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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech giants 'copy anything that's good'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional reporting by Olena Lysenko.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Netflix spokesperson declined to comment ahead of earnings.

Life after the password-sharing crackdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gen Z's entry-level opportunities are drying up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Millennial and Gen X managers are caught in the Great Flattening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baby boomers increasingly need jobs past retirement age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russian troops are making anti-drone bullets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Consumer prices have not risen as much as expected, but this may change soon.
• The Federal Reserve's Beige Book warns of price hikes as tariffs become entrenched.
• Businesses are reporting rising costs overall, with some sacrificing profit margins for tariffs.

Prices have not gone up as much as expected for consumers, but this might not last for long.

The latest Federal Reserve Board Beige Book, a publication that provides general information about the current state of the economy, mentioned tariffs 75 times and warns of price hikes as tariffs become more entrenched.

Across all 12 Federal Reserve districts, businesses told the Federal Reserve that tariffs have increased their costs either modestly or pronouncedly. Many manufacturers reported being surcharged by their suppliers, especially for raw materials used in manufacturing and construction.

While many businesses said they passed along costs to consumers through price hikes, others held off due to price-sensitive consumers, which affected their profit margins.

For instance, a manufacturing company in Memphis told the St. Louis Federal Reserve that it had raised prices significantly to offset the tariff cost on steel and aluminum, but a packaging company in the district is swallowing at least 10% in surcharge due to competition with larger manufacturers.

But the prices may not stay low for long as tariffs prolong.

"Contacts in a wide range of industries expected cost pressures to remain elevated in the coming months, increasing the likelihood that consumer prices will start to rise more rapidly by late summer," wrote the Federal Reserve System in the July Beige Book.

"It seems that prices have gone up out of fear that prices will go up," a construction materials supplier told the Federal Reserve.

The consumer price index, a broad-based measure of goods and services costs, shows that prices have not skyrocketed post-tariffs. In June, prices inched up by 0.3%, putting the 12-month inflation rate at 2.7%. This is mostly in line with analyst expectations, though it's still above the Federal Reserve's goal of 2%.

The Trump administration recently sent tariff letters to nearly two dozen trading partners, threatening duties as high as 50% starting from August 1. None of the four existing trade agreements with the UK, China, Vietnam, and Indonesia has yielded tariffs below 10%, suggesting that the baseline tariff imposed on April 2 may be here to stay.

• New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani tried to woo the city's tech denizens on Wednesday.
• He engaged in a fireside chat attended by roughly 200 startup founders and venture capitalists.
• In the discussion, Mamdani seemed to balance progressive ideas with pragmatic outreach.

Zohran Mamdani had no deck, but plenty of pitch when he met with New York City's tech community on Wednesday night.

At an invite-only fireside chat with venture capitalist Kevin Ryan, the New York City Democratic mayoral candidate tried to sell a room of tech workers and startup investors on his vision for a city that works for the working class.

And he mostly avoided the controversy surrounding his views on Israel and tax hikes for the city's millionaires and billionaires, according to multiple people who attended the event.

Fresh off a primary win powered by the blunt message that New York is too expensive, Mamdani spent about an hour taking questions from New York's tech workers at an event hosted by the Partnership for New York City, Tech:NYC, and AlleyCorp, Ryan's venture capital firm that incubates and invests in startups.

The crowd of some 200 people included startup founders, angel investors, and general partners from venture capital funds.

The event, held at a gleaming skyscraper in Midtown, offered a stark contrast to the candidate's grassroots campaign, which was built around free city buses, a freeze on New York rents, and tax hikes for millionaires. Mamdani leaned in, fielding questions with a mix of what attendees who spoke to Business Insider characterized as "charisma" and pragmatism.

Ryan told Business Insider that when someone in the audience raised President Donald Trump's social media post about Mamdani, which referred to him as "a 100% Communist Lunatic" who "looks TERRIBLE," he joked that it must have hurt Mamdani to hear he looked lousy, drawing scattered laughs.

During their discussion, Mamdani and Ryan pinballed from the state of affairs in New York's tech scene to initiatives across housing, childcare, transportation, healthcare, and government efficiency, attendees said.

Last week, Mamdani collided with tech's more conservative wing on social media after a Sequoia Capital investor's viral comments referring to the candidate as an "Islamist."

Ryan said the post didn't come up during the chat, but one audience member did ask Mamdani about his past comments on Israel. Mamdani deflected, Ryan said.

"He was trying to focus on being mayor of New York," Ryan said, "not mayor of the Middle East."

Mamdani was somewhat vague, Ryan and other attendees said, when asked about his previous comments about billionaires. "I don't think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality," Mamdani said in a TV interview in June.

He seemed to be reaching out to the business community, nonetheless.

