• Daniel Post Senning and Lizzie Post are etiquette experts with the Emily Post Institute.
• Their book shares eight simple steps you can take every day to build strong relationships at work.
• "Acknowledgement is probably one of the most impactful daily practices that we can engage with in so many ways," said Post.

Navigating your professional relationships with your coworkers can be complicated.

Did you accidentally say the wrong thing? Overstep a boundary?

The good news is that some of the easiest things you can do to build and sustain solid relationships at work are pretty intuitive, according to Daniel Post Senning and Lizzie Post, etiquette experts with the Emily Post Institute.

"It's remarkable how durable the advice is when you get down to what our expectations are of each other on a very human level," Post Senning told Business Insider.

Their book, "Emily Post's Business Etiquette," went on sale May 20. It includes a list of eight daily office courtesies you can do to build and maintain goodwill with your boss and peers.

Here's the list from the book:

1. Show up ready for the day or your shift.
2. Acknowledge others and greet them with a smile.
3. If you can, make eye contact when speaking with others (for video calls, turn on your camera and face the lens).
4. Use the magic words in all your interactions, both verbal and digital. (The book lists as magic words: Please, thank you, you're welcome, excuse me, I'm sorry)
5. Use shared spaces appropriately, never leaving a mess or taking more than your share.
6. Decline to participate in office gossip.
7. Offer help to others or check in to see how their work is coming along.
8. Say goodbye to colleagues on your way out the door for the day.

These are simple "'gimme' social interactions," as Post Senning calls them.

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

At the end of the day, these small-but-mighty actions are about acknowledging each other, Post said.

"Acknowledgement is probably one of the most impactful daily practices that we can engage with in so many ways," she told BI. "Whether it's looking up and acknowledging your colleagues with a greeting or a goodbye, or it's acknowledging the work that they do and the participation that you see happening around you that facilitates your own work getting done."

"Emily Post's Business Etiquette" Copyright © 2025 by The Emily Post Institute, Inc. Illustrations copyright © 2025 by Eight Hour Day. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

• You've heard of the "compliment sandwich" — softening a critique by bookending it with praise.
• There's a 3-step method you might find more helpful when having a difficult conversation.
• It's similar but takes the compliment sandwich a step further by closing on a suggested action step.

How do you effectively deliver constructive criticism to a colleague at work? Everyone who's ever done it (and anyone who's struggled to) knows it's not an easy conversation to have.

You probably also know, all too well, the makings of the "compliment sandwich," a long-relied-on fallback in cases like these.

It goes something like this: You open with a compliment to ease into the conversation, then segue into the critique you're really there to give, and finally close with another piece of praise to end on a good note.

While a compliment sandwich can be a solid starting framework (though it's not without its critics), a variation on it might offer a more effective way to share constructive feedback.

Daniel Post Senning and Lizzie Post, etiquette experts with the Emily Post Institute, told us about that method. Their book, "Emily Post's Business Etiquette," went on sale May 20.

"Compliment sandwiches work, I understand that idea too: You want to give someone enough positive reinforcement that they can take the negative," said Post Senning. "But let's take one of those positive reinforcements and try to make it as constructive as possible."

One 3-step alternative riffs on elements of the compliment sandwich while advancing it a step further. It's the praise-concern-suggest method.

Before you get into the conversation, give your colleague a heads-up about what kind of talk it's going to be — think of priming them for a difficult conversation.

"This lets someone know, 'Am I about to say yes to a conversation about something I need to take very seriously, something I need to be open-minded about, something really great to share?'" said Post. "Because 'Do you have a minute to talk?' could be about anything."

During the actual conversation, mention why you're bringing up the issue and what your coworker, not just you, stands to gain from the discussion and any resulting solution.

"Don't assume that someone else understands your good intentions, but be willing to state them, be explicit, and say the obvious thing," said Post Senning. "Directly talk about it being for their benefit as well. Make it clear that you care about them, particularly if it's going to be more difficult."

You might say you're raising the concern because you care about the success of a project you're working on together, or about their success at work, or your professional relationship with each other.

Then, you'd start the same way you would with a compliment sandwich: Offer a piece of praise, as some workplace research has indicated that this can be important.

"Don't just start off with the bad; wading into the shallow end first, not diving too deep too quick, gives you a chance to feel someone else out and get a sense of their response or reaction," said Post.

For many people, the hardest step is bringing up the issue at hand. You want to be direct and clear, and remember why you're having the conversation in the first place.

It can be challenging, however, "you have to be willing to raise problems if you want change," said Post Senning.

Where this method differs from the compliment sandwich is its ending. Rather than closing on a compliment, you offer a possible solution or action step to address the issue you just raised.

"The cost of admission to raising an issue where you want change in someone else's behavior is a willingness to participate in the solution in some way," said Post Senning. "They may or may not take it, but just having done enough work to offer some future direction, some willingness to participate, to not just dump a problem on someone's lap, is important."

Lastly, it can help to depersonalize the criticism so it's about the issue, not the person. One way to do this is to say something like, "If the shoe were on the other foot, I would hope that you would feel comfortable talking to me about this."

It's a way of saying, "This isn't about you, this is about what's going on here, the work that we're doing, and I would really hope the same standards would apply to me" if the roles were reversed, said Post Senning.

And, of course, the conversation doesn't necessarily end with your closing suggestion.

"Be ready to listen, be ready to negotiate," said Post Senning. "You might have an idea. It's one thing to listen, but then there's a follow-up step. You also have to be willing to stay flexible and actually hear what you've just been listening to and reformulate your thinking in relation to it in terms of priming yourself mentally on the other side of that equation."

• Airbnb's CEO said he's heard from founders facing a challenging fundraising landscape amid economic uncertainty.
• Brian Chesky said that while a stable economy is needed, there's a "silver lining" to building a business in tough times.
• The Airbnb cofounder said on Michelle Obama's podcast that a tough economy bakes "discipline" into your company culture.

Brian Chesky is no stranger to starting a business in tough economic times.

Chesky cofounded Airbnb in 2007 and built the business during the 2008 financial crisis. In a recent podcast conversation with Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, Chesky said it was challenging to get the business off the ground during a recession, even with some of the advantages and connects he and his founders had that other entrepreneurs might not have.

However, he said there was one "silver lining" to growing the business during tough times, which might resonate with founders facing today's economic uncertainty.

"A lot of great companies have been started in a recession," he said in a Wednesday episode of "IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson."

"And the one, I don't want to say it's a good thing, but what it does is it teaches you a certain type of discipline," he said. "A tough economy teaches you a discipline that gets institutionalized into your culture."

By comparison, a strong economy might give founders more cushioning to "perpetuate bad strategies and be a little less disciplined," Chesky said.

