• Kevin Hartz, an early Uber angel investor, directed his VC firm A Star Capital to take Waymos only.
• Hartz told BI that he believes Waymo is the "least expensive option."
• A former investor at A Star roughly estimated spending about $10K on Waymos in the past year.

Kevin Hartz, an early Uber angel investor and cofounder of Eventbrite, directed his San Francisco-based venture capital firm, A Star Capital, to only take Waymo robotaxis in the city because he believes they provide the best value.

"Waymo is now required in SF as it is always substantially lower price and often faster," Hartz wrote in an email to his firm of 10 employees on January 16, which was shared on X.

The VC head wrote that a ride in an Uber "Green," the sustainable ride option offered on the platform, was $50 to his destination in San Francisco, whereas a ride back with a Waymo, which only operates Jaguar I-PACE electric vehicles, was $19.

Hartz told Business Insider over the phone that his email was indeed a serious mandate given that employees get their rideshare costs comped by the firm.

"Waymo is simply a better value," he said, adding that he believes "it's the safest and the fastest when you think about its ability to calculate the most efficient route."

Employees can substitute Waymo with another rideshare platform if wait times are too long and would make firm employees late to the office, Hartz wrote in the email.

Since Waymo began offering rides to the SF public in June, the Alphabet-owned company has chipped away at the rideshare market in the city that was once solely dominated by Uber and Lyft.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said during the third-quarter earnings call in October that the company puts Waymo's market share within its limited operating areas of SF at "high single-digits or low double digits." He did not state an exact figure.

Waymo said in a press release that it averages 150,000 rides per week throughout its operating cities. The robotaxi company does not offer rides on San Francisco's highways or to the airport.

A Waymo spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a study conducted last year by Evercore ISI, comparing 1,000 trips across the Waymo, Uber, and Lyft platforms, analysts found that Waymo's pricing has become increasingly competitive in the fourth quarter of 2024.

The average cost of a Waymo ride for that quarter was $21.91, compared to $21.34 for an UberX — the basic level of service the rideshare platform offers — and $22.36 for a Lyft. Prices for Uber and Lyft exclude tips to drivers, Evercore analysts wrote in their report.

An Uber spokesperson declined to comment. Lyft did not respond to a request for comment.

Hartz said he was an early believer in Uber, participating in the company's series B funding round in 2011 at a $300-million valuation. He declined to disclose a figure.

His experience in Waymo has made him a convert, pointing to the privacy the robotaxi offers.

"It's a quiet place where you can kind of reflect," he said.

Khushi Suri, an ex-investor at A Star, had already embraced Hartz's Waymo-only directive long before he shared his January mandate.

As of February 20, Suri took 547 rides, traveled 1,680 miles, and spent 10,005 minutes inside a Waymo, she told BI. She roughly estimated spending $10,000 on Waymo rides in the past year.

"I remember the way there, I was enchanted," Suri told BI of her first Waymo ride. "But on the ride back, I forgot. It's just so natural."

Suri said she was a heavy Uber user, but "resented it." She said the privacy of a Waymo allows her to feel comfortable when she and her friends are going out and dressed for clubbing.

"With Waymo, there's no walk of shame," she said. "It's very intimate."

Uber and Lyft had originally pursued an in-house autonomous vehicle program before selling them off in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Both rideshare platforms are pursuing partnerships with other autonomous vehicle companies to offer a robotaxi service, leveraging its existing user base.

Uber plans to deepen its existing partnership with the Alphabet-owned company by managing a Waymo fleet in Austin and Atlanta sometime in 2025. The company already offers Waymos in Phoenix.

"I wasn't very happy that Uber had discontinued their self-driving program," Hartz said. "I'm glad that they're partnering there."

• The US imposed sweeping export controls on China around high-end chips in 2022.
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said China revenue-percentage was double what it is now pre-export controls.
• The CEO told CNBC "it's hard to tell" if export controls are effective regarding innovation.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is unsure if export controls against China are effective national security measures for the US amid the artificial intelligence race. However, they've certainly hurt the chipmaker's business abroad.

"It's hard to tell whether export control is effective," Huang said in a CNBC interview on Wednesday. The CEO was responding to a question about whether the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek and its latest model showed there are workarounds against the US-imposed sanctions on semiconductors.

"Our percentage revenues in China before export controls was twice as high as it is now," the CEO said, adding that competition from China remains stiff with companies like Huawei and that software will continue to innovate.

"I think that ultimately, software finds a way. Maybe that's the easiest way of thinking about it," he said. "Whether you're developing software for a supercomputer, or software for a personal computer, or software for a phone, or software for a game console — you ultimately make that software work on whatever system that you're targeting and you create great software."

Since the US implemented export controls on semiconductors in 2022 — and tightened those restrictions in 2023 — Nvidia's revenue from China has taken a significant hit.

For the fiscal year ending in January 2023, Nvidia's China business made up 21% of the company's total revenue. For the same fiscal year ending in January 2025, revenue from China made up about 13% of Nvidia's overall revenue.

An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment.

Despite the export restrictions and a brief shock to the chipmaker's stock after DeepSeek unveiled its R1 reasoning model, Nvidia reported another strong quarter on Wednesday, growing total revenue to $39.3 billion — 78% year-over-year increase from $22.1 billion.

Nvidia saw a short sell-off following the DeepSeek release in January. In a single day, it erased nearly $600 billion of its market cap, putting the company's valuation at about $2.4 trillion.

The company has since recovered its market-cap loss, currently standing at a $3.22 trillion valuation.

• "Tesla Takedown" protests have happened in cities around the country in opposition to Elon Musk's DOGE work.
• Protesters are calling for Tesla owners to sell their stock and cars. Some owners have seen their vehicles vandalized.
• Tesla's stock price taken a hit this month and some shareholders told BI they want to sell their shares.

Criticism of Elon Musk has spilled out from the virtual walls of social networks and into the streets.

Demonstrators have gathered in cities around the US in recent days and weeks to participate in "Tesla Takedown" protests of varying sizes. Meanwhile, some Tesla owners have said they have faced insults or vandalism amid the Musk criticism.

Participants of the protests have called for a boycott of the EV giant in response to Musk's involvement with the Trump administration and DOGE's efforts to decrease the size of the federal workforce.

The "Tesla Takedown" effort started on BlueSky, a competitor to Musk's X platform, and now has a dedicated website. The site calls for Tesla owners to sell their vehicles and stock in an effort to "stop Musk now."

The website's organizer, "Bill & Ted" actor and filmmaker Alex Winter, wrote in a RollingStone op-ed that demonstrations have happened at over 100 Tesla showrooms and other locations.

Tesla owner and shareholder David Abrams told Business Insider he's heard about multiple protests but wasn't aware of the "takedown" effort specifically. Abrams said he added "Anti Elon Tesla Club" and "I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy" stickers to his car window, and is hoping that's enough to keep it from getting vandalized.

"I absolutely want to sell my car and my shares," Abrams said, adding that he's waiting for the stock price to go up and would have sold his car already if it made financial sense.

While boycotts aren't always effective at materially impacting a company's bottom line, Wedbush analyst and Tesla bull Dan Ives wrote in a Monday note that Musk's role in DOGE had a "visible perceived downside impact" on the company's stock. Tesla's share price has dropped this week after figures showed a 45% year-over-year drop in Tesla sales in Europe last month amid Musk's vocal support of Germany's far-right AfD party.

Musk addressed some of the protests while speaking at CPAC last week, calling them "fake rallies" with "hardly any people" and saying the demonstrations didn't have "popular support."

Here's a closer look at some of the protests and anti-Tesla vandalism attempts that have taken place in recent weeks in the US.

Demonstrators gathered in Seattle on Saturday to protest against Musk and Tesla

Protesters gathered at various entrances to the University Village shopping mall in Seattle, as well as outside the Tesla showroom at the mall. Some of the signs called to "boycott Tesla" and "defund Musk."

Protesters rallied in front of a Tesla dealership in Fort Lauderdale

Demonstrators gathered in a line on Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale in front of the Tesla dealership on Saturday to protest Musk and his work with DOGE. Over 200 people gathered outside of the dealership, local publication Sun Sentinel reported on February 22.

Multiple protests happened in San Francisco

The above image shows protesters gathered on February 17 outside Tesla's Van Ness location in San Francisco. Demonstrators chanted "No hate. No fear. Immigrants are welcome here."