"He didn't have to meet with the CEOs," said Ryan, referring to a Tuesday meeting with New York's business leaders.

In that meeting, Mamdani reportedly said that he would not use the phrase "globalize the intifada" and that he would "discourage" others from doing so, after months of declining to condemn the phrase that some interpret as a call to violence against the Jewish people.

At Wednesday's event, one attendee, who works at an artificial intelligence company, said he saw the candidate's rhetoric soften into a more pragmatic approach. The person said that when someone asked Mamdani what he hoped to achieve in his first hundred days in office, the candidate referenced a 2009 proposal by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg to make cross-town buses free. Mamdani has said that he plans to make every bus in New York free.

"I was glad to see him being open to new ideas and working with people outside his base," said Yoni Rechtman, a Brooklyn venture capitalist who attended the event. "Over the last few months, he's done a good job moderating on issues that matter to New York." Rechtman questioned if that was because of "an authentic commitment to pragmatism" or "just typical politicking."

"He's engaging," Ryan said, "even though he knows that many people in the room don't agree with a number of his positions. I will give him credit for reaching out."

As an organizer, Ryan played both host and ambassador. He's among the early architects of New York's startup scene, the original "Silicon Alley insider." His hands were on many of its flagship tech companies: Gilt Groupe, MongoDB, and even Business Insider, which he started along with Henry Blodget and Dwight Merriman in 2007.

Ryan, who has previously cohosted events with Mamdani rivals Mayor Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo, and other New York politicians, said he hasn't endorsed a candidate. This event, he said, came together after Mamdani's primary win and offered a chance to introduce the candidate to the tech ecosystem — and for the ecosystem to size him up.

A spokesperson for Mamdani didn't return a request for comment.

Mamdani's campaign has proposed a 2% income tax hike on New Yorkers earning more than $1 million a year — a bracket that likely doesn't include most of the city's early-stage founders and startup employees, and might only graze a few of the investors in the room.

Zach Weinberg, a New York tech founder who notched one of the city's biggest startup exits with the $2.1 billion sale of Flatiron Health in 2018, didn't attend the fireside chat, but he didn't mince words when asked about Mamdani's platform. While the candidate "seems like a perfectly nice guy," Weinberg told Business Insider, he believes many of Mamdani's policies, especially rent freezes and higher taxes, "will not work" and could do more harm than good.

"If he pushes tax rates higher on residents, you will see people move out of the city, which actually decreases tax revenue," he said. "Super wealthy people have flexibility where they live."

He pointed to hedge fund manager David Tepper's departure from New Jersey — a move that caused a drop in the state's annual tax revenue — as a cautionary tale for what happens when tax policy collides with high-net-worth mobility.

Mamdani sits further to the left than most in a room full of card-carrying capitalists, said Ryan. But he tried to show on Wednesday that he's willing to engage with a spectrum of viewpoints ahead of the general election, where he will face a Republican and several independent candidates, he added.

When asked about technology's role in the government, Mamdani lamented that while he can track a food delivery order on his phone, he can't monitor a complaint he's logged in NYC311, the city's information and service hotline, as easily. The public sector, he told the group, could learn from the private sector in how it applies technology.

"He's a good politician and understands that we need to create jobs in the city if people want to pay for anything," Ryan said.

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• President Donald Trump said that Coca-Cola agreed to swap corn syrup for real cane sugar in Coke.
• Coca-Cola has not commented on or confirmed the president's statement.
• If the swap is made, US-based Coca-Cola drinks would taste more like Mexican Coke products.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said a "better" version of Coca-Cola products was on its way.

In a Truth Social post, the president said he'd been working on a deal with the beverage company to use real cane sugar in Coke products in the United States, "and they have agreed to do so."

"I'd like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola," Trump wrote in his post. "This will be a very good move by them — You'll see. It's just better!"

The Coca‑Cola Company acknowledged in a statement that changes were coming but did not provide additional details.

"We appreciate President Trump's enthusiasm for our iconic Coca‑Cola brand," the statement said. "More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca‑Cola product range will be shared soon."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Coca-Cola already sells a cane sugar version of its soda in the US, marketed as Coca‑Cola Mexico or, colloquially, Mexican Coke, since many of its sodas sold in Mexico are made with cane sugar. However, most of its products sold in the United States are sweetened with corn syrup, in part because the government heavily subsidizes corn, which makes corn syrup a cheaper option than cane sugar.

Coca-Cola's stock didn't respond to Trump's announcement in after-hours trading. Shares for the soda company were at $69.27 at market close.

Famously, Trump's drink of choice is Diet Coke, which is made with the artificial sweetener aspartame. The president has frequently been photographed drinking Diet Coke, with The New York Times reporting in 2017 that he drinks a dozen a day.

