. But Musk said in an X post on January 19, the day of the intended ban, that he has been against the ban "for a long time" because it "goes against freedom of speech."

Representatives for Trump and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

• A study found that the climate crisis is set to knock $1.47 trillion off US property values by 2055.
• Some areas are predicted to be hit harder by population declines and rising insurance premiums.
• The steepest impacts on home prices are predicted to be in parts of California and New Jersey.

The impacts of the climate crisis will erase $1.47 trillion in home values across the US by 2055, a new study from research firm First Street found.

The effects will not be spread equally across the country. In some areas, home price gains may be able to outpace losses, but some places will be harder hit.

First Street estimated that 40% of property-value losses will be concentrated in places it calls "climate abandonment" communities. In these locations — primarily in California's Central Valley, at risk of wildfire, and coastal New Jersey, at risk of flood and wind damage — a combination of population decline and rising insurance premiums are predicted to drive down home values.

First Street found that 21,750 neighborhoods spread across the US, or 26% of current US census tracts, qualify as what it calls climate abandonment" communities.

Recent extreme weather events highlight the staggering cost of natural disasters fueled and worsened by climate change. Last year, back-to-back hurricanes Milton and Helene devastated parts of Florida and the Southeast, with Milton alone causing up to an estimated $28 billion in insured losses. Recent Los Angeles wildfires are expected to total close to $250 billion in total damages.

Over the next several decades, First Street's researchers predict more extreme weather events will recalibrate the places Americans find safe to call home. When the population dwindles for any reason, home prices are likely to fall due to a lack of demand.

Consider the way Hurricane Sandy affected the Jersey Shore. Many lower-income residents of New Jersey living along the Atlantic coast were unable to rebuild in those areas due to the soaring cost of flood insurance. Amanda Devecka-Rinear founded the New Jersey Organizing Project, a nonprofit to improve disaster recovery funding, after driving around Long Beach Island, located in Ocean County, and seeing rows of abandoned houses.

"People just got pushed out or had to walk away or had to sell their places because they could never cobble together the funding to get back," Devecka-Rinear told Business Insider in 2022.

Below are Ocean County and four other communities First Street highlighted for their risk of "climate abandonment" and, therefore, property value declines. The percentages for each county are forecasts from First Street from 2025 to the year 2055.

5. Kern County, California

Kern County, known as the energy capital of California, is located inland, about a two-hour drive north of Los Angeles. Its biggest cities include Delano, Ridgecrest, and Bakersfield.

Market impact: -1.8%

Insurance impact: -2.3%

Total property value impact: -4.1%

4. Sacramento County, California

Sacramento County, located an hour north of San Francisco, is home to the state capital, Sacramento.

Market impact: -2.7%

Insurance impact: -1.6%

Total property value impact: -4.2%

3. Monmouth County, New Jersey

Monmouth County is home to several popular Jersey Shore vacation spots, including Asbury Park, Belmar, and Sea Girt.

Market impact: -0.7%

Insurance impact: -3.6%

Total property value impact: -4.2%

2. Ocean County, New Jersey

Ocean County is located directly south of Monmouth County and includes other popular destinations for Jersey Shore beachgoers, including Seaside Heights, Barnegat Light, and Mantoloking.

Market impact: -3.3%

Insurance impact: -1.1%

Total property value impact: -4.4%

1. Fresno County, California

Fresno County is located just north of Kern County. Fresno County was the site of 2020's Creek Fire, which burned for 112 days and was the third-largest single fire in state history.

Market impact: -4.6%

Insurance impact: -9.8%

Total property value impact: -14.4%

• Iran looks to finally be getting the Su-35 fighters it has long sought.
• New and well-armed Su-35s won't replace the capabilities of Iran's degraded air defenses.
• The Su-35 is a jolt for Iran's airpower, especially if it comes with a beyond-visual-range missile.

Iran may finally get the advanced Russian fighter jets it has sought for years, but analysts are skeptical that a few dozen Su-35 Flankers will make up for the damage Israel recently inflicted on Iran's air defenses.

Ali Shadmani, a senior commander in Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps paramilitary, confirmed the Su-35 order on January 27. Iranian state-run media have repeatedly reported imminent deliveries of these 4.5-generation Russian jets in recent years, which have invariably proven premature or downright false but there's reason to believe they're finally going through. Shadmani's statement did not reveal how many Su-35 Flankers Tehran ordered or when it expects deliveries in what's seen as a quid pro quo for the Iranian Shahed attack drones Russia has used in the thousands against Ukraine since 2022.

Iran's aging air force has long needed newer aircraft and the Su-35 brings significant capabilities to threaten enemy aircraft near Iranian airspace. But Arash Azizi, senior lecturer in history and political science at Clemson University, believes even an imminent delivery of Su-35s would still be "a case of too little, too late" for Tehran.