Other protests have appeared outside Tesla showrooms on several occasions recently, some of which clipped posters to the glass doors.

Some of the protests have included stints with cardboard cutouts of Musk

A demonstration outside a Tesla dealership in Virginia on February 25 included an elevated cardboard cutout of Uncle Sam burning in a Cybertruck. Next to the cutout, a woman held a sign with the words "Nobody elected Elon!"

Protesters gathered outside a Tesla dealership in New Jersey

@hollowayryan2025 🚨 They don’t want you to see this. 🚨 We protested outside Tesla Cherry Hill because we’re DONE letting billionaires like Elon Musk and Donald Trump buy our democracy. Musk is pushing Trump’s agenda while crushing workers’ rights and platforming extremists. And we’re supposed to just take it? NOPE. 👀 Comment “🛑” if you’re over it. Share this to keep the momentum going. #ProtestTesla #NoToElon #NoToTrump #BanTheBillionaires #Indivisible #WorkersOverWealth #RejectTheRight #TakeBackDemocracy ♬ original sound - HollowayRyan2025

Rebecca Holloway, who posted the video, told BI that "people are fed up with the unchecked power of the ultra-wealthy" and are responding in their own way.

"The Tesla Takedown movement is about holding powerful people accountable — whether it's Elon Musk normalizing extremism or billionaires using their influence to shape our economy and politics to benefit themselves," Holloway, who posted the video, told BI.

Efforts to convince people to sell their Teslas were also seen in New York

A "sell your car" leaflet with a photograph of Musk's widely criticized gesture during a January 20th event celebrating Trump's election was spotted in Brooklyn.

Demonstrators also gathered in the Meatpacking neighborhood of New York City, and close to 300 demonstrators showed up outside the city at a Mount Kisko Tesla showroom to protest, News 12 Westchester reported.

An anti-Tesla ad made its way to a bus stop in London

London Guerrilla Ad-fare: #Tesla the #Swasticar ... from 0 to 1939 in just 3 seconds #Musk pic.twitter.com/y96FiQ5g1Z

— Peter Speetjens (@PeterBeirut) February 24, 2025

An ad at a London bus stop went viral on social media for displaying Musk in a Tesla with the caption "goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds."

Musk has responded to criticism of his January 20th gesture with jokes on X.

Some of the posters at protests refer to fascism, with posters at the Seattle protest labeled, "Make Nazis afraid again." Others say "Your Tesla paid for fascism."

Some Tesla owners have been subject to insults

Earlier today a group of people (elderly, at that) exited a BMW and as they walked past my Tesla, among other comments, called it a "Swastika car".

I also have seen several recent posts in San Diego of Teslas being randomly vandalized.

Since it appears fewer people than ideal… pic.twitter.com/lHHp6LDAYv

— Jed Bratt (@Jed_Bratt) February 26, 2025

"Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself how you can live with so much hate in your heart," Jed Bratt said in the post on X addressing Musk's critics.

At a Manhattan protest in Tesla's Meatpacking neighborhood, protesters shouted insults at Tesla vehicles, The Verge reported on Tuesday.

Some owners say their Teslas have been vandalized

One Tesla owner said he came back from a birthday dinner to writing on his car with an expletive aimed at Musk. While he was able to remove the writing, he said it still made him feel "violated" and want to get another truck.

@WholeMarsBlog @SawyerMerritt @Guylouis @elonmusk @Tesla_AI @realMeetKevin @Teslaconomics @Gfilche came back from my birthday dinner to this surprise. Sucks so bad when this happens to your truck even though it’s just a Permanent marker. Fortunately it came out with alcohol but… pic.twitter.com/GBpFsZKE0L

— DrT (@ariteymoorian) February 25, 2025

It's not the first time Teslas have been vandalized. In June, a 35-second video showing a fleet of Cybertrucks spray painted with expletives about Musk went viral.

• Meta approved a plan that could allow executives to earn a bonus of up to 200% of their base pay.
• The move came the same month as Meta's efforts to reduce its workforce by about 4,000 employees.
• Meta also trimmed the value of annual equity refreshers some staff receive by about 10%, sources told BI.

Meta approved a plan that could give company executives a bonus of up to 200% of their base salary, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing submitted on Thursday.

The company said in the filing that the bonus plan would provide "variable cash incentives" designed to "motivate its executive officers to focus on company priorities and to reward them for company results and achievements."

The plan would allow for an increase in the bonus package from 75% to 200% of base pay, the company said.

The bonus boost wouldn't apply to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. This isn't an uncommon practice since chief executive compensation can be structured differently, focusing more on stock options.

Meta also recently trimmed the value of annual equity refreshers some staffers receive by about 10%, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke with BI but asked not to be identified as they weren't authorized to speak with the media.

The reduction in the total amount of restricted stock units means some employees would receive about 10% less in the stock refreshers each quarter this year that vest over a four-year period.

That means, for example, if an employee previously received $220,000 in stock refreshers to vest over four years, they would now get about $200,000 worth of RSUs over the same period. Equity refreshers often form a significant part of workers' remuneration alongside salary and bonuses.

A Meta spokesperson didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the SEC filing, the company wrote that its compensation, nominating, and governance committee approved the change after analyzing market data for executive compensation. They determined the target total cash compensation for their executives "was at or below the 15th percentile of the target total cash compensation of executives holding similar positions."

The new target puts the compensation in the 50th percentile, according to the filing.

The approval came amid another round of job cuts at Meta this month. The company said it aimed to eliminate about 5% of its workforce, which would amount to nearly 4,000 employees.

Zuckerberg said the cuts were meant to target "low performers" as the company looked to streamline its operations in "an intense year" and invest heavily in artificial intelligence.

In an internal memo announcing the cuts last month, Zuckerberg said Meta would backfill these roles this year. Meta is now ramping up hiring for machine-learning engineers and expediting recruiting in February and March.

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

• Elon Musk said in a recent panel that humanoid robots will unlock "quasi-infinite" services.
• The Tesla CEO said he wasn't sure if money would have much value by then.
• Tesla is starting production of its Optimus robots in 2025, according to Musk.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a recent interview with Dubai's World Governments Summit that the economic returns of artificial intelligence investments will be seen in humanoid robots.

Speaking to the UAE's AI minister, Omar Sultan Al Olama, in a video call on Thursday, Musk said that humanoid robots and deep intelligence will unlock the global economy's potential by providing "quasi-infinite products and services."

Musk was responding to Al Olama's question on where he believes the "biggest economic returns" of AI models will come from.

"You can produce any product, provide any service," Musk said of humanoid robots. "There's really no limit to the economy at that point. You can make anything."

The billionaire said that money may not carry much value by then.

"Will money even be meaningful? I don't know; it might not be," he said, adding that robots could create a "universal high-income situation" because anyone will have the ability to make as many goods and services as they want.

Musk's bullishness on humanoid robots comes as no surprise. The CEO said during an earnings call on January 29 that Tesla will begin production of "several thousand" Optimus robots by the end of 2025.

"It's one of those things where I think, long term, Optimus has the potential to be north of $10 trillion in revenue," he said during the call. "Like, it's really bananas."

Musk has been known to overshoot timelines for delivery dates, including on the Cybercab robotaxis. The CEO once said that Tesla would have a million robotaxis on the road by 2020. Then in 2022, he pushed that timeline to 2023.

While Musk said in the company's most recent earnings call that Tesla will begin providing autonomous ride-hailing services in Austin by June, the Cybercab, Tesla's dedicated robotaxi car, won't begin volume production until 2026, according to its earnings presentation.

Tesla isn't the only player betting on humanoid robots.

Meta is creating a product group focused on robots and announced on Friday that former Cruise CEO Marc Whitten would spearhead the team, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider.

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

• Rapper Jay-Z was named in a civil lawsuit against Sean "Diddy" Combs in December.
• The lawsuit accused both entertainment moguls of sexually assaulting a minor.
• The attorney for the Jane Doe plaintiff who filed the suit dropped the case on Friday.

A lawsuit that tangled rapper Jay-Z into a legal battle concerning sexual assault allegations against Sean 'Diddy' Combs was dropped on Friday, court documents showed.

In a notice filed Friday in Manhattan federal court, attorneys representing the "Jane Doe" plaintiff who brought forward the lawsuit against the two music moguls said the case was "voluntarily dismissed with prejudice."