The Trump administration, through its Make America Health Again initiative spearheaded by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has urged companies to remove ingredients such as dyes and preservatives from their formulas. Some companies, like PepsiCo, Nestlé, and General Mills, have announced they will remove artificial ingredients and colorings from popular food items by the end of the year.

• The "Gen Z Stare" has captivated the internet, referring to a blank look Gen Zers might give in social interactions.
• Some say it reflects poor workplace communication and social skills.
• But psychologists and generational experts told BI that's not necessarily the case.

It's not polite to stare — especially, as it turns out, if you're Gen Z.

Social media users have described the now-viral "Gen Z Stare" as a vacant, wide-eyed expression often accompanied by an awkward silence. Many of the videos say it happens during retail and customer service interactions, or in painful workplace conversations.

While some say the look might reflect lagging soft skills and questionable office etiquette among Gen Zers, psychologists and generational experts told BI the phenomenon could have more to do with natural growing pains at a first job and factors unique to Gen Z's upbringing. And, they noted, intergenerational criticism isn't anything new.

"Every generation critiques the generation below them," Ellen Hendriksen, a behavioral psychologist and social anxiety specialist, said. "This is nothing new."

Many Gen Zers are working their first jobs

Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist who has written about twentysomethings, doesn't buy the trope that Gen Z as a whole is awkward or socially inept. She said what people may be seeing with the Gen Z Stare is likely a result of Gen Zers navigating the workplace for the first time.

"For most young employees, working with people of other ages and generations is new," she told BI in a statement. "Blank stares you receive from young workers may be more about not knowing what to do and not feeling confident on the job than about their trying to be (passively) aggressively Gen Z."

Megan Gerhardt, a professor of leadership at Miami University and founder of Gentelligence.org, said that customer service jobs, where many social media users claim to see Gen Z Stares, are commonly first gigs.

Hendriksen, a parent of two Gen Zers, said the cohort might not be as up for acting "fake," which could impact their customer service interactions.

"Gen Z might be less willing to do the people-pleasing part, but that means that some of the professionalism has also gotten lost," she said.

Growing up online could play a part

Many factors could be at play in what Gerhardt calls the emerging "norm shift," including the fact that Gen Z tends to spend more time on screens.

"The idea that now that I'm in a face-to-face customer service situation, and I'm supposed to rally an entirely different set of expressions and responses — that might not be something that Gen Z is either used to understanding or has learned yet," she said.

Gerhardt said it's naive to "underestimate" the impact the COVID-19 shutdowns could have had on young people's development, but Jay said she doesn't buy into the notion that Gen Zers are "damaged or stunted" because of the pandemic.

Hendriksen thinks the wordless Gen Z Stare could also be a real-world echo of a now-common digital experience: In a Zoom meeting, one person may say hello, only to have nobody respond because they're all muted.

"Meet them where they're at"

The three experts told BI that regardless of the root causes behind the stare, it's crucial to equip young people with the communication skills they need to thrive in an in-person, multigenerational workforce.

"With respect to the workplace, nearly half of Gen Zers think they don't have the skills that workplaces want—and they're right," Jay said. Universities, she added, generally don't teach students crucial workplace abilities like communication and professionalism. Hendriksen agreed that there's a "skills deficit" for Gen Zers in the customer service and retail space, in part because of the pandemic, but said that the group isn't a monolith.

It's normal for norms around professionalism and etiquette to shift, Gerhardt said, but it's more productive to work with young people on striking the right tone than to try to mock them.

"If we want to make sure that we don't lose this personal touch, then let's meet them where they're at," she said. "Let's invest in helping them understand why that's important and see what they need to get where their bosses or customers feel like they need to go."

Generational critique isn't anything new

When any new generation has entered the workforce, they've needed to get up to speed on a set of skills, said Gerhardt. The viral criticism of the so-called Gen Z Stare reminds her of the "millennial pause" phenomenon and feels like the "latest iteration of generational shaming."

There's been no dearth of criticism targeting various generations — whether it's that boomers are selfish, or that millennials are snowflakes whose avocado toast addiction is to blame for their finances. Now, it's Gen Z's turn.

"Our culture loves to make fun of young adults and how unequipped they supposedly are," Jay said.

• WalletHub ranked 300 US cities to reveal the best and worst places for first-time homebuyers.
• Cities were scored on 22 factors, from housing costs and weather to crime rates and school quality.
• Most top cities for first-time buyers are in Florida, while most of the worst are in California.

Whether it's older generations holding onto large homes or the overall slowing of the housing market amid economic uncertainty, first-time homebuyers are facing an uphill battle when they enter the housing market.