"I think the good news is a lot of great entrepreneurs are incredibly resourceful, and they will find a way to work," the Airbnb cofounder said. "But we absolutely need like a very stable economy."

Chesky said that entrepreneurs he's spoken with recently told him "a lot of fundraising, for all intents and purposes, was kind of on hold."

"A lot of limited partners and investors are just like hunkering down. And what we know about investors, they don't like uncertainty," he said.

He believes investors will "sit this one out until things stabilize."

"And if they don't stabilize, we're going to be in for a very prolonged kind of dry spell for fundraising," he said. "If you did not go to a prestigious school, if you weren't, like, purely a team of technical engineers, if you're not trying to create an AI company, you're just trying to create a business, that will be more difficult."

Airbnb isn't the only successful business to emerge from the Great Recession. Companies like Uber, WhatsApp, Venmo, and Square also started around the time of the 2008 financial crisis.

"It's always a great time to start a business — and some of the most successful businesses are started during recessions," certified financial planner Cary Carbonaro previously told BI. "Adversity is the mother of invention."

• Sam Altman's OpenAI is buying an AI hardware startup from the former Apple design chief Jony Ive.
• Ive's startup, IO, is set to work with OpenAI's research, engineering, and product teams.
• The deal is valued at nearly $6.5 billion.

Sam Altman's OpenAI announced on Wednesday that it's buying a hardware startup called IO from Jony Ive, the former Apple exec who led the design of the iPhone and other iconic products. The deal is valued at nearly $6.5 billion, a spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.

Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom, began working with Altman and OpenAI two years ago before he founded the AI hardware startup one year later with Scott Cannon, Tang Tan, and Evans Hankey. Ive left Apple in 2019 after nearly 30 years at the company.

Now, IO is set to merge with OpenAI to "work more intimately with the research, engineering, and product teams in San Francisco," a press release said.

A video of Altman and Ive posted to OpenAI's social media says the two tech titans are teaming up to create a "family of AI products."

Sitting with Ive in a San Francisco café, Altman says in the video he and Ive started talking two years ago about "what the future of AI and new kinds of computers was going to look like."

Ive, who was instrumental in creating the iMac and iPhone, was formerly Apple's chief design officer and a close collaborator with Steve Jobs, who once called him his "spiritual partner at Apple."

After stepping away from his full-time work at Apple, Ive launched LoveFrom with his fellow designer Marc Newson. The company counted Apple and Airbnb among its early clients. Ive and LoveFrom plan to continue to work closely with OpenAI but remain independent, a company spokesperson said.

Though Ive was known for his minimalist designs at Apple — think the sleekness of the iPhone — he said recently that he's now in his "ornament era." Ive said during a fireside chat earlier this month that his recent design work had been influenced by a wide variety of industrial, graphic, and sound designers.

Altman, who cofounded OpenAI in 2015, has played a critical role in shifting OpenAI from a nonprofit research project into a $300 billion AI giant competing with the likes of Apple and Google.

OpenAI's recent slate of products has focused on AI software, in the form of large language models, reasoning models, image generators, and chatbots.

Altman, however, has previously dabbled in the hardware space.

The OpenAI CEO invested in Humane, a wearable AI pin that was intended to replace smartphones but ultimately floundered after poor reviews and sold its assets to HP.

Altman's cryptocurrency project, World, is building a new verification network for humans with melon-sized devices called Orbs, which take pictures of the human iris. World said the Orb was designed by Ive's first hire at Apple, Thomas Meyerhoffer, who worked closely with the design executive on projects including the iMac.

In 2023, Altman, when asked about artificial intelligence hardware, said he had "no interest in trying to compete with a smartphone."

"What AI enables is so fundamentally new," Altman said at the time. "I think it's well worth the effort of talking and thinking about what we can make now. If the answer turned out to be nothing, I would be a little bit disappointed."

OpenAI said it planned to share more next year about what IO has been working.

• People are increasingly turning to AI assistants at work to record meetings and take notes.
• But how should you use them around coworkers? Do you give a heads up? Stop if someone is opposed?
• Experts from the Emily Post Institute weighed in for us on the emerging etiquette around AI tools.

More and more business meetings have a nonhuman participant: AI.

People are increasingly enlisting AI assistants to sit in on their calls and meetings at work, relying on the technology to record, take notes, and generate summaries or transcripts after the fact.

And while many of the etiquette rules around work are well-established, the best practices around AI in a meeting setting represent a new and evolving Wild West. Do you tell your coworkers you're using AI? Do you boot your tech assistant from the meeting if an attendee is uncomfortable with it?

We asked Daniel Post Senning and Lizzie Post, etiquette experts with the Emily Post Institute, to weigh in on the topic. Their book, "Emily Post's Business Etiquette," which touches on AI in the workplace, goes on sale May 20.

"Any time you record, you want to let someone know," Daniel Post Senning told BI.

"It's just nice to give people a heads-up when something different, unexpected, or that's going to record them is going to be a part of the equation," said Lizzie Post. "Just to give them a heads-up about what they're going to see, what they're going to interact with."

You can also ask if anyone would like a copy of the AI-generated transcript or summary after the call.

"It makes perfect sense that you might say to somebody why that recording is in place and what benefit they might get from it," Post Senning added. "I've learned that if I describe the benefits, all of a sudden they're excited about it and they get the same benefit out of it."

But you should be prepared to stop the recording or other usage of an AI assistant if greeted with pushback from hesitant coworkers.

"If someone says no, they're not comfortable with it, they don't like it, they don't like the whole idea of it, or they just don't like being recorded, be willing to shut it off," he added. If you're not, be prepared for them not to participate in the meeting.

As more people experiment with ChatGPT and other AI tools in their personal lives and at work, the etiquette surrounding their use at work is still developing.

"AI made it into the book, but it's one where the leaps in it and the ways that people are using it are more ubiquitous and different than they were even six months ago," said Post Senning.

"That's an area that's moving very fast right now, and the core advice wouldn't be any different, but I think the space that it would take up in the book and the ways we would talk about it — that would be a likely difference in another edition that came out even six months later or a year later."

Has your or a friend's use of AI led to tension at work or in your friend group? Contact the reporter at [email protected]

• Does Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have a bunker? Not if you ask him.
• He calls the 5,000-square-foot underground structure at his Kauai ranch "a little shelter."
• Here's what we know about Zuckerberg's plans for the bunker-not bunker.

Billionaires are no strangers to extensive real estate portfolios, and many of them are building their own Doomsday bunkers.

Shall we count Mark Zuckerberg among them? If you ask him, no.