"This is still a meaningful upgrade for Iran's beleaguered air force and one that it has waited for for a long time," Azizi told Business Insider. "But it doesn't do much to fill the gaps that Iran will have against adversaries such as Israel."

"It will be a drop in the bucket."

Previous reports suggested Iran would receive at least 24 Flankers originally built for Egypt or up to 50 Su-35s ordered and paid for under a previous presidential administration.

IRGC commander Shadmani's remarks come two weeks after Iran and Russia signed a 20-year strategic partnership and in the wake of a devastating Israeli air and drone campaign that destroyed most of Iran's strategic, long-range S-300 air defense systems.

A timely delivery of these jets — possible but far from certain — could enhance Iran's "overall defensive and deterrent" capabilities, said Freddy Khoueiry, a global security analyst for the Middle East and North Africa at the risk intelligence company RANE. Their delivery could also make Israel "cognizant of the threat of advanced fighters" in Iranian hands.

Iran's current fighter fleet is badly outdated compared to most of its neighbors in the Middle East. It consists of F-14A Tomcats and F-4 Phantom IIs from the pre-1979 rule of the last shah, when Tehran was an American ally. Tehran's only notable fighter acquisitions since were a fleet of MiG-29 Fulcrums from the Soviet Union in 1990. Tehran also confiscated Iraqi aircraft, including French-made Mirage F1s, flown to Iran to evade destruction in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

While factory-fresh Su-35s would be Iran's most significant fighter acquisition in a generation, they won't replace the capabilities of Iran's degraded air defenses. For example, Khoueiry noted they could not "directly replace the persistence coverage, area denial, and wide-area protection" offered by ground-based systems like the Russian-made S-300.

"Iran would also need time to train crews and integrate the Su-35 into its existing network of sensors, command-and-control nodes, and other defensive assets," Khoueiry told BI.

"While modern fighters can deter hostile operations and bolster interception capabilities, they work most effectively when combined with robust surface-to-air defenses," Khoueiry said. "Therefore, replacing lost S-300 systems remains crucial for any comprehensive and layered Iranian air defense strategy."

Federico Borsari, a defense expert at the Centre for European Policy Analysis, believes the Su-35 will significantly improve Iran's air defense and offensive capabilities.

At the same time, he anticipates that Iran will try to acquire the more advanced Russian S-400 to replace the S-300s it lost.

"However, it's not clear how long it might take to create a highly layered air defense network," Borsari said. "Likewise, it will take a few years for Iran to get a fully operational squadron of Su-35s (time for training, infrastructure adaptation, integration of the system in the doctrine and concept of operations, etc)."

"So, Israel retains an important advantage for the time being."

The Su-35 is a significant jolt for Iran's airpower. Borsari noted the aircraft's significant maneuverability provided by its Saturn AL-41FS turbofan engines. These engines give the jet a high climb rate, acceleration, and "superior kinematics performance," even at speeds up to Mach 2.25. And its Irbis-E radar can simultaneously scan the ground and air over a wide area.

"As a whole, the capabilities of the Su-35, in particular the combination of the Irbis-E radar and beyond visual range R-77-1 missiles with active radar guidance, would definitely improve the Iran air deterrent's combat air patrol capabilities and make it much more dangerous for Western fourth and even 4.5-generation aircraft, including Israeli F-16s and F-15s," Borsari told BI.

It's possible that Russia will also deliver the R-77-1 missiles to powerfully arm the Su-35. Moscow similarly provided beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles with the MiG-29A fighters it provided Tehran in the early 1990s.

While it remains "inferior from a technical standpoint" to Israel's stealthy fifth-generation F-35I jets, Borsari said, the Su-35 could still pose dangers to the premier Israeli aircraft — some of which likely entered Iranian airspace during the October 26 strikes.

"The Su-35 can become a threat by both using long-range R-77-1 air-to-air missiles or by getting within visual range and employing its better air-superiority characteristics against the F-35."

"Against this backdrop, Israel will do its best to avoid [within visual range] engagements and use the F-35 in its comfort zone."

It's likely that future Israeli strikes, should they come, could use F-35 stealth fighters to target Su-35s on the tarmac, not unlike how they struck air defenses in October. Israel may again use its standoff air-launched ballistic missiles to destroy these aircraft from a distance.

"With Israel having demonstrated its advanced stealth capabilities in the past year with its effective attacks against the Iranians, there is a decent chance the Israelis could launch a preemptive attack that at least grounds a portion of these Russian-built fighters and prevents the Iranians from effectively using them," RANE's Khoueiry said.

Paul Iddon is a freelance journalist and columnist who writes about Middle East developments, military affairs, politics, and history. His articles have appeared in a variety of publications focused on the region.

Within days of taking over The Daily Beast last April, Joanna Coles, the news site's co-owner, was on an editorial tear.