Data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) shows there are fewer first-time homebuyers than ever in the market. The market share of first-time homebuyers decreased from 32% in 2023 to 24% in 2024 — the lowest share since NAR began tracking in 1981.

It's also taking longer for Americans to secure their first home. The median age of a first-time homebuyer increased from 35 in 2023 to 38 in 2024.

Still, it's not impossible to buy for the first time, and some cities have better conditions than others.

The personal-finance website WalletHub analyzed 300 US cities of all sizes across 22 metrics, grouped into three key categories: affordability, the local real estate market, and quality of life. Factoring in elements like housing costs, weather, crime rates, and school quality, the cities were ranked based on how well they support first-time homebuyers.

"Buying a home for the first time is a very stressful and difficult process, especially when housing prices are through the roof and interest rates have risen sharply in the past few years," WalletHub Analyst Chip Lupo said. "The best cities for first-time home buyers not only are affordable both in terms of buying a house and living there afterward, but they also have a lot of housing choices as well as low crime rates and good schools."

According to WalletHub, six of the best 10 cities for first-time homebuyers are in Florida, while all but one are in the South. California garnered the most cities at the bottom of the list.

Here are the 10 best cities for first-time homebuyers and the 10 worst, according to WalletHub.

The best cities for first-time homebuyers

10. Sunrise, Florida

• Population: 100,128
• Median household income: $72,107
• Median home-sale price: $422,500
• Real estate market rank: 22
• Affordability rank: 153
• Quality of life rank: 13

9. Lakeland, Florida

• Population: 124,990
• Median household income: $60,947
• Median home-sale price: $315,000
• Real estate market rank: 9
• Affordability rank: 139
• Quality of life rank: 15

8. Orlando

• Population: 334,854
• Median household income: $69,268
• Median home-sale price: $403,500
• Real estate market rank: 7
• Affordability rank: 159
• Quality of life rank: 17

7. Cape Coral, Florida

• Population: 233,025
• Median household income: $76,062
• Median home-sale price: $368,800
• Real estate market rank: 4
• Affordability rank: 145
• Quality of life rank: 20

6. Gilbert, Arizona

• Population: 288,790
• Median household income: $121,351
• Median home-sale price: 593,500
• Real estate market rank: 17
• Affordability rank: 34
• Quality of life rank: 85

5. Huntsville, Alabama

• Population: 230,402
• Median household income: $70,778
• Median home-sale price: $343,000
• Real estate market rank: 35
• Affordability rank: 36
• Quality of life rank: 43

4. Surprise, Arizona

• Population: 167,564
• Median household income: $93,371
• Median home-sale price: $435,000
• Real estate market rank:
• Affordability rank: 1
• Quality of life rank: 207

3. Tampa, Florida

• Population: 414,547
• Median household income: $71,302
• Median home-sale price: $435,000
• Real estate market rank: 5
• Affordability rank: 170
• Quality of life rank: 6

2. Boise, Idaho

• Population: 237,963
• Median household income: $81,308
• Median home-sale price: $511,250
• Real estate market rank: 8
• Affordability rank: 61
• Quality of life rank: 27

1. Palm Bay, Florida

• Population: 142,023
• Median household income: $67,521
• Median home-sale price: $327,000
• Real estate market rank: 2
• Affordability rank: 118
• Quality of life rank: 3

The worst cities for first-time homebuyers

10. San Mateo, California

• Population: 103,006
• Median household income: $152,669
• Median home-sale price: $1,725,000
• Real estate market rank: 261
• Affordability rank: 287
• Quality of life rank: 245

9. New Orleans

• Population: 362,701
• Median household income: $55,339
• Median home-sale price: $385,000
• Real estate market rank: 195
• Affordability rank: 213
• Quality of life rank: 295

8. Anchorage, Alaska

• Population: 289,600
• Median household income: $98,152
• Median home-sale price: $425,000
• Real estate market rank: 259
• Affordability rank: 152
• Quality of life rank: 298

7. Costa Mesa, California

• Population: 109,131
• Median household income: $110,073
• Median home-sale price: $1,640,000
• Real estate market rank: 230
• Affordability rank: 297
• Quality of life rank: 188

6. Los Angeles

• Population: 3,878,704
• Median household income: $80,366
• Median home-sale price: $1,124,000
• Real estate market rank: 255
• Affordability rank: 294
• Quality of life rank: 246

5. Santa Barbara, California

• Population: 87,291
• Median household income: $101,672
• Median home-sale price: $1,632,500
• Real estate market rank: 227
• Affordability rank: 299
• Quality of life rank: 130

4. San Francisco

• Population: 827,526
• Median household income: $141,446
• Median home-sale price: $1,500,000
• Real estate market rank: 273
• Affordability rank: 280
• Quality of life rank: 281