The Meta CEO said on a recent episode of the podcast "This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von" that he does "have an underground tunnel" at his ranch on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, though he resisted characterizing it as a bunker.

"There's this whole meme about how people are saying I built this, like, bunker underground. It's like more of underground storage type of situation," Zuckerberg said. "It's sort of a tunnel that just goes to another building."

Zuckerberg's real estate portfolio includes expansive holdings in Hawaii. He began snapping up land there more than a decade ago. He reportedly paid $100 million for roughly 750 acres in 2014 and $53 million for another 600 acres on Kauai's North Shore in 2021.

In December 2023, Wired reported that Zuckerberg was building a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, complete with its own supplies of energy and food, at his Ko'olau Ranch property. The final bill after tallying up building permits and land will be about $270 million, the magazine reported.

Wired reported the Kauai compound would feature two mansions linked by a tunnel that also connects to the shelter, which would have "living space, a mechanical room, and an escape hatch that can be accessed via a ladder," as well as a sturdy metal door filled with concrete.

Brandi Hoffine Barr, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, declined to comment to Wired at the time regarding the size or features of the underground structure.

Local news outlet Hawaii News Now reported in December that it had obtained county planning documents showing an underground "storm shelter" measuring nearly 4,500 square feet on his property, roughly the size of an NBA basketball court.

In a December Bloomberg interview, Zuckerberg equated the bunker to "a basement" or "a little shelter."

"There's just a bunch of storage space and like, I don't know, whatever you want to call it, a hurricane shelter or whatever," he said. "I think it got blown out of proportion as if the whole ranch was some kind of Doomsday bunker, which is just not true."

Zuckerberg posted a video on Instagram in January 2024 poking fun at the discourse surrounding his property, saying, "When your wife catches you in the 'bunker' playing video games." The clip shows Chan walking into a keypad-operated room resembling a home movie theater where Zuckerberg is seen gaming with friends on a massive screen.

Zuckerberg has also posted on Instagram about starting cattle ranching on the property.

"Started raising cattle at Ko'olau Ranch on Kauai, and my goal is to create some of the highest quality beef in the world," he wrote in January 2024. "The cattle are wagyu and angus, and they'll grow up eating macadamia meal and drinking beer that we grow and produce here on the ranch."

The following month, he said that he was "not trying to do this commercially" and was "just trying to create the highest-quality stuff we can." He also explained the reasoning behind the cows' diet of macadamia nuts and beer.

"As a human, what do you think is the thing that basically you just sit and eat a lot? It's like beer and nuts, basically. Nuts, super dense. Beer induces appetite, which I think people are familiar with."

He added that he wanted to feed the cows the "densest, most nutritious" food so they would gain weight and "be the most delicious cows."

In addition to cattle ranching, the land would include "organic ginger and turmeric farms, a nursery dedicated to native plant restoration, and partnering with Kauai's foremost wildlife conservation experts to protect native birds and other endangered or threatened wildlife populations," a spokesperson for Zuckerberg and Chan told Business Insider.

"Mark and Priscilla value the time their family spends at Ko'olau Ranch and in the local community and are committed to preserving the ranch's natural beauty," the spokesperson said. "When they acquired the property, they rescinded an existing agreement that would have allowed for portions of the property to be divided into 80 luxury homes. Under their care, less than 1% of the overall land is developed with the vast majority dedicated to farming, ranching, conservation, open spaces, and wildlife preservation."

• Most commercial flights today are faster than they were decades ago, but not always.
• Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said flying from Atlanta to New York actually takes longer today than in the 1950s.
• He said old air traffic control systems are to blame, amid chaos at Newark that's caused mass delays and cancellations.

You wouldn't expect your commercial flight today to take longer than it would've decades ago, but Delta's CEO said that's the case lately for at least one major flight route.

A Delta Air Lines flight from Atlanta, where the carrier is headquartered, to LaGuardia airport in New York City takes longer today than it did when the airline began offering the route in the 1950s, Ed Bastian said Thursday on "The Today Show."

Delta typically offers at least a dozen flights daily that originate in Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson and arrive in LaGuardia. The shortest of these typically takes around 2 hours and 13 minutes.

"What happens is in order to keep it safe everything gets slowed down at the sign of any kind of risk," he said.

Asked why the flight takes longer today, Bastian responded, "That's the air traffic control system. It's very slow, it's congested but it's not congested; there's plenty of space if you modernize the skies and you can kind of bring greater efficiency."

Key to modernizing the skies would be using satellite technologies and GPS, he said, in addition to updating the radar and radio systems from the 1960s that air traffic controllers are still using.

Delta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Duffy said in Sunday's interview that he is "concerned about the whole airspace" in the United States because the equipment used by most airports is now outdated.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently spoke about the issue on "Meet the Press," saying he was "concerned about the whole airspace" in the country because of the antiquated equipment.

"The equipment that we use, much of it we can't buy parts for new," Duffy said. "We have to go on eBay and buy parts if one part goes down. You're dealing with really old equipment. We're dealing with copper wires, not fiber, not high-speed fiber, and so this is concerning."

Bastian called on additional investment from Congress to fund the modernization.

Another major airport in the New York metropolitan area, Newark Liberty International Airport in neighboring New Jersey, has recently been experiencing mass delays and cancellations affecting thousands of travelers.

"It's slowing everything down, taking stress out of the system," Bastian said of Newark. "Now that's not good in the long run, it's not good for consumers, it's not good for the airport itself but it's the only thing that we have in the meantime."

The airport has seen massive disruptions since late April, caused by a shortage of air traffic control staff, some equipment outages, the closure of the main runway for construction, and rainy weather.

• Meta has removed an unauthorized ad featuring Jamie Lee Curtis after she called out Mark Zuckerberg.
• She wrote an open letter to the Meta CEO on Instagram, calling the ad a "totally AI fake commercial."
• Meta simply said the ads were a violation and had been removed.

Meta has taken down a misleading ad featuring an image of Jamie Lee Curtis after the actor flagged it on Instagram.

The "Halloween" franchise actor wrote an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, posted in front of her more than 6 million Instagram followers, imploring his company to remove an unauthorized post using her likeness.

"It's come to this @zuck," Curtis wrote in an Instagram post on Monday, tagging Zuckerberg. "Hi. We have never met. My name is Jamie Lee Curtis and I have gone through every proper channel to ask you and your team to take down this totally AI fake commercial." She added that it was nonsense that she "didn't authorize, agree to, or endorse."

Curtis said she'd tried to DM Zuckerberg but wasn't able to do so since he didn't follow her, so her last resort was to "take to the public instaverse" to reach him.

Her post also showed the ad in question. It features a real photo of Curtis, taken from an interview she did with the MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle in January, but is overlaid with a fake caption implying Curtis said, "I'd want everyone suffering from."