Tony Buzbee, a high-profile lawyer representing the plaintiff, declined to comment.

Combs' legal team told Business Insider in an email that the "complete dismissal" of the lawsuit was "yet another confirmation that these lawsuits are built on falsehoods, not facts."

In their statement, Combs' attorneys denied that their client ever committed sexual assault or was involved in human trafficking.

Dropping the lawsuit with prejudice means the plaintiff will not be allowed to bring the same case back to court, Neama Rahmani, a personal injury attorney and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, told BI.

Dozens of legal cases have been brought against Combs, one of the most influential figures in hip-hop history, containing allegations of sexual assault, physical abuse, or sex trafficking.

On September 16, a federal grand jury indicted Combs on felony charges, including sex trafficking and racketeering. Combs, who has denied the charges, has remained at a detention center in Brooklyn since his arrest that month.

A separate lawsuit, unrelated to the grand jury indictment, was filed in October by a Jane Doe. The lawsuit accused Combs of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl at a house party. Attorneys wrote in the suit that the plaintiff sought damages to be determined at a trial.

The initial filing contained references to "another male celebrity, Celebrity A," who was also accused, in the lawsuit, of engaging in the sexual assault of a minor.

In December, attorneys representing the plaintiff revealed in an amended complaint that that celebrity was Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter.

"The pleading speaks for itself," Buzbee said in a statement at the time. "This is a very serious matter that will be litigated in court."

Carter denied the allegations and, in a personal statement posted on social media, said Buzbee was blackmailing him into settling out of court.

"These allegations are so heinous in nature that I implore you to file a criminal complaint, not a civil one!! Whomever would commit such a crime against a minor should be locked away, would you not agree? These alleged victims would deserve real justice if that were the case," the statement said.

The state of New York passed the Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Act in 2022, which gives a lookback window for people to file civil claims regarding an incident that may have happened more than nine years ago until February 28, 2025.

Given that the lookback window is closing and the Jane Doe's attorneys filed to dismiss the lawsuit with prejudice, Rahmani said the case is "pretty much dead in the water."

In a legal filing from January, Carter sought to dismiss the lawsuit and place monetary sanctions against Buzbee. That filing said the Jane Doe's case contained "substantial inaccuracies," including an NBC News interview with the Jane Doe's father, who appeared to contradict some of the details outlined in the civil lawsuit.

The lawsuit, for example, said that the 13-year-old was picked up from the after-party where she was assaulted. Her father said he had no memory of picking up his young daughter from the event.

Rahmani said the plaintiff's attorneys' move to dismiss the lawsuit involving Carter will likely have no impact on the dozens of ongoing legal battles against Combs

"I don't think it's gonna move the needle," he said.

• Suchir Balaji, an ex-OpenAI researcher who raised concerns about his employer, died in November.
• His parents have demanded a thorough investigation into his death.
• An autopsy report said authorities found a gun registered in Balaji's name.

San Francisco authorities said a case involving the death of a former OpenAI researcher in November is "closed," citing, among other evidence, a self-inflicted gunshot wound from a pistol registered to the victim, documents shared with Business Insider show.

Suchir Balaji, an ex-OpenAI employee who last year raised concerns about copyright issues regarding his former employer, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26. He was 26 years old.

Local authorities at the time ruled Balaji's cause of death as an apparent suicide with no evidence of foul play.

Balaji's mother, Poornima Ramarao, previously told BI that the family would seek a private autopsy. Attorneys representing Balaji's parents also filed a petition against the city and county of San Francisco in January, demanding the immediate release of public records related to their son's case.

In a joint letter to the family attorneys dated February 14 from the San Francisco Police Department and the medical examiner's office, authorities wrote that Balaji was found lying alone in his bathroom with no signs of a "forced entry to the single door leading into the residence."

In the police's investigative findings, the letter said, a firearm was found underneath Balaji's leg.

"The pistol found at the scene was purchased and registered to Mr. Balaji in January 2024," the letter said.

Gun residue particles were found on Balaji's right and left hand, the autopsy report reads. The report said Balaji sustained "a severe firearm injury."

"There were no signs of unrelated injuries or bruising to Mr. Balaji," authorities wrote.

Authorities said in the letter to the Balaji family's attorneys that they had seen the preliminary report from the independent autopsy the family sought and that the findings were "consistent" with the medical examiner's office's findings, including the entrance and trajectory of the bullet.

"The SFPD found no evidence or information to establish that Mr. Balaji died of means other than a suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head," the letter from SFPD and medical examiner's office said. "If you learn of any new information or evidence, please provide it to SFPD. SFPD considers this case closed and will only reopen the criminal investigation if there is a basis for a chargeable offense and the statute of limitations has not expired."

Kevin Rooney, an attorney representing Balaji's parents, told BI the family had received the letter and the autopsy report. He did not have further comment.

Balaji was an OpenAI researcher for four years, helping the AI startup gather data for its GPT-4 model. A former colleague told BI in an interview that Balaji was instrumental in developing ChatGPT's early predecessor.

"He was one of the true geniuses at OpenAI," Tarun Gogineni, a research scientist at OpenAI, said.

In October, just a few months after Balaji left the company, The New York Times published an interview in which Balaji accused his former employer of violating copyright law.

OpenAI is involved in several other legal battles concerning copyright violations. On November 18, Balaji was named in the Times' lawsuit as a custodian who could provide supporting legal documents for the case.

An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Balaji's mother, Ramarao, previously told BI she wasn't satisfied with the police investigation. To raise awareness about her son's case, she organized public vigils and made multiple media appearances.

Ramarao wrote in a post on X on Friday afternoon that she wanted a "transparent investigation."

A spokesperson for the medical examiner's office did not address Ramarao's social media post when responding to BI's request for comment. An SFPD spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

• Blue Origin CEO David Limp explained why the rocket company was laying off about 10% of workers.
• He said rapid growth led to bureaucracy; now it's thinning management layers and cutting engineers.
• The Jeff Bezos-owned company is joining tech's flattening trend.

Another Jeff Bezos-founded company wants fewer middle managers.

Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, said on Thursday that it was laying off about 10% of its workers and thinning out management layers.

"We grew and hired incredibly fast in the last few years, and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed," CEO David Limp told employees in an email obtained by Business Insider.

"Sadly, this resulted in eliminating some positions in engineering, R&D, and program/project management and thinning out our layers of management," Limp added.

Blue Origin, founded by Bezos in 2000, has been playing catch-up with Elon Musk's SpaceX. On January 16, Blue Origin launched New Glenn, its first orbital rocket.

SpaceX developed its first orbital rocket, the Falcon 9 v1.0, in 2005. The rocket made its debut launch in 2010.

In December, Bezos told the journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook Summit that he thought Blue Origin was "not a very good business yet."

"I think it's going to be the best business that I have ever been involved in, but it's going to take a while," Bezos added.

The move by Limp, who worked for more than a decade at Amazon, echoes Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's desire to have fewer middle managers — part of a wider tech flattening trend.

Jassy told Amazon employees in September that he wanted to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by the end of March, which he argued would "decrease bureaucracy" and improve the company's speed.

Meta has made similar moves. In 2023, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company didn't want a structure "that's just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work."

Read Blue Origin CEO David Limp's memo:

From: David Limp

Date: Thursday, February 13, 2025, at 7:10 a.m.

Subject: Difficult Org News — Changes To Our Team

Folks,

We just finished this morning's meeting, during which I gave an update on our organization. As I mentioned, we have made the tough decision to reduce our workforce by about 10%. The impact this has is not lost on any of us—we are saying goodbye to our friends and colleagues who have helped us build Blue into what it is today.

I know this is a lot to absorb, and I would like to explain how we got here. Over the last few months, as a leadership team, we have worked together to define our 2025 Annual Operating Plan and growth strategy. Our primary focus in 2025 and beyond is to scale our manufacturing output and launch cadence with speed, decisiveness, and efficiency for our customers. We grew and hired incredibly fast in the last few years, and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed. It also became clear that the makeup of our organization must change to ensure our roles are best aligned with executing these priorities. Sadly, this resulted in eliminating some positions in engineering, R&D, and program/project management and thinning out our layers of management.