Coles posted on X about hiring a "senior Lauren Sánchez correspondent" to cover Jeff Bezos' fiancée and proposed a "chief fruit and vegetable correspondent" to write about Meghan Markle's new lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard. She pitched a piece about Donald Trump farting in court and another that asked whether protesting was "the new sex for Gen Z." (A spokesperson for The Daily Beast said neither story was assigned.) A third idea — a list of celebrities who had pooped themselves — was written by an intern who refused to put her name on it.

Over the course of its 16-year existence, the Beast earned a reputation for its scrappy reporting. The site balanced tabloidy, lowbrow scoops — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida once ate pudding with his fingers — with more-serious pieces on Robert Mueller's Russia investigation or on the pro-life US Senate candidate Herschel Walker financing his girlfriend's abortion. (Walker denied this.)

None of this meant the Beast made any money. The site's other new co-owner, Ben Sherwood, told staff at an all-hands meeting in July that the outlet had been on track to lose $9 million in 2024. Barry Diller, the billionaire chair of the media conglomerate IAC, had been "hours out" from selling the Beast to private equity, Sherwood said.

Instead, Diller hired Coles, 62, the famed former editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, and Sherwood, 60, the former president of ABC News. The pair walked in ready to revamp a newsroom where, in their view, reporters and editors "had been at a five-star hotel too long," someone who interviewed with them for a job said. For Coles, that meant making the Beast more fun. "I certainly wasn't reading it on a regular basis," she told The New York Times in November, adding that an editor at another publication had called the site "the boring avatar of the resistance."

"I thought he summed it up in one," she said.

For a left-leaning newsroom full of seasoned beat reporters and digital natives, "Boanna" was a shock to the system. The culture clash was exacerbated by a round of buyouts and layoffs, including the firing of the editor in chief Tracy Connor, that gutted the staff. All of it played out in gossip columns and on media Twitter. It was the type of juicy workplace implosion that would have made for a great Daily Beast story.

In a July meeting with the politics team, Sherwood said the layoffs were a necessary step in "rightsizing" a broken business. To some extent, the plan has worked. In a December podcast interview, Diller said Sherwood and Coles had turned a profit two quarters in a row and predicted that The Daily Beast would come close to breaking even in 2025. Sherwood said that in the final six months of 2024, revenue grew by 76% compared with the same period the prior year. "We're staying rigorously focused," Coles told Business Insider in January. "Everything has to go through a filter of: Is this about power? Is it about people? Is it about politics? If it's not about that, we're not interested."

Sherwood, who's based in Los Angeles and flies into the New York office once or twice a month, told BI that in the coming year, he and Coles would invest in "more original content, audio, video, and technology and tools for a more engaging experience for our readers."

In a December 17 all-hands meeting, the Beast's director of product management announced that it was aiming to launch a new lifestyle vertical by the third quarter. Coles, meanwhile, will headline a new "Beast Power 100" event series this year and next in partnership with a tech sponsor. During the all-hands, The Daily Beast's president and chief operating officer, Keith Bonnici, said the event was part of a plan to build "a business around Joanna," leveraging Coles' relationships and connections to grow the Beast brand. The event series was a "seven-figure deal," Bonnici told staffers. "Very excited about that. Clearly I like money, if you haven't figured that out."

Since Coles and Sherwood have taken over, the Beast is light on the hard-hitting journalism it was once known for; instead, the site features aggregation and opinion columns from Coles' famous acquaintances, including the "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" creator Nell Scovell and the "Last Week Tonight" writer Jill Twiss. Coles said she and Sherwood had been "very clear" about their desire to hire more investigative reporters and publish more original journalism.

Some industry executives are sympathetic to the challenge Coles and Sherwood face: finding a viable business model for an outlet that's never been profitable and has seen a decline in audience traffic over the past two years. "I often find writers have been kept in the dark or don't want to acknowledge the business is super shitty and hanging on by a thread," one media executive said.

Others are skeptical that the pair will be able to solve the dilemma that plagues most media companies: how to publish quality journalism while also making money. "I think you're dealing with two executives" who "come from the most traditional forms of media in existence: print magazines and broadcast television," an industry executive who's worked in media for almost 30 years said. "That skill set is completely inapplicable to what they're trying to do. It would be like taking someone managing US Steel and saying, 'I'm putting you in charge of OpenAI.'"

IAC launched The Daily Beast in 2008 with the former Vanity Fair editor in chief Tina Brown at the helm. Its goal, as Brown wrote years later, was to combine "tabloid raciness with sophisticated wit." She added that she relished her role as "Den Duchess to a group of wildly talented millennials having late-night office romances and lots of PG-13 entertainment." The site itself reeked of urgency, with splashy headlines in dramatic black and red.