3. Oakland, California

• Population: 443,554
• Median household income: $97,369
• Median home-sale price: $868,000
• Real estate market rank: 275
• Affordability rank: 231
• Quality of life rank: 300

2. Santa Monica, California

• Population: 90,729
• Median household income: $109,739
• Median home-sale price: $1,605,000
• Real estate market rank: 252
• Affordability rank: 300
• Quality of life rank: 231

1. Berkeley, California

• Population: 121,749
• Median household income: $108,558
• Median-priced home: $1,350,000
• Real estate market rank: 291
• Affordability rank: 296
• Quality of life rank: 296

• Creator economy M&A deals are on pace for a record year, according to a new report.
• Quartermast Advisors tracked 52 deals that have been announced in the first half of 2025.
• Here are the categories that have seen the most deals and what to expect in the rest of the year.

Creator economy mergers and acquisitions are on pace for a record year, according to a recent report from the M&A advisory firm Quartermast Advisors.

Quartermast tracked 52 deals that had been announced in the first half of the year. According to the firm's analysis, that's a 73% year-over-year increase.

So far this year, two key players are inking deals in the creator economy: private equity firms and industry incumbents.

For instance, private equity firm PSG Equity invested $150 million to take a majority stake in the creator economy startup Uscreen, which helps influencers launch their own apps.

"Private equity is looking at some of these businesses that have been built and saying, 'Hey, there's a lot more we can do with growth equity,'" Quartermast founder James Creech said.

Summit Partners, another private equity firm, made a strategic investment that funded influencer marketing platform Later's $250 million acquisition of affiliate startup Mavely.

Media and advertising incumbents are also snapping up creator startups. An example is advertising giant Publicis Groupe's recent acquisitions of BR Media Group, an influencer marketing agency, and Captiv8, an influencer marketing platform for managing campaigns. Creech also pointed to traditional media companies buying up creator startups, like Fox's acquisition of Red Seat Ventures, a digital media company behind conservative streaming shows and podcasts (including several from former Fox News stars).

"Traditional companies realize the creator economy is an important category," Creech said. "They need to have this DNA, they need to have these capabilities in-house, so they're looking to acquire them."

A recent data point that backs that up: Creator-driven platforms will overtake traditional media companies in ad revenue this year, according to a recent report from WPP Media, an arm of the ad giant WPP.

M&A is heating up

"We track every single creator economy acquisition," Creech said, adding the firm uses SEC filings, PitchBook data, press releases, and other public sources to gather its report on creator economy M&A.

Across the creator economy landscape, here's where deals are being made so far in 2025, according to Quartermast's analysis:

• Software companies, such as influencer marketing platforms and content creation tools, account for about a quarter of the deals so far in 2025 (26.9%). Deals in this category include Later acquiring Mavely and Publicis acquiring Captiv8. Quartermast's report counts 14 deals in this category between January and June.
• Media properties, which Quartermast defines in its report as "digital publishers, short-form video studios, and creator media companies," were the second largest category (19.2%). The report lists 10 media deals, including Wonder acquiring Tastemade and Whalar Group acquiring The Business of Creativity.
• Talent management firms continue to be a space for consolidation, making up 13.5% of deals in the first half. Shine Talent Group announced its acquisition of Spark Talent in January, and firms like The Outloud Group and Fixated have made multiple acquisitions so far this year.
• Influencer marketing agencies are also cutting deals as consolidation runs through the industry, making up 13.5% of first-half M&A. Publicis is another buyer here. It acquired BR Media Group, an influencer marketing agency based in Brazil.
• Audio companies, such as podcasting and music startups, made up 9.6% of deals. Creech listed Alex Cooper's Unwell Media as an example. It announced two acquisitions at the start of the year. Quartermast also included Epidemic Sound's acquisition of music recognition startup Song Sleuth in this category.

Meanwhile, other categories made up a smaller portion of the pie, such as gaming (3.8%), commerce (3.8%), and a generalized "other" (9.6%).

What the rest of 2025 holds for the creator economy

What's in store for the second half of 2025?

Creech, whose firm has brokered two M&A deals so far in 2025, predicts that the creator economy could see more than 100 deals by the end of the year.

Categories that Creech said could ramp up include creator services, talent management firms, and influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing has continued to be a busy sector for M&A for the last few years, which have been freckled with deals on both the agency and platform side.

Publicis, for instance, has already announced two influencer marketing acquisitions in 2025 and acquired Influential for $500 million last year. The French company told shareholders in February that it anticipated "investing €800 million to €900 million" in acquisitions (roughly $930 million to $1.04 billion).

"That might not all be creator economy, but I think other influencer agencies or software will be part of that," Creech said about Publicis' potential deals through the end of the year.