While I acknowledge that these messages are better delivered personally and individually, the reach of these changes across multiple locations and teams makes that difficult. We will notify impacted employees immediately via their work and personal email addresses of their status with Blue. We will also email employees who are not impacted to confirm their employment with Blue. Both emails will arrive by 7:30 A.M. PT/10:30 A.M. ET today. While our sites are open, I encourage you to work from home for the rest of the day if your role allows you to do so.

We are doing what we can to support everyone impacted. The email notifications will provide support details, which include severance packages, COBRA coverage, career support services, and access to counseling through our Employee Assistance Program.

Let me add that I am extremely confident in the enormous opportunities in front of us and have never been more optimistic about our mission. We will continue to invest, invent, and hire hundreds of positions in areas that will help us achieve our goals and best serve our customers. We will be a stronger, faster, and more customer-focused company that consistently meets and exceeds our commitments. This year alone, we will land on the Moon, deliver a record number of incredible engines, and fly New Glenn and New Shepard on a regular cadence.

To our colleagues who are impacted today, thank you so much for your hard work and passion for our mission. I hope we all support one another with grace and empathy while upholding our leadership principles during this time.

Dave

• Thousands of federal workers have been fired across multiple federal agencies.
• The layoffs target probationary workers, who typically have been in a role for less than two years.
• It comes as the Trump administration targets spending in the federal government.

Mass layoffs swept through federal agencies on this week, as the Trump administration's efforts to shrink the federal workforce led to thousands of workers being terminated.

Agencies from the Office of Personnel Management to the US Forest Service notified probationary employees on Thursday of their termination, multiple sources inside each of those agencies told Business Insider.

Workers classified as "probationary" typically have less than two years of experience in their roles. The layoffs came one day after a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration's buyout offer could proceed.

David Rice, a probationary employee at the Department of Energy, received his termination notice — reviewed by BI — on Thursday night. He was hired in September after serving in the Army for 25 years, and he said that had he not checked his email before he was locked out of the system, he never would have known.

"I would have tried to log in on Tuesday morning and found out that I can't log in," Rice said. "I never would even been notified because no one's called me. No one's told me anything other than just sending me an email after hours."

Here's a look at which agencies have been affected.

Forest Service

About 3,400 probationary workers at Forest Service were fired on Thursday, Dennis Lapcewich, the vice president of the Forest Service Council of the National Federation of Federal Employees union, told BI.

The USFS employs about 35,000 people.

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

"It's like watching the enemy advance and seeing that the next town over just got razed," a National Park Service employee told BI.

A USFS employee who has worked in the federal government for six years told BI that he's most worried about the long-term effects of the cuts on those who rely on the forest service's resources.

"I worry about myself personally, but I'm a public servant. I care about the public. I took an oath to the Constitution," he said. Though he's not a probationary employee and wasn't fired, he said he learned on a group video call on Thursday about the terminations and that some senior leadership in the Washington office would be immediately reassigned.

"These are the next generation of public servants. Obviously, with anything in life, you want to have some type of succession plan. We're missing out on building the succession plan," he told BI.

Office of Personnel Management (OPM)

OPM, which is essentially the US government's HR department and oversees the retirement accounts for about 2.8 million active federal workers, fired dozens of probationary employees on Thursday.

On the call, which took place around 2:40 PM ET, an OPM official announced that affected employees had until 3 PM ET —approximately 20 minutes — to gather their belongings before their access to the office and IT systems would be terminated. BI reviewed a recording of the call.

"Professionalism my ass," one probationary employee who was laid off told BI over text. "Definitely wasn't treated with dignity."

Department of Education and Small Business Administration

Termination notices were also sent to probationary workers at the Department of Education and Small Business Administration on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to letters that were viewed by BI.

A letter sent to one Department of Education employee whose identity was verified by Business Insider said the agency found that the worker did not demonstrate their employment would be "in the public interest."

At least 60 probationary employees with the Department of Education received the letters or received phone calls from management, union officials told BI.

An SBA spokesperson did not immediately respond to request for comment from BI. A representative from the Department of Education declined to comment to BI.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

A probationary employee at the CDC told BI that she and her colleagues spent much of Friday anxiously waiting to hear if they were being fired. At 4:00 p.m. ET that day, she joined a group video call, which BI reviewed an audio recording of. On the call, senior leadership said that around 750 probationary employees would be terminated that day. Employees were not allowed to ask questions.

The speaker said they learned of the terminations this morning and that those impacted would receive their termination notices from the Health and Human Services Department today. Some temporary appointment employees might also be laid off, the speaker said on the call. Senior leadership said they'd received a list of impacted workers and could flag any "errors" to HHS

"If an individual receives those notifications, their access to their government systems here at the agency as well as their badges — they're going to be turned off today once those notices go out," the speaker said on the video call.

As of 15 minutes after the call, neither the employee nor any of the colleagues they spoke to had received a termination notice, and their boss didn't know if they were on the list of impacted workers.

Veterans Affairs

The Department of Veterans Affairs announced the termination of 1,000 employees on Thursday.

The VA press release said that it dismissed "non-bargaining unit probationary employees" who had served two years or less in their appointments, and the agency estimated the terminations would save it more than $98 million per year.

"This was a tough decision, but ultimately it's the right call to better support the Veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors the department exists to serve," VA Secretary Doug Collins said in a statement.

"To be perfectly clear," Collins said, "these moves will not negatively impact VA healthcare, benefits, or beneficiaries. In the coming weeks and months, VA will be announcing plans to put these resources to work helping veterans, their families, caregivers, and survivors."

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau terminated dozens of probationary employees on Tuesday, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The termination notice, reviewed by BI, stated: "The Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge, and skills do not fit the Agency's current needs."

The agency also terminated temporary staff, known as term employees, who are on contracts that are set to last between two and four years, another source told BI.

An analyst on a two-year fellowship that began in June 2023 said she was informed of her firing in an email to her personal email address at around 7 pm on Thursday. By the time she got the termination letter, she'd already been locked out of her work email.

"I was at a party, and I found out through my coworkers first," she said.

The ex-employee's contract was set to end in June of this year, and she was exploring opportunities to stay at the agency. Now, she's most concerned with making sure she has health insurance.

"I have upcoming appointments, and I'm thinking, do I have to reschedule them? Do I have to schedule certain things earlier that aren't recommended by my doctor?" she said.

It's not clear how long terminated employees will be able to keep their health insurance.

The terminations follow CFPB's acting director, Russell Vought, directing all employees at the agency to stop working and obtain written permission to perform any of their duties.

Environmental Protection Agency

The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday said it had laid off roughly 400 federal employees.

"EPA has terminated 388 probationary employees after a thorough review of agency functions in accordance with President Trump's executive orders. EPA has followed standard protocols and procedures, ensuring impacted staff received notification of their status," the agency said in a statement. "President Trump was elected with a mandate to create a more effective and efficient federal government that serves all Americans, and we are doing just that."

The EPA employs roughly 15,000 people, according to its 2024 budget.

'Fork in the Road' offer in action

The mass layoff of probationary staff occurred one day after a federal judge allowed the administration to continue its deferred resignation program.

Known as the "Fork in the Road" offer, more than 2 million employees were given the choice in January to resign in exchange for pay and benefits until the end of September or remain in their roles without guarantee that they will keep their jobs. Over 75,000 employees took the buyout.

Multiple legal challenges have been raised in response to the flurry of executive orders from the Trump administration.

On February 7, a federal judge temporarily blocked the US Agency for International Development from placing 2,200 employees on paid leave. The block is set to end on Friday at midnight.

Lapcewich, the union representative for the US Forest Service, told BI that legal avenues are being explored in response to the latest layoff of probationary workers.

"All I can tell you is that legal issues are being pursued by union lawyers," he said.

Do you work at a federal agency? Share your experience and thoughts with these reporters at [email protected] and [email protected] or via Signal at alicetecotzky.05 and asheffey.97.

• Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the site saw "volatility" in traffic in Q4 due to Google's algorithm change.
• The impact shows how some users still rely on an external search engine to get answers from Reddit.
• Reddit saw 39% user growth between 2023 and 2024.

Reddit's stock dropped more than 15% after hours on Wednesday after the company reported user growth below analyst expectations in its fourth-quarter earnings.

The site averaged 101.7 million daily active unique users in the fourth quarter, a 39% year-over-year increase but below Wall Street analysts' estimates of 103.8 million.