"If I have a brand, besides being an actor and author and advocate, it is that I am known for telling the truth and saying it like it is and for having integrity," Curtis said in her post. "This (MIS)use of my images (taken from an interview I did with @stephruhle during the fires) with new, fake words put in my mouth, diminishes my opportunities to actually speak my truth."

A Meta spokesperson told Business Insider the ads were a violation and had been removed.

Curtis subsequently added a comment on her post that said: "IT WORKED! YAY INTERNET! SHAME HAS IT'S VALUE!
THANKS ALL WHO CHIMED IN AND HELPED RECTIFY!"

Meta announced last year that it had begun testing the use of facial recognition technology to detect these "celeb bait" ads, which use pictures of public figures to lure people to scam websites that prompt them to share personal information or send money. It's unclear what the ad featuring Curtis was promoting or whether it led users to a scam site.

Meta says the facial recognition technology compares faces in the ad with the celebrity's profile pictures on Facebook and Instagram, and if it's a match and the ad is found to be a scam, it'll be blocked. Facial data generated for the comparison is immediately deleted, whether it yielded a match or not, the company adds.

• Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder convicted of fraud, shares two kids with William "Billy" Evans.
• Evans is reportedly launching his own blood-testing startup now, with the imprisoned Holmes advising him.
• Here's what we know about Evans.

Elizabeth Holmes is infamous for the spectacular rise and fall of her blood-testing startup, Theranos, that saw her go to prison for fraud. Now, her partner is reportedly launching his own blood-testing startup.

William "Billy" Evans, with whom Holmes shares two children, is heir to a chain of hotels in California and was her daily companion at her monthslong trial. According to reports, his latest venture is a blood-testing startup, like Theranos, and Holmes is giving him advice from behind bars as she serves a years-long sentence in a Texas women's prison.

Here's everything we know about Billy Evans, Elizabeth Holmes' partner:

William "Billy" Evans grew up near San Diego, California.

He's one of three children born to his parents, Susan and William L. Evans, according to the Daily Mail.

The Evans family has lived in the San Diego area for generations.

Billy Evans' grandparents, Anne and William D. Evans, founded a hotel management group in 1953 called Evans Hotels, according to the group's website. The group manages three properties in the San Diego area.

After William D. Evans died in 1984, his widow, Anne, added two of her children to the Evans Hotels management team.

One of them was William L. Evans, who is Billy Evans' father.

Billy Evans attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He graduated in 2015 with a bachelor's degree in economics. During summers between school, Evans worked at various financial and consulting companies in California, according to a version of his LinkedIn profile that has since been modified. He was also a student brand manager at Red Bull while at MIT.

While at MIT, Evans studied abroad in China on a full scholarship, his LinkedIn said.

He studied Chinese language and literature at Fudan University in Shanghai.

After graduating from MIT, Evans reportedly tried to launch a healthcare startup for transporting wealthy Chinese people to the US for "concierge medical attention."

Although he studied Chinese in college, Evans wasn't fluent in the language, and the idea never took off, according to the New York Post.

After that startup idea failed, Evans worked at LinkedIn.

He was a strategy and analytics leadership program analyst there until February 2017.

Evans then moved to Luminar Technologies, a startup working on radar and sensor technology for autonomous cars.

His LinkedIn said he was a manager of special projects there, but employees told the New York Post he was fond of "wandering around with absolute purpose, but no one knew what that purpose was."

Evans was reportedly close with Luminar's CEO, Austin Russell. He acted as Russell's "secret police" who would "strut around the office and tell people what to do," the Post reported.

Holmes and Evans met in 2017, according to a letter Evans wrote.

In November 2022, Holmes' attorneys filed 130 such letters from friends and family seeking leniency in her sentencing.

In his, Evans, who is eight years younger than Holmes, talked about the couple's story, including his initial hesitation to pursue a relationship with Holmes, and gave a glimpse into their private lives throughout the trial as he made his plea for a lighter sentence.

Evans says they "immediately fell in love."

They met in San Francisco at a house party during Fleet Week to benefit wounded warriors, according to The New York Times. Holmes spoke with the Times for a profile in May 2023 in her first interview since 2016. Evans had gone to get ice for a party at his apartment but dropped by the benefit, where a mutual friend introduced him to Holmes, and they talked for three hours, per the Times.

"My friends were texting, 'Where are you? We're here," Evans told the Times. "To say we immediately fell in love isn't an overstatement."

Evans wrote in his letter to the judge that he and Holmes "walked away from the others, and it was as if the rest of the world ceased to exist."

He said Holmes wore a sunhat and oversized glasses to try to "stay under the radar," and he didn't initially recognize her as they spoke.

"It was strange to feel so comfortable and willing to share with someone who I didn't know. I was captivated by her childish wonder and authenticity," he added in his letter. "We spoke for hours, I lost track of time, and even if I didn't know it ... I fell in love. She pulled out her business card, scribbled her personal cell on the back and then it clicked who she was."

Evans said they remained "just friends" for six months, writing, "I was admittedly hesitant to dive in given all that had been said, Liz had been consistently vilified in every piece of media imaginable."

"The more I got to know her the more I loved who she was," he continued in his letter to the judge. "It was not long before the friendship turned into something more."

Evans said in his letter that Holmes swam the Golden Gate Bridge in 2022 while pregnant and shared other details about their personal lives.

Evans wrote that the couple's husky, Balto, was taken from their front porch by a mountain lion and killed. His letter, and several others in the filing, also said that Holmes is a volunteer for a sexual assault crisis helpline, and Evans said she was recently "working on draft state legislation to help ensure victims of sexual violence and rape will be granted their survivors rights and receive the care they need."

Holmes had testified during her trial that she was raped in her sophomore year at Stanford and separately alleged that she was emotionally and sexually abused by Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, her ex-boyfriend and former right-hand man at Theranos. Balwani's attorneys denied the abuse allegations during the trial.

Meanwhile, Evans said he and Holmes don't have privacy because of the trial and have moved multiple times after their home address was revealed. He said that their son has been "avoided by other families not wanting to expose their children to my family."

"This will follow us for the rest of our lives," he wrote. "There is no avoiding the scorn that accompanies Elizabeth Holmes."

The two were first spotted in public together in August 2018.

They were seen at Burning Man, the arts festival in the Nevada desert, just days before Theranos fully shut down, according to the Daily Mail.

Evans left his job at Luminar in January 2019.

Luminar employees told the Post they suspect the reason was the potentially bad publicity surrounding Evans' relationship with Holmes.

Today, Evans says he does "a lot of different stuff."