Creech also expects to see more international deals in the second half of the year. While 40% of acquisition targets in the first half of 2024 were international, that shrank to 21% for the first half of 2025.

• Scale AI laid off 14% of its workforce, or 200 employees, on Wednesday.
• Scale interim CEO Jason Droege said it created "too many layers" and is unprofitable.
• The startup remains well-funded and plans to hire in higher-growth areas, it says.

Scale AI interim CEO Jason Droege sent an email to staff saying that it conducted major layoffs because it overhired for its GenAI unit.

Scale AI reduced its 1,400-person workforce by 14% on Wednesday in cuts that affected 200 employees in its generative AI division, which helps Big Tech clients like Google and Meta improve their AI chatbots.

Scale AI ramped up capacity "too quickly over the past year" on GenAI, leaving other divisions, like its public sector units, "under-resourced," Droege wrote in the email, which was viewed by Business Insider.

"While that felt like the right decision at the time, it's clear this approach created inefficiencies and redundancies," Droege wrote. "We created too many layers, excessive bureaucracy, and unhelpful confusion about the team's mission."

The email also confirmed that Scale AI is not profitable, saying that the startup has an ongoing "drive towards profitability." As part of that drive, Scale AI will decline GenAI projects that are low revenue drivers or have low growth potential, Droege's email says.

After publication, Scale AI spokesperson Joe Osborne disputed that Droege said the startup is unprofitable. When asked to elaborate, Osborne declined.

Droege cited market shifts for the layoffs, writing that "shifts in market demand also required us to re-examine our plans and refine our approach."

Droege's email says that as part of the restructuring, Scale AI will streamline its GenAI division from 16 "pods" down to five key areas and merge various teams into a single Demand Generation team.

Meta's blockbuster $24.3 billion investment in Scale and hiring of its former CEO Alexandr Wang led to major disruptions to the startup's Big Tech client base, which competes with Meta on AI. Google, xAI, and others abruptly halted projects with Scale in the wake of the investment.

Scale AI previously told BI that it remains well-funded and plans to hire hundreds more staff in different areas.

"We're streamlining our data business to help us move faster and deliver even better data solutions to our GenAI customers," Osborne, the Scale AI spokesperson, said. "We also plan to make significant investments and hiring across our enterprise and government AI businesses."

• The 8th Circuit blocked the FTC's "click-to-cancel" rule over claims of procedural issues.
• The rule would have made it as easy for a consumer to cancel a subscription as it was to sign up.
• While the provision is blocked, there are ongoing state and congressional efforts to ease subscription traps.

Click-to-cancel is canceled.

Americans were just days away from accessing an easy exit route from so-called subscription traps: On July 14, the Federal Trade Commission's rule to make subscriptions as easy to cancel as they were to sign up, commonly known as "click-to-cancel," was set to go into effect.

The 8th Circuit threw a wrench in those plans in a July 8 ruling that blocked the FTC's click-to-cancel provisions. The court said that the commission failed to follow proper procedure when soliciting feedback on its proposal.

"While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices," the ruling said, "the procedural deficiencies of the Commission's rulemaking process are fatal here."

Neale Mahoney, an economics professor at Stanford University, told Business Insider that the most direct impact of the 8th Circuit's ruling is that "it's just going to waste people's time rather than being able to cancel easily."

"They're going to have to block out time during work and sit on hold, or they're going to have to navigate frustrating cancellation flows on company websites," Mahoney said. "And that I think people have difficult everyday lives, and this just adds to the annoyances of people being able to make the decisions they want as consumers."

Companies have become increasingly adept at holding consumers in subscription plans using "negative options," which interpret a consumer's silence as an agreement to continue purchasing a product, rather than requiring customers to actively agree to recurring charges. This is why you might find yourself looking at your credit card bill one month, trying to decipher a list of charges you don't remember signing up for.

While the FTC has had a rule in place regulating negative options for decades, the click-to-cancel provision was the most recent amendment to change the way subscriptions operate.

Lina Khan, the FTC's commissioner under former President Joe Biden who led the subscription rule, pushed back on the 8th Circuit's claims. She said in a post on X that the rulemaking was a "process that took 3+ years and required reviewing 16k comments & giving industry a chance to present their views at an FTC hearing."

For consumers, the ruling means spending more time and money navigating the subscription cancellation bureaucracy. The impacts on the economy are broader — Mahoney said that since subscription traps lock people into products and make it hard to switch, they'll decrease competition.

"We know that when markets are less competitive, then firms have less incentive to lower their prices, they have less incentive to improve quality," Mahoney said. "So I fundamentally see this as, it's going to be annoying, it's going to waste people's time, but more broadly, it's going to lessen the forces of competition and lead to higher prices and lower quality in subscription markets."