User growth is a critical metric for Reddit because so much of its business relies on advertising. Before the company went public in March, Reddit said in a filing that it generates "substantially all of our revenue from advertising."

Reddit reported $428 million in revenue for the fourth quarter, a 71% year-over-year increase from 2023. About 92% of that fourth-quarter revenue came from advertising. The rest came from Reddit's "other revenue" segment, which includes content licensing deals.

Steve Huffman, Reddit's CEO, said on an earnings call that it's become common for people to use search engines like Google to peruse Reddit. But Huffman said the site saw "volatility" in traffic in the fourth quarter after Google tweaked its search algorithm.

Huffman said he was not worried about the traffic volatility and that it did not impact revenue.

"We feel very good about the pace that we're on from Q1," Huffman said. "We see volatility from Google all the time, as does everybody."

A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent after business hours.

Huffman said during the call that the algorithm change primarily impacted "logged-out users" — people browsing Reddit without an account.

Logged-in user numbers grew 27% in 2024, the company said in its earnings release.

The CEO also said the number of Google search queries that include "Reddit" increased, suggesting more users are seeking answers from the thread-based platform. The company moved away from forcing searchers to download the Reddit app and began showing all public posts, even to logged-out users, Huffman said.

The CEO said the solution to gaining loyal users is building tools such as Reddit Answers, an AI-powered search tool that generates answers based on input from users on the platform.

Reddit has made a number of AI-related investments and partnerships in the past year.

The company announced a content licensing deal with Google and OpenAI, allowing the makers of Gemini and ChatGPT to train their models on Reddit data.

It's unclear how much those deals contributed to Reddit's revenue. Google is paying Reddit $60 million a year for its licensing deal.

Reddit's "other revenue" segment, which includes the licensing deals, contributed $144.7 million in 2024.

Although Reddit's stock has seen fluctuations in the past year, the company's value has significantly climbed since its IPO in March at $46. It's up 32% this year.

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's HQ was shut down on Sunday.
• Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency, wants to eliminate the agency.
• The first director of CFPB told BI that Musk's calls to dismantle the bureau are "totally unethical."

The first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned against eliminating the independent watchdog agency, telling Business Insider that it would strip oversight of financial firms and harm US consumers.

"We'd be back to the wild, wild west for financial services that affect families all over the country in terms of what their terms would be on their credit cards, on their mortgages, and other products. There would be no oversight of that," Richard Cordray, who first led the CFBP when it was established in 2011 after the Great Recession to help prevent another financial crisis, told BI.

"Companies could act in their own interests at the expense of consumers," he added. "It would be as though we were saying to a neighborhood, 'Go ahead and enforce your laws. We will withdraw the police. We will not have any kind of enforcement of the law.'"

On Sunday, the CFPB told its staff that its DC headquarters would be closed this week and that they should work remotely, according to an email from the agency's COO, Adam Martinez, that was seen by BI.

On Monday, the CFPB's new acting director, Russell Vought, told employees in an email seen by BI to "stand down from performing any work task."

The CFPB in flux

The CFPB has had a shake-up in leadership since Trump took office.

While Martinez has served as the bureau's associate director and chief operating officer since February 2023, on February 1, Trump fired Rohit Chopra, the former CFPB director under President Joe Biden. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took on the role of acting director of the agency until Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, took over the role on February 7.

Vought, CFBP's new acting director, was an author of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, a conservative road map for the first 180 days of the Trump administration that outlines policy suggestions ranging from dismantling the Department of Homeland Security to scaling back USAID operations — some of which have already been implemented by the Trump White House.

Project 2025's playbook calls for abolishing the CFPB, calling it an unconstitutional, "highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency," instead recommending the bureau's consumer protection duties be rolled up under the Federal Trade Commission.

While the FTC has a Bureau of Consumer Protection, which has some overlap with the duties of the CFPB, the CFPB is the only federal bureau completely dedicated to protecting consumers from anticompetitive, deceptive, or unfair business practices in the financial services industry.

In a Saturday post on X, Vought wrote that the "spigot" for the agency's funding "is now being turned off."

Elon Musk calls for the end of CFPB

Vought's move comes after Elon Musk, the head of DOGE, repeatedly called to eliminate the agency as part of his broader effort to slash federal spending. "RIP CFPB," he said on X.

The CFPB's oversight of the financial industry has included a lawsuit filed against Capital One over allegations that it illegally charged customers over $2 billion in interest, the return of money to student-loan borrowers from private lender Navient, and rules to cap overdraft fees and remove medical debt from credit reports.

Cordray said Musk's targeting of CFPB could be a conflict of interest, considering X has plans to provide financial services on the platform.

Musk has shared his ambitions to turn his social media company into an "everything app," including a digital wallet and payment system. On January 28, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced a partnership with Visa that will allow peer-to-peer money transfers with what the company calls XMoney, set to debut later this year.

"It's a direct conflict of interest and totally unethical for him to be making judgments about how the CFPB should exist that are not legislated by Congress and that might serve his own financial interests at the expense of the public across the country," Corday said.

Representatives for the White House, Musk, and the CFPB did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Congress established the CFPB under the Dodd-Frank Act and gave it the regulatory authority to enforce and expand on existing laws, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Act, meant to protect consumers and guide financial firms.

The agency is funded by the Federal Reserve instead of Congress' appropriations process, which has led to criticism from many lawmakers who say Congress should oversee the CFPB's funding.

"The CFPB was supposed to be bipartisan — in a way nonpartisan and actually independent of politics — and meant to implement good policies to protect American consumers," Antoinette Schoar, a finance professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, told BI. Schoar was a CFPB's inaugural advisory board member, lending her expertise in consumer finance to help develop some of the bureau's policies.

Musk vaguely acknowledged the CFPB's contributions on Thursday, saying that "they did above zero good things, but still need to go."

Escalating attacks on the bureau

The X owner's desire to shut down CFPB also reflects President Donald Trump's opposition to the consumer watchdog agency. During his first term, Trump took steps to reduce the CFPB's influence and appointed Mick Mulvaney as its acting director.

Trump "spent four years in the Oval Office and obviously the CFPB shifted direction during that time pretty dramatically, was much more timid, and not aggressive on behalf of consumers," Cordray said. "But they did enforce the law."

Under the new Trump administration, things are different: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently ordered the CFPB to halt most of its work and pause all public communications, an email obtained by Business Insider showed.

The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees in the CFPB, on Sunday filed suit against Vought, urging a judge to block DOGE officials from accessing employee information and to block Vought's directives to "cease all supervision and examination activity" and "cease all stakeholder engagement."

Cordray said that Musk has no authority to "delete" the consumer watchdog agency, saying that "Congress is the lawmaking authority in the country" and that Musk "is not the Congress."

Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts said in a post on X on Saturday that Musk's role was a "blatant conflict of interest."

"Elon wants the CFPB gone so tech billionaires can profit from apps, like X, that offer bank-like services but don't follow financial laws that keep people's money safe," the senator wrote. "Musk wants to use the government to put more in his pockets."

The White House recently designated Musk as an unpaid "special government employee," which means the billionaire isn't subject to the standard ethics and conflict-of-interest rules that official government employees typically encounter.

One of the laws introduced as part of the Ethics Reform Act of 1989 stipulates that federal workers, including an SGE, are prohibited from making government decisions that impact their financial interests.

However, the law has an exception that says the official appointing the SGE can grant a waiver if the worker's services are deemed in the public interest and outweigh the potential conflict.

• Longevity guru Bryan Johnson maintains a carefully curated diet regimen for his age-reversing quest.
• His Super Bowl LIX spread included foods that promote gut health and are fiber-rich.
• He told Business Insider he's also maintaining clean air quality.

Bryan Johnson, the longevity guru who has spent millions of dollars on a journey to reverse his biological age, had a Super Bowl LIX spread that emphasized plant-based foods instead of Buffalo wings or pizza.

On Sunday, the biotech entrepreneur solicited pictures of people's Super Bowl snacks on X, unsurprisingly getting responses that would disappoint many a health fanatic.

"I know this is not going to be pretty…but it must be known," he wrote. He has repeatedly emphasized the pitfalls of fast food, pizza, and french fries.

Johnson told Business Insider in an email that his Super Bowl spread included "some light veggies, hummus, fermented foods, berries, nuts, and seeds."