When asked by the Times' reporter, Amy Chozick, what he does for work, he offered vaguely, "A lot of different stuff — investing, starting companies."

As recently as 2019, Holmes and Evans shared an apartment in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, near the city's iconic crooked Lombard Street.

They lived in a $5,395-a-month apartment in San Francisco at the time, according to CNBC.

Vanity Fair reported in February 2019 that Holmes and Evans had gotten engaged.

That June, Vanity Fair reported that Holmes and Evans had tied the knot in a secretive wedding ceremony.

Evans' parents were reportedly "flabbergasted" by their son's decision to marry Holmes, the Post reported.

Evans was a fixture in Holmes' trial.

He accompanied her to court daily and was a key part of one of her Hail Mary attempts to avoid prison.

After Holmes was convicted, she made several attempts to avoid prison time.

As the clock was running out with a scheduled sentencing date fast approaching, she requested a new trial on the grounds that a key government witness visited her home in August 2022 expressing regrets that his testimony had helped convict her.

The witness was Adam Rosendorff, who was Theranos' lab director from April 2013 to November 2014. Holmes' motion relied heavily on a recollection of the encounter documented by Evans, who spoke with Rosendorff when he appeared at their home.

In an email to Holmes' attorneys recalling his encounter with Rosendorff, Evans wrote: "He said he feels guilty, it seemed like he was hurting. He said when he was called as a witness he tried to answer the questions honestly but that the prosecutors tried to make everybody look bad (in the company). He said that the government made things sound worse than they were when he was up on the stand during his testimony. He said he felt like he had done something wrong. And that this was weighing on him, He said he was having trouble sleeping."

The judge agreed to postpone Holmes' sentencing to hear Rosendorff out, giving Holmes a small victory, but it backfired on her when Rosendorff stood by his testimony in the hearing, saying, "She needs to pay her debt to society."

Rosendorff explained that he'd felt bad for Holmes because of the possibility that a child would grow up without a mother, but he stressed that his testimony was accurate.

Evans' dad, William L. Evans even made headlines at Holmes' trial one day.

NPR reported in September that a man who identified himself as a "concerned citizen" named Hanson defended Holmes to news reporters at her trial; in actuality, NPR reports, the man was the older Evans.

In May 2023, Holmes began her prison sentence.

She reported to Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, a minimum-security women's prison located about 100 miles from Houston, where she grew up.

During her sentence, she'll be separated from Evans and their two children, a son born in July 2021 and a daughter born in February 2023.

As for Evans, it seems his next venture is a blood-testing startup of his own.

The New York Times and NPR report that he's launched a blood-testing startup called Haemanthus that has raised millions and has roughly a dozen employees.

Holmes is giving him advice on the new venture but doesn't plan to have a formal role at the startup, according to NPR. As part of a settlement with the SEC in 2018, Holmes is banned from serving as an officer or director of a public company for a decade.

Evan's LinkedIn lists his current experience as working at a "Not So Stealth Startup" since October 2022.

• The "manager nerds" are coming, Anthropic's cofounder Jack Clark said.
• He said AI meant managers would "manage fleets of AI agents" and do more with smaller teams.
• Clark said on a podcast that he foresaw managers having "AI agents doing large amounts of work."

Managers need to have "soft skills" like communication alongside harder technical skills. But what if the job becomes more about managing AI agents than directing people?

Anthropic's cofounder Jack Clark said AI agents are ushering in an era of the "nerd turned manager."

"I think it's actually going to be the era of the manager nerds now, where I think being able to manage fleets of AI agents and orchestrate them is going to make people incredibly powerful," he said on an episode of the "Conversations With Tyler" podcast released last week.

"We're going to see this rise of the nerd turned manager who has their people, but their people are actually instances of AI agents doing large amounts of work for them," he added.

Clark said he's already seeing this play out with some startups that have "very small numbers of employees relative to what they used to have because they have lots of coding agents working for them."

He's not the only tech exec to predict AI agents will let teams do more with fewer people.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Stripe Sessions conference last week that tapping into AI could help entrepreneurs "focus on the core idea" of their business and operate with "very small, talent-dense teams."

"If you were starting whatever you're starting 20 years ago, you would have had to have built up all these different competencies inside your company, and now there are just great platforms to do it," Zuckerberg said.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said in March that he thinks "vibe coding" — or using generative AI tools to quickly develop and experiment with software development — would help smaller startup teams do the work of 50 to 100 engineers.

"People are getting to a million dollars to $10 million a year revenue with under 10 people, and that's really never happened before in early-stage venture," Tan said. "You can just talk to the large language models and they will code entire apps."

AI researchers and other experts have said there are risks to overreliance on the technology, especially as a replacement for human power, including LLMs having hallucinations and concerns that vibe coding could make it harder in some instances to scale and debug code.

Mike Krieger, a cofounder of Instagram and the chief product officer at Anthropic, predicted on a podcast earlier this year that a software developer's job would change in the next three years to focus more on double-checking code generated by artificial intelligence rather than writing it themselves.

"How do we evolve from being mostly code writers to mostly delegators to the models and code reviewers?" he said on the "20VC" podcast.

The job will be about "coming up with the right ideas, doing the right user-interaction design, figuring out how to delegate work correctly, and then figuring out how to review things at scale," he added.

A spokesperson for Anthropic previously told Business Insider the company saw itself as a "testbed" for workplaces navigating AI-driven changes to critical roles.

"At Anthropic, we're focused on developing powerful and responsible AI that works with people, not in place of them," the spokesperson said. "As Claude rapidly advances in its coding capabilities for real-world tasks, we're observing developers gradually shifting toward higher-level responsibilities."

Correction, May 12: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified Mike Krieger's job title at Anthropic. He is the chief product officer, not the chief people officer.

• Mark Zuckerberg says founders today should take advantage of a tool he didn't have when he started Facebook: AI.
• The Meta CEO says technologies like AI can help today's entrepreneurs do more with smaller teams.
• Other tech executives have shared similar sentiments.

Mark Zuckerberg said today's founders and entrepreneurs should take advantage of the technology he couldn't when he was building Facebook two decades ago.

"If you were starting whatever you're starting 20 years ago, you would have had to have built up all these different competencies inside your company, and now there are just great platforms to do it," the Meta CEO said said at the Stripe Sessions conference this week.

Zuckerberg says using technologies like AI can help today's founders "focus on the core idea" of a company.

"I think that this is just going to lead to much better quality stuff that gets created around the world because now you're just being able to have these, like, very small talent-dense teams that are, like, passionate about an idea," Zuckerberg said.

Replacing the 'midlevel engineer'

Zuckerberg has talked about the effect of AI on much larger companies, including Meta, on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in January.

"Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code," he said.

Of course, LLMs have been known to have troubling hallucinations at times, and companies could see negative repercussions from hollowing out their mid-level engineer ranks.

"Ease of use is a double-edged sword," Harry Law, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, previously told BI. "Beginners can make fast progress, but it might prevent them from learning about system architecture or performance."

Using AI too extensively in coding could also make scaling or debugging difficult, he warned.

"Security vulnerabilities may also slip through without proper code review," he said.

Still, companies are finding ways to charge ahead with AI

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said in a CNBC interview in March that "vibe coding" will help startups stay leaner by allowing smaller teams of engineers to produce work that would otherwise take a team of 50 to 100 developers.

"I mean, the wild thing is people are getting to a million dollars to 10 million dollars a year revenue with under 10 people, and that's really never happened before in early stage venture," he said.

"You can just talk to the large language models and they will code entire apps," Tan continued. "You don't have to hire someone to do it."

Vibe coding, the hot new buzzword in the valley, was coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in a post on X in February.

"There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding,' where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists," Karpathy wrote in his post. "I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding — I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works."

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke recently told managers that before asking to hire someone new, they must prove AI couldn't do the job better alone.

In March, Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei said AI could be "writing essentially all of the code" in 12 months' time.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in the company's third-quarter earnings call in October that more than 25% of the new code created at the company is generated by AI and then checked by employees.

Pichai said using AI to code boosted the company's "productivity and efficiency."

"This helps our engineers do more and move faster," Pichai said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in early February that he expected software engineering would look "very different" at the end of 2025.

The use of AI at large tech companies to aid, expedite, or outright do their employees' work dovetails with the industry's growing focus on efficiency in recent years.

Zuckerberg proclaimed 2023 a "year of efficiency" for the company, which has seen several rounds of mass layoffs in recent years. Several of its peers have also slashed thousands of jobs as they focus on flattening their organizational structures and pushing out their "lowest performers."

• Companies continue to lay off managers.
• Match Group, Amazon, Google, and Meta are thinning out middle managers, flattening org charts.
• Mark Zuckerberg was an early advocate of the "Great Flattening," describing it as an overhiring fix.

"How many managers to have — what are the pros and cons of managers?" The question was posed to Mark Zuckerberg nearly two years ago during an interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman.

At the time, the Meta CEO — still sporting his shorter "Caesar" haircut — had kicked off the "Great Flattening" trend, culling middle managers amid his "year of efficiency" as a correction to overhiring during the pandemic.

But as companies beyond Big Tech, the latest being the Tinder owner Match Group, pare back managerial roles, Zuckerberg's answer to the podcaster's question in June 2023 remains relevant — and helps explain why CEOs continue to thin out management ranks.

The Facebook founder began by acknowledging that managers are an important component of a company like Meta.

"I believe a lot in management," he said. "I think there are some people who think that it doesn't matter as much, but look, we have a lot of younger people at the company. For them, this is their first job, and people need to grow and learn in their career."

Zuckerberg said there was "a mathematical way" he thought about the ratio of employees to managers and making cuts.

Before Meta's layoffs, Zuckerberg said he had asked about the average number of direct reports each manager had at the company and learned it was about three to four. He said he felt it should be more like seven to eight. The lower numbers made sense at the time, Zuckerberg said, as Meta was hiring a ton and helping newcomers ramp up.

"So in a world where we're not adding so many people as quickly, is it as valuable to have a lot of managers who have extra capacity waiting for new people? No, right?" Zuckerberg said.

He said he decided to "defragment the organization," thinning out the ranks of middle management, which "decreases the latency on information going up and down the chain and I think empowers people more."

It all added up to a leaner organization that he felt could move faster in both decision-making and execution.

Elsewhere in the interview, Zuckerberg mentioned that the cuts came at a time of uncertainty in the world. As companies navigate geopolitical tensions and President Donald Trump's trade war, Zuckerberg's words in 2023 likely ring true to many CEOs today.

"I just feel the external world is quite volatile right now," Zuckerberg said in the interview. "And I wanted to make sure that we had a stable position."

Middle managers have increasingly found a target on their backs in recent years. Massive companies have followed Meta's lead over the past year, with Amazon and Google moving to flatten their org charts amid a renewed focus on greater efficiency.

Their CEOs have similarly voiced their reasons.

At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy said in September that the company would increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of March.

"Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today," he said at the time. In short, he told employees in a November all-hands, "I hate bureaucracy."

Google is cutting manager, director, and vice president roles by 10%, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in December.

Pichai said Google had made changes designed to simplify the company and boost its efficiency, two employees who heard the CEO's comments previously told Business Insider. In September 2022, he'd said he wanted Google to be 20% more efficient; months later, the company conducted a massive round of layoffs, eliminating 12,000 jobs.

"Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth," Pichai told staff in an email about those layoffs. "To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."

Salesforce in 2023 slashed some layers of management and turned some managers into individual contributors, with the goal of reducing the "spans" and "layers of control" across the company. Earlier that year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced layoffs of 10% of the workforce as part of a cost-cutting restructuring plan. In his memo to staff, he cited pandemic overhiring and a "challenging" economic environment as reasons for the cuts.

Middle managers made up nearly one-third of layoffs among white-collar workers in 2023, an analysis by Live Data Technologies for Bloomberg found.

Match Group, the parent company of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge, announced this week a 13% reduction in its workforce, affecting one in five managers.

Beyond tech, the focus on flattening has extended to behemoths of other industries.

Citi in 2023 announced it was paring back its layers of management from 13 to eight; the company later announced cuts affecting 1,500 managerial roles. At the start of 2024, UPS said it was laying off 12,000 of its 85,000 managers.

Some workplace experts have said the Great Flattening targeting middle managers could hurt workforces, as middle managers often carry out vital responsibilities like executing on upper management's goals and boosting employees' morale and performance.

The trend is continuing as companies decide that restructuring to decrease the number of managers is the right move to appease investors who are zeroed in on efficiency, especially after the pandemic hiring boom in tech.

Or as Zuckerberg previously said:

"I don't think you want a management structure that's just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work."

• Jeff Bezos sold one of his several Washington properties after moving to Miami in 2023.
• He snapped up three mansions on Indian Creek Island, leaving behind eight properties in Washington.
• He closed the reported deal for $63 million on a Hunts Point estate.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has amassed a real estate portfolio that rivals some of America's biggest property owners. He's the 23rd-largest landowner in the US, according to the 2025 Land Report, with at least 420,000 acres to his name.

Bezos' Seattle-area real estate empire, which was worth as much as $190 million in 2023 based on Zillow estimates, is getting smaller. Almost two years after moving south, Bezos sold one of his several Seattle properties for a big profit.