The Beast hit plenty of road bumps, including a short-lived merger with Newsweek that precipitated Brown's 2013 departure. After her exit, editorial leadership passed to John Avlon, the CNN political commentator, then to Noah Shachtman, an editor of the publication Foreign Policy who went on to become the editor in chief of Rolling Stone.

Though it never made a profit, the Beast became known for punching above its weight. It attracted top talent, especially on the political desk: Spencer Ackerman, Sam Stein, and Olivia Nuzzi, who has since become Beast fodder herself. Brandy Zadrozny's reporting on Vice helped shape the narrative around the beleaguered outlet, and after political reporter Roger Sollenberger's Herschel Walker scoop, the politician lost the Senate race. Shachtman, who ran the Beast from 2018 to 2021, said that at its best, the site holds powerful people to account. "I feel like that's needed," Shachtman told BI, "especially now when so many other outlets are hiding under the rug."

When they arrived at the Beast, Coles and Sherwood expected to be met with excitement, according to the Times. But the staff was skeptical from the start. "There was no honeymoon period," one former staffer said.

"It was basically them laying out the argument that we weren't working hard enough, our leadership had done everything wrong monetarily, the reporters were lazy, the editors were stupid, and it was their way or the highway," another former staffer said.

Sherwood said his and Coles' critique "was never personal."

"It was very hard for employees to hear the truth that had never really been shared with them before: the Beast was on track to lose more than $36 million over the next few years. Traffic had plummeted double digits. Subscriptions were collapsing. The tech and website were broken," Sherwood said. He and Coles, he added, were trying to figure out how to turn things around.

At times, things got tense between them and their inherited staffers. A few months into her tenure, Coles held an hourlong, expletive-laden meeting with the politics reporter Jake Lahut, who was on vacation when Trump was shot and didn't file a story. "I used to hire a car and drive in godforsaken places" and "not sleep for 24 hours," Coles told Lahut, who worked at BI from 2020 to 2022. "You are working in much, much nicer conditions." Coles repeatedly questioned whether Lahut had what it took to be a journalist. A few days later, Lahut resigned.

Justin Baragona, a former Beast media reporter, said that in pitching staff on what this new Daily Beast should look like, Coles kept saying she wanted to go back to a "smarter version of tabloid journalism, back to the Tina Brown days."

"I was like, 'You want to go back to the late aughts, which didn't work?'" Baragona told BI in August.

During Coles and Sherwood's first all-hands meeting on April 15, Baragona asked how they knew their Daily Beast wouldn't end up like The Messenger, an online publication founded by The Hill's Jimmy Finkelstein. The site launched in May 2023 with a $50 million investment and folded less than a year later, laying off 300 employees and earning a reputation, per the Times, as "one of the biggest busts" in online news. It's normal for a staff full of reporters to press their bosses during meetings, but Baragona said Sherwood seemed offended by the question. "I get a little bit fired up when we get included in the same sentence" as The Messenger, Sherwood responded at the all-hands. "That's not what we're looking to do."

To many of the more than 20 former and current staffers who talked to BI, Coles seemed like a holdover from the world of glossy magazines. In the middle of the first all-hands meeting, she was interrupted by her cellphone ringing. "Oh, it's Kara Swisher," Coles said, referring to the podcast host. "I'll call her back." At another point during the meeting, she recalled the night of the 2016 election, when a colleague's husband invited her to come sit in the NBC News control room. There were two other people there, she said: Lorne Michaels and Steven Spielberg.

Once, Coles asked Tracy Connor, then the editor in chief, to point her to a "reporter who covers frivolous things." Connor replied that the Beast did not cover frivolous things but that Coles should describe the story she wanted and Connor would do her best to assign it. Coles, it turned out, wanted a journalist to investigate Gov. Kristi Noem's budget for hair, makeup, and manicures. "That's just Joanna," one former staffer said. "She didn't mean to demean what we do. That's her tabloid Daily Mail sensibility." But "a lot of the issues," the former staffer added, were about Coles and Sherwood "severely misreading who we were."

"You'd think they would've come in and been like, oh goody, we've got the keys to this kingdom to start some real trouble." a former editor said. "But the first thing Joanna does is a Lauren Sánchez correspondent. You couldn't have shown less of an understanding of what The Daily Beast was than that."

Within two months of coming on board, Coles and Sherwood fired Connor, a low-key New York Daily News alum who'd earned reporters' respect, and replaced her with the former Daily Mail editor Hugh Dougherty. "He's an absolute savant when it comes to news," Coles told BI. "And he's got a sort of Scottish rigor. He's in the office at 8, and he rarely leaves before 8."

Dougherty seemed like an awkward fit for the newsroom's culture. Early in his tenure as executive editor, he criticized a photo editor over an illustration he didn't like, calling them "brain-damaged," according to multiple people who heard about the incident contemporaneously. He also called The Daily Beast's union a "plague" and a "cancer," two former employees said.