The list includes plant-based foods that promote gut health and have high antioxidant content.

"The air quality clean and monitored and the water is tested," Johnson added.

Johnson, 47, maintains a carefully curated diet regimen, consuming exactly 1,977 calories daily as part of his aggressive anti-aging quest.

However, pizza and Buffalo wings — staple food items on Super Bowl Sundays — were not part of his spread.

"I no longer have arousal from eating junk food," Johnson previously told Business Insider. "People think that a cheat day for me, like the reward would be eating pizza and donuts. It makes me nauseous to even think about."

The National Chicken Council said in a January press release that Americans are projected to consume 1.47 billion chicken wings on Sunday. Johnson is not one of them.

One user responding to Johnson's X post shared a picture of slices of squared pizza.

"I am praying for you," the health guru responded.

Another user shared a picture of a fridge filled with Johnson's Blueprint meal prep kits. Johnson approved, responding with a fire emoji.

On top of Johnson's strict diet, however, are millions of dollars worth of longevity treatments and medical diagnostics, including a device that records his nighttime erections.

He also supplements his diet with dozens of vitamins, manganese, and zinc and does daily exercise.

Johnson has previously shared that he spends $2 million annually on the rigorous antiaging health program that some aging and longevity experts who spoke to BI have challenged.

• Sophia Tung rode in one of Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxi in Shenzhen, China.
• She told BI that the safety driver had to disengage the autonomous driving system during her ride.
• Hailing an Apollo Go was also a challenge, she said.

Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxi nearly crashed during a ride causing a safety driver to disengage the autonomous driving system, a rider told Business Insider.

Sophia Tung, a San Francisco-based engineer who documents her robotaxi experiences on YouTube, visited Shenzhen, China, in December to take a ride in Baidu's robotaxi.

Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant, is one of the leaders of the robotaxi race in China as the country makes an aggressive push toward autonomy and electrification. Another top competitor is WeRide.

The company currently operates in 11 cities, including Wuhan, Shenzhen, and Beijing. It's unclear which cities have vehicles that are fully autonomous or supervised by a human safety driver.

Apollo Go also hasn't publicly disclosed its robotaxi fleet size. Baidu's CEO Robin Li said in an earnings call in August that the company has more than 400 robotaxis operating in Wuhan, in which most of the vehicles are unmanned and operating without "human safety officers."

Similar to the patchwork of state laws regulating autonomous vehicles in the US, companies like Baidu have to comply with different local government laws.

There's little publicly available data concerning the safety of Baidu's Apollo Go. The company said in a press release from May that "each autonomous vehicle undergoes more than a thousand rigorous safety tests before hitting the road, including hardware and software inspections, human-computer interaction tests, and compliance checks."

In July, an incident involving a pedestrian who was hit by an Apollo Go went viral. Social media users took the side of the autonomous vehicle, saying that the pedestrian was crossing when the light was green, The Associated Press reported.

Tung told BI that her nearly 9-mile ride was "very rough," giving her car sickness, and that she feared her experience would end in a crash as the autonomous vehicle merged into a lane that had another merging vehicle.

She published a YouTube video in January about her ride in an Apollo Go, titling it a "nightmare experience."

"It was pretty scary actually," she told BI. "I honestly thought it was going to crash."

A Baidu spokesperson declined to provide a comment on Tung's experience for this story.

Hailing an Apollo Go

Hailing an Apollo Go robotaxi was a hurdle in itself, Tung said.

The engineer said the Apollo Go app required her to submit a form of government identification — in this case, her passport — before she could book a ride. Other Chinese rideshare services such as Didi also require a form of identification.

That's different from US rideshare companies like Alphabet's Waymo, Uber, and Lyft, which don't require an ID to use its services.

Booking the actual ride was another challenge, she said.

Unlike most US rideshare services, in which users can set their pick-up location, Apollo Go riders are limited to designated pick up-points within a given service area.

One of the pick-up points was at a taxi stand in a luxury mall near the Shenzhen Talent Park area, Tung said. She waited several hours before giving up and trying to hail a ride the next day.

When attempting to book a robotaxi, Tung said the Apollo Go app provided inaccurate or useless data points.

For example, the app will tell a user how many people are in front of you, waiting for an Apollo Go, but the app won't say whether those people got picked up, Tung said.

The app also provided inaccurate estimated wait times, she said.

"It gives you an estimated time for sure," Tung said. "But the time is not correct. When the countdown hit zero, it reset back to 25 minutes."

The next day, Tung said she spent nearly four hours trying to hail an Apollo Go.

"I was so relieved when I finally got a car, because literally it has been just an absolute nightmare trying to just even get one," she said.

A close call

When a robotaxi pulled up to Tung's location, she was immediately surprised to see a human safety driver inside the vehicle.

Waymo used safety drivers when they were testing their robotaxis to a limited group before rolling out the service to the public. The safety drivers were present in case the autonomous system needed to be disengaged.

"At least in Shenzhen, there are videos of people taking Apollo Go with no safety driver, which I thought would be the case," Tung said.

Tung said the ride began with a "super abrupt start" as the car accelerated hard and made back-and-forth merges between multiple lanes.

Tung compared the Apollo Go to an earlier version of Tesla's Full-Self Driving Supervised system, which requires constant supervision of a human driver.

Throughout the ride, Tung documented in her video how the autonomous driver braked hard or switched between lanes without indicating a lane change.

During those moments, Tung said the human driver did not talk or react to abrupt movements.

That changed when the Apollo Go later made an attempt to merge two lanes over.

Tung said the driver disengaged the autonomous driving when the Apollo Go and another vehicle tried to merge into the same lane.

Tung's video shows the safety driver grabbing the wheel and manually driving the car some distance before re-engaging the autonomous driving system.

"I'm pretty sure if the safety driver hadn't actually grabbed the steering wheel and stopped it, it would have gotten run into by the car that was oncoming," Tung said.

In another incident minutes later, the safety driver could be seen in Tung's video reaching for the steering wheel, appearing to prepare to disengage the autonomous driver to avoid a bus that was stopped on the outermost right lane.

During the ride, Tung's video also showed the Apollo Go misidentifying objects and road markings in its environment at times.

For example, pedestrians walking a crosswalk were displayed on the monitor as cars. In another moment, the robotaxi would detect a hazard cone in the road when there weren't any objects, Tung said in the video.

Room for improvement

Tung told BI that the overall Apollo Go user experience, from the app to the ride, could be improved.

While the car itself was comfortable enough, Tung said the driving experience was rough.

"I think Apollo's largest thing is the actual control of the car," she said. "It's just not great."

Tung noted that this was her only ride in an Apollo Go and that she would be curious to try the vehicle in other service areas such as Wuhan.

"I will not write off completely just yet," she said.

• Nike aired its first ad in the Super Bowl in 27 years on Sunday.
• The brand's return to the big game comes as its new CEO looks to reverse a sales slump.
• It has shaken up its marketing division and wants to create cultural moments to elevate its brands.

Nike made a surprise return as a Super Bowl advertiser for the first time in 27 years.

JPMorgan analysts stole Nike's thunder by sharing the news in a research note published Thursday following a meeting with the brand's CEO and CFO.

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

The ad featured a who's who of women in sports, including track and field star Sha'Carri Richardson and WNBA player Caitlin Clark, over narration by Grammy-Award-winning rapper Doechii.

"You can't be demanding. You can't be relentless. You can't put yourself first," Doechii can be heard saying. "So — put yourself first."

Nike said in a statement that the company "has a starkly different perspective, offering a call to athletes across the globe: Do it anyway — and redefine the expectations of sport along the way."

The marketing push comes at a high-stakes moment for Nike, which has been struggling to revive lagging sales. And it's an expensive bet: Some Super Bowl advertisers have spent more than $8 million to secure 30 seconds of airtime.

Nike's new CEO, Elliott Hill, detailed a turnaround plan in December. Hill rejoined Nike in October after a four-year hiatus. He was formerly the company's president of marketplace and consumer.

Since taking the helm, Hill has called out Nike for certain missteps, such as offering too many discounts and shifting attention away from its relationships with wholesalers.

The company is also trying to make iconic sneaker brands like Jordans and Air Force 1s hot again by pulling back on supply to boost demand.

Nike's revenue slid 8% year over year to $12.4 billion during the three months ending November 30, the company said in December. Nike shares are down roughly 30% over the last 12 months.