He sold his 9,420-square-foot home in Hunts Point, Washington, for a record $63 million, Puget Sound Business Journal reported in April. The estate was acquired by Cayan Investments LLC, Business Insider confirmed Thursday.

His collection also includes three properties in Indian Creek Village, an island off the coast of Miami, where he announced in 2023 he'd be relocating with his fiancée Lauren Sánchez.

Bezos, worth $211 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, purchased several properties with his former wife MacKenzie Scott. Their divorce was finalized in 2019, and it's unclear which of these properties Bezos still owns, as divorce records were not made public.

From two neighboring Beverly Hills mansions to multiple estates in exclusive Seattle suburbs, here are Bezos' residential properties in the US.

Caroline Cakebread, Katie Warren, Dominic-Madori Davis, and Libertina Brandt contributed to an earlier version of this article.

Jeff Bezos has spent millions of dollars amassing a collection of residential properties over the years.

A 2025 Land Report named Bezos the country's 23rd-largest landowner, with 420,000 acres to his name.

Over the years, he's picked up several New York City apartments, a ranch in Texas, and homes in Washington state, California, and Washington, DC.

 

For years, Bezos' home base was a nearly 24,000-square-foot estate in Medina, Washington.

In 1998, Bezos paid $10 million for a 5.3-acre property in the wealthy suburb on the shores of Lake Washington.

Twelve years later, in 2010, he spent $45 million on an estate nextdoor, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported.

One home is a 20,600-square-foot, five-bedroom, four-bathroom house with a basement spanning over 5,000-square-feet and five fireplaces. The other is an 8,300-square-foot, five-bedroom, four-bathroom home built in 1940.

The Wall Street Journal reported that he purchased the property next door in 2010 under Aspen Ventures LLC. That lot has a 24,000-square-foot Tudor-style, six-bedroom, six-bathroom mansion, which was listed for $53 million. 

Finally, in 2015, he purchased a $3.9 million property across the street from the Medina compound, Business Insider previously reported. The comparatively smaller property was purchased through a trust managed by the same law firm, and with the same property tax address, as the other Medina properties Bezos and Scott purchased before their divorce.

Medina is an exclusive suburb that is home to Bill Gates, Microsoft bigwigs, tech entrepreneurs, and telecom magnates.

Many of the neighborhood's mansions are hidden away behind gates and protected by elaborate security systems.

Bezos' first big New York purchases were three apartments, which he bought for $7.65 million on Central Park West in Manhattan.

The three units in The Century building on Manhattan's Upper West Side were purchased in 1999 from the former Sony Music head Tommy Mottola, The Observer reported at the time. 

More than a decade later, in 2012, Bezos bought an additional unit in the building, valued at $5.3 million in 2012, making him the owner of four condos in the building.

The Art Deco building was built in the 1930s, boasts a concierge, elevator attendants, and three separate entrances.

His next big buy was a massive ranch near the town of Van Horn, Texas.

In 2004, Bezos purchased Corn Ranch, a 165,000-acre stretch of land outside Van Horn, Texas.

He told the local paper he bought the property so his family would get the chance to live on a ranch like he did when he visited his grandfather as a child. The land is also the most productive launch site for his aerospace company Blue Origin.

Three years after buying The Washington Post in 2013, Bezos bought a former textile museum in DC's Kalorama.

He spent $23 million on the property, which dates back to 1912 and has a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, The Washington Post reported.

The neighborhood is a hot spot for Washington bigwigs.

The Obamas purchased an $8.1 million property nearby in 2017, which marked the second-most expensive transaction in the neighborhood, after Bezos' — The Washington Post reported.

The two joint structures on Bezos' property have nearly 27,000 square feet of living space, making it the largest home in Washington, DC.

It's been reported that Bezos may have also purchased the home across the street in January 2020 for $5 million, though BI could not confirm he owns the property.

In the months following his 2019 divorce, Bezos spent $45 million on four properties in other exclusive Seattle enclaves.

The largest property of the 2019 spending spree was a $37.5 million waterfront estate in Hunts Point, an exclusive neighborhood with fewer than 400 residents. The home has 300 feet of coastline, a rooftop deck with a fireplace, and a glass bridge connecting to a two-story guesthouse.

He purchased two more modest homes in Hunts Point around the same time, which his neighbors said are used for security and other staff, including a chef.

When he offloaded the $37.5 million estate in April, he got $25 million more than he purchased it for in 2019, Puget Sound Business Journal reported.

Around the same time, he purchased a home nearby in Yarrow Point.

He also purchased a staff home in the nearby Yarrow Point. The home sold for $4.2 million in January 2024, according to its listing on Compass.

Two months after Bezos and MacKenzie Scott finalized their divorce, he reportedly dropped about $80 million on three New York City apartments.

In 2019, he dropped about $80 million on three adjacent New York City apartments in the priciest-ever real-estate deal south of Manhattan's 42nd Street.

The spread included a three-story penthouse and two units directly below it.  It was the priciest real estate deal south of Manhattan's 42nd Street, appraiser Jonathan Miller told The Wall Street Journal at the time.

Renderings of the inside of the apartment from the creative agency VisualHouse show the opulence of the penthouse.

Bezos has since purchased two more units inside the prewar building. In 2020, he spent $16 million on an additional unit, and purchased a $23 million apartment in the building in 2021.

The purchases brought his grand total to $119 million of real estate in the one building, which has a fitness center, golf simulator, game room, and movie-screening room, according to the property's website.

 

Bezos also owns property in Beverly Hills, California, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

He first bought property in the cushy neighborhood in 2007, shelling out $24.45 million for a mansion that had tennis courts, a guesthouse, a six-car garage, and a pool, the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. In 2017, he bought the house next door for $12.9 million.

In 2022, Scott donated the two mansions to a housing charity.

 

After his divorce, he broke California records when he purchased the Warner Estate in 2020.

Bezos purchased the nine-acre Warner Estate in Beverly Hills for $165 million from billionaire David Geffen.

The estate was designed for Jack Warner — the former president of Warner Bros. Studios — in the 1930s. 

The most expensive home sale in California's history at the time, Bezos purchased the house for $165 million from David Geffen, who bought it in 1990 for $47.5 million. The mansion has guest homes, a tennis court, a swimming pool, and a nine-hole golf course.

Like many of his other homes, privacy is key at the Warner Estate. Hedges surround the nine acres on which the 13,600-square-foot home sits.

In 2021, Bezos and his now-fiancée Lauren Sánchez bought a home in Hawaii.

Bezos paid about $78 million for the Maui home, according to The New York Times.