The FTC declined to comment on the 8th Circuit's ruling.

Where subscriptions go from here

The 8th Circuit's block doesn't necessarily mean that click-to-cancel is gone. The FTC could choose to appeal the ruling; Erin Witte, director of consumer protection at the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America, told BI that she was surprised to see "how vigorously" President Donald Trump's FTC defended the rule.

Trump's FTC filed a brief in March supporting the negative option and click-to-cancel rule, writing that consumers "face unnecessary obstacles from sellers who force them to endure multiple phone calls, long hold times, and countless automated menus. Studies show that most Americans pay hundreds annually for unwanted subscriptions."

FTC's commissioner Mark Meador took a different tone last week when he wrote in a post on X following the 8th Circuit's ruling: "The FTC's click-to-cancel rule, which would have made it much easier for consumers to get rid of unwanted online subscriptions, isn't going into effect for one reason: the Biden FTC cut corners and didn't follow the law. Process matters."

This suggests that the FTC likely won't appeal the ruling, Witte said — but there are existing state regulations and congressional efforts to ease the subscription cancellation process. John Breyault, vice president of public policy for telecommunications and fraud at the National Consumers League, referenced California's click-to-cancel rule that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law last year, requiring businesses in the state to make subscriptions as easy to cancel as they were to opt into.

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz and Republican Sen. John Kennedy also introduced the Unsubscribe Act on July 10. The act would require companies to be more transparent about their subscription models and make them easy to cancel. It would also require companies to periodically notify consumers of their subscription and how they can cancel it.

What subscription rules mean for businesses

Subscriptions are advantageous to businesses because they can rely on that recurring revenue, but making them easy to cancel "seems like a pretty low bar," said Teresa Murray, who oversees consumer issues at the nonprofit Public Interest Research Group.

"If you're a company, why would you want to have customers who don't want to be your customers? Why would you want to take money from people who are making a good-faith effort to cancel? That just doesn't seem to be a good business model," Murray said.

She added, however, that consumers should also be held responsible for ensuring they comply with their signed-up terms, such as setting calendar reminders to cancel free trials and keeping copies of email confirmations detailing the subscription agreement.

Breyault said that even with the 8th Circuit's block, some companies may have already started rethinking their subscription models — but it's unlikely anything will change wide scale absent a federal regulation.

"I think what you'll see is that companies will start looking at how they're marketing these subscriptions, how easy or difficult it is for consumers to cancel them," Breyault said. "And I think that some of them may take action voluntarily to reform how they do this, but without the rule in place, companies that profit off of offering them deceptively are likely to continue to do so in a way that harms consumers."

• Goldman Sachs reported strong second-quarter revenue on Wednesday.
• One especially strong area was IB advisory, where revenue was up 71% year-over-year.
• CEO David Solomon told shareholders he was bullish about dealmaking and AI.

For David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, the last few years haven't always been smooth sailing.

Since he took over the bank about seven years ago, he's faced a volley of challenges: Questions over his leadership, an unsuccessful consumer banking push, and a post-COVID dealmaking downturn that never really thawed.

Through it all, he's pushed ahead with his vision for a leaner and more efficient bank that could provide a return for investors in any environment — rain or shine.

On Wednesday, he appeared to have gotten his wish. The bank posted strong results across its business lines, including 71% jumps in M&A advice, even as overall deal volumes slumped.

Solomon's optimism was evident as he spoke on a conference call about the bank's plans to become even more efficient while continuing to grow returns for investors. He said the bank has grown the stock dividend by 400% since he took over in 2018, including a recent increase of 33%. When asked whether that would continue, he sounded optimistic.

"I do think given what's going on with the capital stack and the capital regime and given the way we're executing on our strategy, which is allowing the firm to grow, there is room for us to continue to drive that dividend higher," he said.

Here are four key areas that Solomon was eager to tout for shareholders.

Big deals are back

M&A activity is still down from last year, but large deals are making a comeback, which benefits Goldman. The bank's advisory revenue jumped 71% year-over-year to $1.17 billion. Overall investment banking fees rose 26% from a year ago.

Solomon used the conference call to tout a string of deal wins, including the bank's work on Salesforce's $8 billion purchase of Informatica and 11 stock listings the bank managed for clients like Circle, Chime, and eToro.

"Though uncertainty could persist in some pockets, particularly in industries highly sensitive to trade policy, we are optimistic on the overall investment banking outlook," Solomon said.

Focus on efficiency

Efficiency has been a driving theme of Solomon's tenure, including plans to eliminate duplicative roles and move people to lower-cost centers like Dallas and Salt Lake City.

On Tuesday, Solomon said the bank is taking its efficiency efforts to the next level with the rollout of an artificial intelligence tool called Devin.