In July, Dougherty was chatting with writers in a weekend Slack channel. One reporter mentioned recapping a Fox News interview, and Dougherty replied that he hadn't realized the interviewee was on with "Gay Trowdy" — seemingly poking fun at former Rep. Trey Gowdy, now a Fox host. Dougherty declined to comment on these incidents.

Staffers felt like they were increasingly being asked to cross ethical lines. Coles, who is on the board of Snapchat, expressed interest in negative stories about TikTok, its rival, one former staffer said. Former employees described three instances in which they were encouraged to use Chris Vlasto — a pal of Sherwood's who worked at ABC News and was contracted by the Beast to do communications — as an anonymous source in a story; in two of these cases, the former employees said this directive came from Sherwood.

Vlasto told BI that, as a longtime employee of ABC, he'd offered to share contacts and phone numbers with reporters. He said he never volunteered himself to be quoted anonymously. Sherwood added that Vlasto is "a fantastic resource for any reporters seeking to be smarter about topics related to the television industry or ABC News."

On occasion, Coles herself could be loose with the facts. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," she said she thought Trump was microdosing, leading the host Jonathan Lemire to clarify that there was no evidence that Trump was taking drugs. And on a September episode of Ari Melber's show, she said that people had already begun early voting in North Carolina. After the show wrapped, her co-panelist, Molly Jong-Fast, pulled Coles aside and explained that early voting wouldn't start until mid-October, someone familiar with the interaction said. They added that Jong-Fast warned Coles about being so egregiously wrong on TV.

(The spokesperson said Coles was clearly joking with regards to Trump microdosing and said it's "ridiculous" to say she's loose with facts given her distinguished career.)

Some reporters worried that Coles' bravado would hurt their credibility — not to mention their relationships with key sources. During an April visit to the Washington, DC, bureau, Coles suggested that the Beast's Washington reporters write about the fattest members of Congress and which lawmakers were on Ozempic. And after Puck reported that the ABC News chief Kim Godwin said that Black people don't watch the news, Coles assigned reporters to "call every famous Black person in the news," including Robin Roberts and Don Lemon, to ask them to respond to the claim. The story didn't run.

Coles said that many of her story ideas were attempts to start conversations among staffers. "I come from a background where people argue about ideas," she said. "It's about understanding what an idea is and how you pursue it, and not being afraid of saying things out loud and not being afraid of being judged."

When the Beast first came on the scene, digital media still seemed like a good financial bet; the same year it launched, The Huffington Post was valued at $100 million. Digital publishers could count on revenue from social media sites like Facebook, brand-name advertisers, and venture capitalists hoping to recreate the HuffPost magic. These days, that has all but disappeared. Meta, which once built tools that advantaged sites like BuzzFeed, has pivoted away from hard news, and Google's new emphasis on AI-generated answers threatens to upend the digital ad market even further.

In 2022 and 2023, Diller started looking for a buyer for the Beast, meeting with people like Janice Min of The Ankler and BI's founder Henry Blodget. While there was substantial interest from private equity, Diller preferred not to see the outlet stripped for parts. He wanted to give the site a fighting chance, said someone privy to conversations about its future. For Diller, that meant "having a star at the helm," the person said. (Diller declined to comment.)

Coles and Sherwood seemed to have everything Diller was looking for. They'd had long careers and were well-known names in their respective fields. The Beast was a chance for them to get back into the newsmaking game.

Coles started as a newspaper reporter in London (one of her early scoops famously came from confronting someone while they were on the toilet) before moving to the States. She became the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan in 2012, back when magazines were flush, and then the chief content officer at Hearst four years later. With her frosty pixie cut and treadmill desk, she was a larger-than-life figure at Hearst, "swanning around in full Gucci," as one former Hearst editor put it.

Coles left Hearst in 2018 after Troy Young was appointed president. She continued to executive produce "The Bold Type" — a fictional show about women's magazines based loosely on her time as an editor in chief — until its cancellation in 2021. She tried her hand at various other ventures, including Boudica, a content platform to connect women in corporate America. She collaborated with the Twitch streamer Valkyrae to launch RFLCT, a blue-light-blocking cream that was blasted as a scam because of its lack of scientific bona fides. ("I am confident that if a male gamer had come up with RFLCT he would have been roundly applauded," Coles said in a 2021 statement to The Washington Post defending the product.)

In 2020, Coles partnered with the New York Islanders co-owner Jon Ledecky to launch several special-purpose acquisition companies — investment vehicles popular with celebrities at the time. Four years later, one of the SPACs was charged with making misleading statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission. That same year, investors in the SPACs' parent company sued Coles and other board members, alleging a breach of their fiduciary duty. The SEC charges were settled, with the SPAC neither admitting nor denying the commission's findings; the lawsuit is still active.