Nike has also shaken up its marketing department in recent months to elevate its brand storytelling, as Adweek previously reported. Several company veterans returned to or were elevated in the marketing organization over the last year, including former vice president Nicole Hubbard Graham who was named marketing chief.

Nike seems to be banking on big cultural moments to get its brand back on track.

The company debuted a new ad timed around this month's Grammy Awards that highlighted the legacy of its 40-year-old Jordan Brand.

JPMorgan analysts met with Hill and Nike financial chief Matthew Friend at an event on Thursday morning. In a research note recapping the meet and greet, the analysts said Nike execs cited "excitement" around Hubbard's return and the brand's representation at "large consumer moments," including the Jordan campaign and a planned Super Bowl ad.

Hill told investors in December that Nike had to "get back to putting sport at the center of everything that we do." He said the company would invest in "big, bold brand marketing efforts" and important sports moments.

• USAID will cut nearly all staff, reducing its workforce from over 10,000 employees to 290.
• Trump and Musk have criticized USAID for being wasteful and supporting liberal causes.
• USAID spent $32.5 billion in 2024, focusing on health and humanitarian aid.

Federal workers are suing to stop the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, which faces cuts to nearly all of its over 10,000 staff by Friday.

The cuts would reduce employment numbers to 294, Randy Chester, vice president of the American Foreign Service Association at USAID, said in a press conference on Thursday announcing a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and members of his administration that seeks injunctive relief to halt the cuts.

"The rest of the service will be furloughed and put on administrative leave, pending, but we assume there will be a reduction," he said.

One USAID employee who asked to remain anonymous told Business Insider that "the whole region of sub-Saharan Africa will be left with 12 staff members — or less."

The Trump administration's move to gut the foreign aid agency will also halt the contracts administered abroad by USAID.

On Tuesday evening, USAID announced it would put nearly all its staff on administrative leave beginning on Friday at 11:59 p.m., with exceptions to people with "exceptional circumstances," said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. USAID said it would arrange return travel with the State Department within 30 days.

"We're not trying to be disruptive to people's personal lives, we're not being punitive here, but this is the only way we've been able to get cooperation from USAID," Rubio, USAID's acting director, said Thursday from the Dominican Republic.

This comes after Donald Trump and Elon Musk both attacked the agency for being wasteful and backing liberal causes, with Musk calling it a "criminal organization" on X.

The American Federation of Government Employees, a union that represents about 800,000 federal workers, filed a lawsuit with the American Foreign Service Association on Thursday, naming President Donald Trump, Rubio, Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, the State Department, USAID,  and the Treasury Department as defendants.

Attorneys representing the plaintiffs called the move by the Trump administration a constitutional and moral crisis.

The White House did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

USAID oversees programs in 65 countries focusing on medical assistance, food and nutrition, HIV treatment, and aid to people in conflict zones. Data reveals that USAID spent nearly $32.5 billion in aid in fiscal year 2024, with the most amount of aid sent to Ukraine, Jordan, and Ethiopia. Half of the funding went to either humanitarian or health and population purposes, while another $7 billion was spent on governance.

Foreign spending accounts for less than 1% of the US federal budget, though the US is the world's largest humanitarian aid provider.

Many leading Democrats and legal analysts have argued that shuttering USAID is illegal, as an independent agency can only be closed by an act of Congress.

Five days into Trump's term, the US froze billions in humanitarian aid intended for health, education, and anti-corruption purposes, among other purposes.

Trump has recently suggested his administration may try to shutter the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Justice.

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

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

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

The effects won't be even across the board.

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

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

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

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

US carmakers pivot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The US has a patchwork of state laws with which autonomous vehicle companies must comply.
• The Trump administration has signaled interest in developing a federal framework for AVs.
• Former DOT inspector general Eric Soskin told BI there are a few ideas the government could explore.

As US companies continue their full-speed race to deploy fully autonomous vehicles, the federal government appears to be trailing behind in regulation.

Companies like Waymo, Tesla, and others heavily invested in robotaxis must navigate a patchwork of state laws, each with its own rules regarding self-driving cars.

For example, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Colorado doesn't require AVs to have liability insurance. In California, it does.

AV companies argue that these inconsistent rules present a hurdle to the mass adoption of self-driving cars in the US.

It's why autonomous vehicles are one area where companies turn to the federal government for guidance, Eric Soskin, a former inspector general for the Department of Transportation, told Business Insider.

"Manufacturers in most industries, especially innovators, often say, 'Hey, I don't like regulation very much. I want my space to be minimally regulated.'" Soskin said. "But in the autonomous vehicle space, now we're seeing manufacturers saying, 'You know what? It would be great if the federal government would take on a bigger role here in the United States.'"

Soskin was the DOT's inspector general for four years after he was nominated by President Donald Trump in 2020. He was among 18 IGs who were fired in January as the second Trump administration underwent rapid cuts in federal spending under the direction of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Soskin declined to comment on his termination.

The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association — a consortium of companies exploring AVs, including Alphabet's Waymo and Volkswagen — recently released a proposal for a federal policy framework in an effort to "accelerate the deployment and commercialization of autonomous vehicle technology."

The framework provides recommendations for safety, transparency, accountability, and leadership advancement, the group said.

The Trump administration also has been said to be looking into easing rules around autonomous vehicles, including reporting requirements by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Bloomberg reported.

In establishing federal rules on self-driving cars, Soskin notes that the DOT could enact some actions while others may require the hand of Congress or the President.

Setting aside those limits, Soskin provided a few approaches and areas the government could address when enacting a federal framework.

Performance-based standards

Soskin said regulating autonomous vehicle companies by setting "performance-based standards" that they reach for rather than implementing specific rules that manufacturers must follow can be a balanced way to encourage innovation while safely rolling out the technology.

Those standards can touch upon issues states and consumers are concerned about, such as how well vehicles can detect other objects in their environment and, generally, how well AVs know what's happening on the road.

An example is how car companies can choose to submit their vehicles to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to get official safety ratings. Those ratings are then used to advertise to consumers the safety of the vehicles.

"Performance-based standards, or hitting some mark, is going to be a lot more effective in encouraging different routes to getting a solution," he said.

Cybersecurity and privacy

Autonomous vehicle companies often tout how self-driving cars are safer than cars driven by humans. But for the government to understand the extent to which that is true, companies will need to share a lot of data, Soskin said — and so far, manufacturers and drivers are reluctant to do so.

This is where a set of cybersecurity and privacy standards will be important to assure consumers of the safe handling of their data. The former inspector general said the government could then establish a requirement or incentives for manufacturers to share ride data and crash data.

System redundancies

The government may also want to set a standard for failure modes or system redundancies — in other words, safety features that will kick in if the autonomous driver fails. For example, Volvo says its self-driving trucks have two brake systems so that a secondary brake can stop the truck if the primary system fails.

"What's supposed to happen when something goes wrong?" he said. "Or when something does go wrong, how do we ensure something else takes over?"

Insurance

Another area that will need to be addressed is liability and insurance.

"The adoption of autonomous vehicles, I think, is going to require that those involved are not held liable in ways that are disproportional to human-operated vehicles," Soskin said.

In a liability trial, juries may have to determine a compensatory amount when a human is at fault in a collision.

"If X is that number for human-caused liability and a hundred X is that number for autonomous vehicle liability, that would be a huge disincentive to autonomy," Soskin said. "So thinking about how we set a liability system that permits autonomy to move forward is important and potentially important at the federal level."

• A medical transport jet crashed in Philadelphia shortly after takeoff on Friday.
• Six people were on board the Learjet plane when it went down, authorities said.
• The NTSB said investigators have recovered the plane's cockpit voice recorder.

A medical transport jet crashed on Friday in northeast Philadelphia.

The Learjet 55 had six people on board when it went down shortly after departing Northeast Philadelphia Airport, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Flight operator Jet Rescue Air Ambulance said in a statement that four crew members and two passengers — a pediatric patient and her mother — were on the flight.

It said there were no survivors.

Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on X that all six people on board were Mexican.

They have been identified as Capt. Alan Alejandro Montoya Perales, copilot Josue de Jesus Juarez Juarez, Dr. Raul Meza Arredondo, paramedic Rodrigo Lopez Padilla, patient Valentina Guzman Murillo, and her mother Lizeth Murillo Ozuna, CBS News reported, citing a spokesperson for Jet Rescue Air Ambulance.