The tool, created in conjunction with Cognition Labs, is geared at helping its software engineers work faster and more efficiently, he said.

"Operating efficiently is one of our key strategic objectives, and these efforts will allow us to continue to enhance the client experience while improving productivity," he said.

Regulatory changes

Solomon sounded upbeat on the regulatory environment under President Donald Trump and said optimism over looser oversight is already boosting the firm's dealmaking prospects.

When talking about the bump in M&A advice, he said one reason is regulatory.

"There's a confidence level on the part of CEOs that significant scaled industry consolidation is possible," he said, adding, "And so people are very engaged in that across a range of industries. Scale continues to be incredibly important to businesses broadly."

"We are encouraged by recent statements from regulators that a holistic review of the regulatory and capital regime for the financial services industry is warranted," he added.

Uncertainty

Investors don't love uncertainty — but Goldman certainly benefits from it. Recent uncertainty rattles investors and financial sponsors — but who do they call when they feel the jitters? The banker.

On Wednesday, the bank posted its best trading result ever, with equities revenues of $4.3 billion for the second quarter (up 36% year over year) and revenue from fixed income, currencies, and commodities of almost $3.5 billion (up 9% over last year).

This quarter, clients forged ahead with deals and repositioned their portfolios, some actually spurred by the volatility, Solomon said. "Our global client franchise has never been stronger," he said, "and I'm proud of how we've helped our clients navigate periods of heightened uncertainty."

• I'm a mom of four boys and run my owns business.
• At a work event, a pregnant woman asked me how I juggled everything, and I lied.
• That moment changed my career.

We were at an event for working moms — I bribed my four boys to be there with me, but to everyone else, my pristine children were in attendance out of the sheer goodness of their hearts. The team of women I managed at the time always gushed at my boys' tiny vintage loafers, the color-coded outfits, and can-do helper attitude. And I let them. I let them think we lived a Christmas card life.

So when a pregnant young woman asked me how I did it all, I already knew how to answer.

I got this question a lot, and I was fairly certain all successful mothers have been asked the same thing. I knew this to be true because at the time, all you had to do was pick up a magazine or scroll to find a perfectly polished family Instagram post, and BAM, you'd be hit with a curated line or two about "finding balance."

I lied to her

I fed this woman the same line, told her a story, and quite literally waved my hands fleetingly as if running a household of four young boys and managing a traveling spouse while working full time was no big deal. The fancy title, red soles on my heels, and matching J.Crew cashmere for my kids were my shield. It seemed to be working well.

But that night, I went home and looked around my house.

Were my kids happy? I assumed so. But I wasn't sure. I never asked them. My husband and I high-fived for a brief moment before both returning to our computers. We had important things to do. A makeshift meal simmered on the stove behind me. I watched my oldest play baseball, striving for perfection at every pitch, emotional and angry when it didn't go his way. I watched my second get lost in the shuffle. I watched my third grader struggle to read a simple "Cat in the Hat." And my youngest, glued to a screen (it was Elmo, so I justified it).

I shook my head in disbelief, realizing that I had an opportunity to help that young mother. To tell her the truth. I had the opportunity to help another woman, and I chose not to. Shame on me.

As I looked at my kids that night, I knew I had to do it differently.

I didn't know how to help my family

But the truth was, I didn't know what to do next. I didn't know how to help my family, be a good and present mom, and build a career I loved. Not to mention have a minute to eat protein, lift a weight once and a while, and sleep. I wanted to believe I could have it all, but I didn't even know where to start.

But if my job, as their mother, was to teach them important things, then I had to teach myself first. So, I did. I took instinctual action. I left the fancy job and dug deep into who I was and what this world needed from me. I vowed to do it differently — not to help others from high on the perfect mountain top, but to help others by being real and honest, down in the valley with them.

That stranger changed my life

Looking back, that moment not only changed my career but also my parenting. Something clicked. I'm the only one they've got who can show them how it's done. I don't want them walking into the world believing that a mother, a wife, or a business partner should be frantic and tired, always striving to meet someone's expectations. When they look at women, I want them to see their beauty, power, confidence, and joy.

That woman will never know that she changed my life. Six years later, I would be running a business rooted in helping high performers find their own versions of success. Every day, in every habit, I work to be a better human so I can be a better mother.

My four boys are along for the ride. They know every time I get the gig and every time I don't. They help me prep for speeches while I help them with spelling tests. We run through my P&L while studying geometry. If we want them to work hard for their dreams, we have to do it for ourselves first. And my husband, he's still here, playing a key role, as we grow alongside each other. On the outside, we are in the busiest season of our lives. On the inside, we have never been happier as a family.

Now, when I'm asked, "How do you do it all?" I lead with the truth, which usually leads to a story, which leads to more humanness.