Sherwood, an ambitious executive from a well-heeled Beverly Hills family, got his start as a "Good Morning America" producer and worked his way up to the top job at ABC News. He presided over a run of successes at ABC, including leading "GMA" to its first ratings victory over the "Today" show. There were people, a former colleague of Sherwood's at ABC said, who wondered if Sherwood "could be Bob Iger someday." When ABC merged with Fox, Disney kept the Fox TV executives to run entertainment and Sherwood left the company. "Usually when you're replaced at that level you're still a player, you get a production deal and eventually move into another job," a second former colleague said. Instead, Sherwood said, he went the entrepreneurial route and spent the next three years building the sports tech company Mojo, which he sold in 2023 for an undisclosed sum.

Coles and Sherwood had known each other for a few years and would often exchange links and thoughts on the day's news. They'd discussed some sort of journalism team-up and had even come up with a name, Scoop, but didn't get much further. They saw each other as kindred spirits, the latter of Sherwood's former colleagues said. Sherwood, the person added, thought of himself as "this savant" who could speak to middle-American women, much as Coles' Cosmo had.

It was one of IAC's bankers, Jason Rapp, who suggested that Coles and Sherwood speak to Diller together. In their meeting, they impressed Diller with their ideas about what the future of media looked like and how the Beast might fit into that equation. "I wanted something that curated a lot of news out there that wasn't about the end of democracy all the time," Coles told the Times.

Coles and Sherwood spoke Diller's language and existed within the billionaire's rarefied social orbit. Coles and Diller's wife, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, often appeared at events and on panels together and were both cast on season two of "Project Runway All Stars." And Diller had started his career at ABC, where Sherwood came up. One person who knows both Coles and Diller said it probably didn't hurt that Coles was a charismatic blond British magazine star much like his old partner, Brown.

Ultimately, the trio agreed to partner on a joint venture, with Coles and Sherwood taking a 49% equity stake. Actually bringing their vision to life "was like the girls' trip made it out of the group chat," one Daily Beast reporter said.

It wasn't long before the leaks began. Articles in New York Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Washington Post quoted disgruntled Beast staffers describing Coles' story ideas as scattershot. Sherwood swept in to play good cop, holding a follow-up meeting with the DC team on May 1 in which he seemed to try to defend Coles. "We're not doing a 180; we're not here to cover Donald Trump's farts," he assured the politics team, saying that Coles' ideas hadn't been real assignments. "This is not Jimmy Finkelstein," he said. He and Coles weren't "trying to make you guys write 70 articles a day."

Around the same time, Coles and Sherwood began gearing up for layoffs. But The Daily Beast's union was in the middle of negotiating a new contract, which meant the co-owners couldn't immediately make changes. Instead, the union proposed presenting the staff with voluntary buyouts. As things in the office grew tenser, more people decided to leave. By the time Connor's exit was announced in June, 12 people had applied for a buyout; a few days after Dougherty took over, 13 more people joined.

During buyout negotiations, Coles contacted multiple people directly to ask them to stay on, offering them more money and better positions. Three employees eventually rescinded their requests. In the end, 22 members took a buyout, resulting in $1.9 million total in cuts. Management also laid off eight nonunion employees. When the restructuring was through, the Beast was down to 13 unionized staffers.

Even as Coles and Sherwood downsized, they were eager to attract new talent. One reporter said the duo described themselves in the interview process as "pirates on a pirate ship in the industry, going to storm the beaches" — phrasing that seemed cribbed from Logan Roy's speech to the ATN staff on "Succession."

This same reporter described Coles as saying she wanted to hire Brits because she thought they were "smarter than Americans." She and Sherwood tapped Martin Pengelly — a Guardian journalist who'd recently broken a story about Kristi Noem, South Dakota's governor, killing her dog — to run the DC bureau. Pengelly expected to take charge of a competent, well-oiled newsroom, someone with knowledge of the situation said. Instead, he found himself short-staffed. Two of his congressional reporters had just left, and two more were on leave, giving him a team of one. But he was still under pressure from Sherwood and Coles to churn out stories.

The last straw, people said, was when Coles told Pengelly to use an online test to determine whether Joe Biden had Alzheimer's for an article. After five weeks at the Beast, he quit without another job lined up. (Coles declined to comment on this specific assignment. "We want to be an independent news organization," she said, "and it was very clear there was something wrong with the president.")

Multiple people said Coles and Sherwood struggled to make hires. Coles told Variety in September that they'd wanted to bring in "big voices" but discovered that "their price was too rich or they weren't going to move the needle in the way we thought." They tried for months to get new names for the politics team, putting out feelers to well-known reporters including Nuzzi, MSNBC's Sam Stein, and the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff. One politics reporter they attempted to hire, Cameron Joseph, went to The Christian Science Monitor instead.