In a press briefing on Saturday, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said that at least one other person died as a result of the crash. The person was in a car when the plane went down, she said.

Video footage of the incident circulating on social media seems to show the plane hurtling toward the ground followed by a large explosion.

Data from Flightradar24 shows the aircraft, which was headed to Springfield-Branson National Airport in Missouri, had been in service for 43 years. It shows the plane took off shortly after 6 p.m. local time and crashed in less than a minute, "less than three miles from the end of the runway."

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have since launched an investigation into the incident.

The NTSB said on Sunday that investigators had recovered the plane's cockpit voice recorder and its enhanced ground proximity warning system, which may also contain flight data.

The recorder was found at the impact site "at a depth of 8 feet," it said.

NTSB investigator Ralph Hicks said during a press conference on Saturday that the aircraft arrived at the Northeast Philadelphia Airport around 2:15 p.m. on Friday and was on the ground for a few hours before departing at around 6:06 p.m.

The aircraft climbed to about 1,500 feet above the ground before the crash.

Officials are classifying the incident as an "accident," Jennifer Homendy, NTSB chairman, said at the press conference.

The NTSB said a preliminary report would likely come within 30 days, but a final report detailing a probable cause could take between 12 and 24 months.

In a post on Truth Social following the crash, President Donald Trump said: "So sad to see the plane go down in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania."

"More innocent souls lost. Our people are totally engaged. First Responders are already being given credit for doing a great job. More to follow. God Bless you all."

The incident comes days after an American Airlines flight crashed into a military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, killing 67 people.

In a video statement posted to X on Saturday, Transport Secretary Sean Duffy said it had been a "heartwrenching week in aviation" and promised more announcements on the crashes.

"I want Americans to feel confident in American air travel," he said.

• A jet operated by American Airlines collided with a Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, DC.
• Investigators on Thursday said they recovered the black boxes from the passenger jet.
• Black boxes can provide key data from moments before the impact.

Investigators recovered the recording devices, or black boxes, from one of the aircraft involved in Wednesday night's midair crash near the Reagan Washington National Airport.

A spokesperson for the National Transportation Safety Board, which is overseeing the probe into the crash, told Business Insider in an email that the "cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder" from the Bombardier CRJ700 airplane operated by American Airlines was recovered.

"The recorders are at the NTSB labs for evaluation," the spokesperson said.

Black boxes, despite their name, are actually bright orange. They provide key data that can help investigators determine what happened in the moments before the impact.

The cockpit voice recorder "records radio transmissions and sounds in the cockpit, such as the pilot's voices and engine noises," according to the NTSB. "The other, the Flight Data Recorder (FDR), monitors parameters such as altitude, airspeed and heading."

A flight data recorder can hold up to 24 hours of information while a cockpit voice recorder stores up to the last two hours of audio, NTSB wrote.

The black boxes themselves are stored inside reinforced shells that can withstand temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 30 minutes and be submerged in 20,000 feet of water, BI previously reported.

A transmitter attached to the flight data recorder allows investigators to find the black boxes, but finding an aircraft that is submerged in a large body of water can still be difficult.

When the Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed into the Java Sea in October 2018, killing 189 people on the flight, black box data recovered by investigators revealed how the two pilots struggled to maintain control of the plane as the aircraft was repeatedly sent in a nose-dive position.

The District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department said in an X post on Thursday evening that authorities will conduct "additional searches to locate aircraft components, to support the investigation, and begin operations to salvage the aircraft."

"Overnight, boats will remain on scene for security and surface searches from local, state, and federal regional partners," the agency said.

The collision between a passenger jet and a military helicopter occurred in one of the most congested airspaces in the US.

Sixty-seven people — including four crew members and 60 passengers aboard the CRJ700 and three Black Hawk crew members — were presumed dead.

For years, aviation experts have warned of the risks of midair collisions amid air traffic controller staffing shortages and an increasingly congested airspace.

• A passenger jet collided with a Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan Washington National Airport.
• Four crew members and 60 passengers were aboard the jet, and three were aboard the helicopter.
• President Donald Trump said there were no survivors.

Sixty-seven people are presumed dead after an American Airlines flight crashed into a military helicopter Wednesday night during the jet's final approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

President Donald Trump confirmed there had been no survivors, calling the crash "a dark and excruciating night" for the country.

American Eagle Flight 5342, operated by PSA Airlines and flying from Wichita, Kansas, was on approach to land at the airport when it struck a UH-60 Black Hawk, officials said. Several federal agencies, including the National Transportation Safety Board, are investigating the crash.

A NTSB spokesperson told Business Insider in an email on Thursday evening that the "cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder," known as black boxes, were recovered from the Bombardier CRJ700 passenger jet.

"The recorders are at the NTSB labs for evaluation," the spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, crews are still searching the waters as part of the investigation and recovery efforts, while boats remain on the scene for security and search operations, according to the DC Fire and EMS Department.

"Our divers have searched all areas that are accessible," a statement from the department read Thursday night. On Friday, the statement said, "divers will work with NTSB to conduct additional searches to locate aircraft components, to support the investigation, and begin operations to salvage the aircraft.

Three Army crewmembers were aboard the Black Hawk from Bravo Company, 12th Aviation Battalion at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, whose identities will be withheld until their next of kin have been notified, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Thursday morning video.

"It was a fairly experienced crew, and that was doing a required annual night evaluation," he said in the video. "They did have night vision goggles."

He said investigators deployed Wednesday night and that the 12th Aviation Battalion has an "operational pause on contingency missions" for 48 hours.

"We anticipate that the investigation will quickly be able to determine whether the aircraft was in the quarter at the right altitude at the time of the incident."

At the Thursday morning press conference, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that both aircraft had been flying in a "standard pattern" that was not unusual, with no breakdown in communication between them.

"The helicopter was aware that there was a plane in the area," he said.

Duffy added that the fuselage of the American Airlines plane was inverted in the water.

"It's been located in three different sections," he said. "It's in about waist-deep water."

A livestream taken from the Kennedy Center by EarthCam showed an explosion as the helicopter collided with the passenger plane.

A spokesperson for US Figure Skating, the country's governing body for the sport, told BI that "several members" of the organization were aboard the flight.

"These athletes, coaches, and family members were returning home from the National Development Camp held in conjunction with the US Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas," the spokesperson said.

She added: "We are devastated by this unspeakable tragedy and hold the victims' families closely in our hearts."

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said Russian nationals were aboard the flight, according to the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.

At a press conference Thursday morning, Trump said he didn't know what caused the crash before laying out a series of diversity initiatives within the FAA that he suggested without evidence could have contributed to the crash.

In a video posted to the American Airlines website, CEO Robert Isom said the airline was "cooperating fully" with the NTSB's investigation of the crash.

"Anything we can do, we are doing, and right now, that means focusing on taking care of all passengers and crew involved, as well as their families," he said.

Isom said that the plane's pilot had six years of experience with PSA, and the first officer had almost two years.

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was closed to all aircraft after the crash and reopened around 11 a.m.

United Airlines and Southwest Airlines said they were allowing passengers booked on flights to the airport to change their travel plans without fees.

Anthony Brickhouse, an aviation expert, told BI that the crash was tragic but that he was not surprised it happened.

"We've had so many close calls with runway incursions and commercial flights almost colliding, and when something repeats over and over again, we call that a trend," he said.

"We've been trending in this direction for two or three years now, and unfortunately, tonight, it happened," he added.

Several near misses have taken place in recent years, in cities such as Austin and New York.

But this marks the first major commercial plane crash in the US since 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed over Buffalo, New York, killing 49 on board and one person on the ground.

Kathleen Bangs, an aviation safety analyst and former pilot, told BI that she used to fly into Reagan Washington National Airport as a regional airline pilot and that the "extremely busy" airport had challenging flying conditions, including two runways of 5,000 feet and 5,200 feet, and proximity to water.

"The conversation now will be what safety steps need to be modified to ensure there's never another similar collision in the nation's capital," she said.

This was the third major plane crash worldwide since December.

An Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer plane crashed last month, with some blaming Russian air defenses. Thirty-eight people died.

A few days later, a Boeing 737 operated by the South Korean carrier Jeju Air crashed in South Korea, killing 179 people. Two people survived.