During the December all-hands, Coles told staff that she'd had "a ton of outreach" from people clamoring to join the Beast. In fact, just that morning, a woman had recognized her during a coffee meeting. "I know you; you're Joanna Coles," she recalled the woman saying. "I would love to write for you."

In one way, Sherwood and Coles have succeeded where no one else has: They've made the Beast financially successful. In November, Bonnici, the Beast's COO, told Adweek that revenue was expected to grow by 30% in 2025. Traffic is up, too. According to the Times, data from the media analytics firm Comscore showed that the Beast had 21.3 million visitors to its site in September, compared with a 13.8 million monthly average in 2023. Coles said the Beast had seen a bump in traffic starting with the June presidential debate, presumably from readers who want to know "what the hell is going on in America." The question is what happens next.

Staffers have continued to leave. In addition to Lahut, the Beast has lost the managing editor Noor Ibrahim, the breaking news editor Rachel Olding, and the breaking news writer AJ McDougall. In October, it lost Roger Sollenberger, and the following month, Mini Racker, one of the few remaining DC staffers, left too. The investigative reporter Kate Briquelet departed in January.

Coles and Sherwood are exploring new ways to make money. In addition to their new lifestyle vertical and event series, Coles told one reporter that she was "very good at spinning this stuff into TV and movies" and that she had plans to partner with Snapchat. The Daily Beast spokesperson said this partnership has yet to materialize.

Sherwood said that even though he and Coles ended 2024 with about 31% fewer employees, the Beast was publishing about 70 stories a day — an increase, the spokesperson added, from the 40 to 50 articles produced before the buyouts and layoffs. Sherwood sometimes contributes to this count himself. Recent stories include a piece on the Menendez brothers' resentencing, as well as one titled "Cute, Cuddly & Commie! D.C. Welcomes 2 New Chinese Pandas" and another with the headline "McDonald's Serves Up the 14-Ounce 'Big Arch,' Its Biggest Hamburger Ever." (Sherwood said he used a senior executive source to land the McDonald's scoop.)

As publications like Vice and The Messenger shutter and layoffs become cyclical, the media industry is struggling to find a sustainable path forward. Outlets such as Puck have managed it by focusing on a specific audience — the power players of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street — and by charging $100 or more for an annual subscription. The Daily Beast, on the other hand, seems to be focused on traffic — a model that seems increasingly unsustainable as advertisers spend less and less in return for clicks. In a September all-hands meeting, Bonnici said the Beast would eventually need to put time and resources back into investigative journalism to be of value to its audience.

For IAC and Diller, making money is certainly good. Coles said that while she and Sherwood had "complete operational and editorial control," Diller had "been nothing but 150% supportive."

During his December podcast appearance, Diller said Coles and Sherwood wanted to build the Beast "into a real business with substantial profits." He called their plan ambitious but added: "So far, they've gone faster to get it on even footing than I ever thought would be possible. So we'll see."

Multiple people said Diller had held on to the site for so long because he cared about its role as a meaningful news source. "He wants to do things that give him pride in the world — things people in his peer group would read and talk about and respect," one person familiar with Diller's thinking said. The person questioned whether Diller is achieving that with this iteration of the Beast.

For now, though, Sherwood and Coles are getting another shot at media relevance. So far, they've presented a united front. But "I think Ben is more worried than Joanna" about reputational damage, a reporter said. "Joanna is more like: 'Fine, you don't want to ride with us? I don't need you.'"

• Three federal employee unions filed a lawsuit against the Treasury Department on Monday.
• The unions accused Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, of sharing sensitive data with Elon Musk's DOGE.
• The White House said Musk had "abided by all applicable federal laws."

Three federal employee unions have accused the Treasury Department of giving Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency unlawful access to sensitive information.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, lawyers acting for the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees, and the Service Employees International Union said Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, violated federal law when he shared the department's data with DOGE.

The three union groups are represented by lawyers from the Public Citizen Litigation Group and the State Democracy Defenders Fund.

"Federal laws protect sensitive personal and financial information from improper disclosure and misuse, including by barring disclosure to individuals who lack a lawful and legitimate need for it," the lawyers wrote. "In his first week as Treasury Secretary, defendant Bessent violated these restrictions."

The lawsuit said Musk and DOGE staffers had sought access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service's records "for some time" but had been "rebuffed by the employee then in charge of the Bureau." The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a department within the Treasury that oversees all federal payments and collections.

Bessent then put that employee on leave and gave DOGE's staffers "full access" to the Bureau's data and computers, the lawsuit said.

"The scale of the intrusion into individuals' privacy is massive and unprecedented," the lawsuit added.

"People who must share information with the federal government should not be forced to share information with Elon Musk or his 'DOGE.' And federal law says they do not have to," the lawsuit said.

Lawyers from the Public Citizen Litigation Group and State Democracy Defenders Fund didn't respond to requests for comment.

On Monday, President Donald Trump told reporters that Musk was given access to Treasury data so that he could identify wasteful government spending.

"He's got access only to letting people go that he thinks are no good, if we agree with him. And it's only if we agree with him," Trump said while signing executive orders in the Oval Office.

"Elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval, and we will give him the approval where appropriate," Trump added.

A White House spokesperson told Business Insider on Monday that Musk was a "special government employee" and wouldn't be paid for his services. According to federal law, special government employees cannot work for more than 130 days in a 365-day period.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters on the same day that Musk had "abided by all applicable federal laws."

The Treasury and Musk didn't respond to requests for comment from BI.

Shortly after winning the November election, Trump announced that Musk and the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy would co-lead DOGE. Trump said in his announcement that the commission would cut wasteful federal spending and slash excess regulations.

Last month, Ramaswamy said he was stepping away from DOGE, leaving Musk as its sole leader.

In October, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO outlined his goals for DOGE. At a Trump campaign event, he said the committee would save the government at least $2 trillion, though he didn't specify what cuts he would make to achieve that target.

Achieving Musk's $2 trillion target would involve cutting government spending by nearly a third. The federal government spent $6.75 trillion in the 2024 fiscal year.

In January, Musk appeared to walk back his estimate, saying that reducing $2 trillion in spending would be a "best-case outcome" for DOGE. The billionaire said in an interview with the political strategist Mark Penn that the commission had a "good shot" at saving $1 trillion.

"If we can drop the budget deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion and free up the economy to have additional growth such that the output of goods and services keeps pace with the increase in the money supply, then there will be no inflation," Musk told Penn. "So that, I think, would be an epic outcome."

• Dennis Beggs did his first marathon the same year he started running.
• Now 63, he is running seven marathons in seven days on seven continents.
• He said taking it slow and stretching helped him get into running marathons.

Dennis Beggs hated his first run. He was 55 years old and had been walking a lot to clear his mind while caring for his mom, who had Alzheimer's disease. He wanted to start running instead to "waste less time," he told Business Insider, so ran a quarter of a mile in spring 2017 — and thought he'd never do it again.

But the next week, Beggs, a farm owner from Wisconsin, decided to try again and began running incrementally longer distances each day. He didn't know exactly how far or long he was running because he never took a watch or a phone. So when his neighbor invited him to join a 10k race on Independence Day, he was surprised to come second.

At the race, a man encouraged him to run his first marathon. Looking back, his first marathon in October 2017 was a "disaster," but it motivated him to keep dedicating time to running.

Now, at 63, he has completed many running challenges, including 10 marathons in 10 weeks. And on January 31, he started the World Marathon Challenge, which involves running seven marathons on seven continents in seven days, to raise money for the Alzheimer's Foundation of America.

Beggs shared how he got so fit at 63 with BI.

Beggs started with short runs

"You start out small, and then you work your way up," Beggs said.

He started out walking, and when he started running, he slowly increased the length of his runs. He was already fit from managing a farm, so he quite quickly was able to run for longer periods of time, while setting achievable milestones.

Sohee Lee, a personal trainer, previously told BI that easing into working out by doing sessions a few times a week and not pushing yourself too hard is the most sustainable approach.

He appreciated the physical and mental benefits of running

Beggs said his lifestyle changed when he got fitter.

"You're going to see your body transform. You're going to lose weight, you're going to feel fitter, you're going to have much more energy. It'll lead to better nutrition, too, because it's like, 'Wow, I feel good. I don't really need a doughnut every day,'" he said.

Plus, running is a great opportunity to clear his mind and think without distractions. Beggs might consider what he needs to do that day, pray, or mull over tough decisions.

"I always feel cleansed after I run. It relaxes me and gives me stability," he said. The runner's high is a feeling "like no other," he said, and has helped build his confidence.

One 2024 study published in the journal Sports (Basel) found that people who ran regularly saw greater improvements in their mood after a run than those who ran occasionally.

He does yoga and has massages

Beggs uses Thai massage to stretch out his muscles. Thai massage doesn't involve the kneading and rubbing associated with other forms of massage, but entails yoga-like poses and stretches with the assistance of a massage therapist, instead.

"It really helps with my stretching, and I feel like it means I have less chance to sustain injury because it's a more intense form of stretching," he said.

A small 2024 study by researchers at Mae Fah Luang University, Thailand, found that participants with muscle fatigue recovered faster after 30 minutes of traditional Thai massage compared to participants who did one minute.

He also does yoga in the winter when he's not doing as much physical farm work.

What is known as active recovery, such as walking or gentle yoga, can improve blood flow, improve fitness performance, and soothe muscles.