In the weeks leading up to the purchase, Bezos made several donations to local organizations — including Hawaii Land Trust and Mālama Family Recovery Center, local news site Maui Now reported.

Sánchez announced that she and Bezos would donate $100 million to help Maui after neighborhoods on the island were devastated by fires.

"Jeff and I are heartbroken by what's happening in Maui. We are thinking of all the families that have lost so much and a community that has been left devastated," Sánchez wrote on Instagram. 

Their notable island neighbors include fellow billionaires Oprah Winfrey, Paul Thiel, and Oracle executive Larry Ellison, according to the Times.

Bezos purchased a home in Indian Creek in 2023, another billionaire hotspot.

In August 2023, he added a $68 million mansion on Miami's "billionaire bunker" island, Indian Creek Village, to his portfolio. 

The home reportedly spans 9,300 square feet, and the entire property is about 2.8 acres. The exclusive island has been home to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Tom Brady, and billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

While announcing his relocation, Bezos said that he wanted to be closer to his parents and space company Blue Origin's operations in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

He reportedly also snapped up the home next door.

Bezos bought the seven-bedroom Indian Creek mansion for $79 million in October, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.

The nearly two-acre mansion was built in 2000 and boasts features like a home theater, library, pool, and wine cellar.

But he wasn't done yet with his Indian Creek shopping spree. People representing Bezos reportedly contacted at least three other island homeowners to discuss purchasing their properties, Bloomberg reported in early January.

Bezos snapped up a third mansion on Indian Creek for $90 million

In April 2024, Bezos made his third purchase on the island known as the "billionaire bunker," Bloomberg reported. He paid $90 million for the six-bedroom home in an off-market transaction.

The house last sold for $2.5 million in 1998, according to the outlet, which noted that Bezos plans to live there while tearing down the other two properties he'd purchased on the island.

Indian Creek, located on Biscayne Bay and home to fewer than 100 residents, has its own mayor and police force, and is accessible only via a gated bridge.

• Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says some of his best leadership advice is just "very basic human stuff."
• He said on Scott Galloway's podcast that "trust and presence" are important traits in good leaders.
• Huffman also talked about using your principles and values to help you make tough decisions.

Steve Huffman says his leadership advice boils down to "very basic human stuff."

The Reddit cofounder and CEO was asked what makes a good leader on an episode of the podcast "The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway" released Sunday.

His answer comes down to "trust and presence."

"I think the most important thing is just being honest," he said. "What are you trying to do, why do you want to do it, what does it take to get there, what's going well, what's not going well, what are your hopes, what are your dreams, what are your fears? I think it's very basic human stuff."

Huffman noted it can be easier said than done, though.

"Just being straightforward about what we're trying to do and why and not sugar-coating things I think is really important," he said. "Vulnerability builds trust and then trust is what builds cohesive teams, and then you need, of course, cohesive teams to do things."

Another characteristic of a good leader is "presence," he said, "showing up and working and caring and being a part of the team at every scale."

Huffman was also asked how he approaches decision-making.

"First, take your decision, try to escalate it to a value or a principle, and then make the decision using that value or principle," he said. "I think the thing about values is they exist for one reason, which is to make hard decisions, and so if you're not using your values to make hard decisions, then they're not your values."

Huffman reflected on challenges in the company's 20-year history, including that "we weren't running as a business" for a while, he said.

"We were really idealistic, and I think in many ways the idealism has been very good, but we were also idealistic about not being a business — which is not a great way to run a sustainable business," he said about growing the company after he stepped back into the role of CEO in 2015.

Huffman cofounded Reddit with Alexis Ohanian, his college roommate, in 2005, and they sold the platform to Condé Nast in 2006. Huffman left in 2009 to cofound the travel website Hipmunk before returning as Reddit's CEO in 2015 at a turbulent time for the company.

"Wrapped up in some of that idealism was also, like, not working very hard," Huffman added. "In the Bay Area, broadly, is this — it's almost an entitlement of, 'I work at these companies, but I don't have to work very hard and I'm here for myself."

Huffman recalled telling his employees, "If we don't work really hard and work really smart and make this thing successful both from a user point of view and business point of view, then we don't get to do this, and we'll never achieve our mission."

• The first nonverbal recipient of Elon Musk's Neuralink brain chip has shared a video of how he uses it.
• Brad Smith, who has ALS, used Neuralink's brain-computer interface to edit the video.
• A synthetic version of his voice, made with AI and old recordings, allowed him to narrate the video.

The first nonverbal Neuralink patient to receive the chip implant is offering a glimpse into how he uses the technology — editing and narrating a YouTube video using signals from his brain.

Brad Smith is the third person in the world to get a brain chip implant with Elon Musk's Neuralink, and the first person with ALS to do so.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that primarily affects motor neurons — the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord responsible for controlling voluntary muscle movement. Over time, patients lose voluntary control of muscle movements, affecting their ability to speak, eat, move, and breathe independently.

Smith posted a video on YouTube last week showing how he uses his brain implant in day-to-day life.

He explained how the brain-computer interface (BCI) lets him use brain signals to control the mouse on his MacBook Pro to edit the video, which he said is the first edited with Neuralink or a BCI.

The implant, placed in his motor cortex, is roughly the size of five stacked quarters and contains more than 1,000 electrodes. Smith said that Neuralink doesn't read a constant stream of his thoughts but rather interprets brain signals indicating how and where he wants to move the cursor. While he initially tried imagining moving his hand to control the cursor, it ultimately proved more effective for him to think about moving his tongue and clenching his jaw to control the cursor and virtually click the mouse.

AI was also used on recordings of Smith from before he lost his ability to speak to create a synthetic version of his voice, allowing him to effectively narrate the video in his own voice.

In a separate video from reporter and Musk biographer Ashlee Vance, Musk phoned Smith during a visit from Neuralink's team to Smith's home.

"I hope this is a game changer for you and your family," Musk said.

"I'm excited to get this in my head and stop using eye-gaze," Smith said through his computer. Smith said in his video last week that he'd been using eye-gaze technology to communicate, but that the technology was limited to dark rooms. Neuralink's implant, he said, lets him communicate outdoors and in varying lighting.

The Neuralink implant also allows Smith to play video games with his kids, with footage showing him playing "Mario Kart."

"It took years to get here, and I still break down and cry," Smith told Vance for his Substack publication Core Memory. "It is really nice to have a purpose greater than me. I am really excited to serve others in the future with this work."

BI has reached out to Smith for additional comment.

Neuralink, which was previously tested on monkeys, implanted its device in a human for the first time in January 2024. Noland Arbaugh, a quadriplegic who became the company's first human patient, previously told BI the implant has helped him regain independence and control in his life and make new social connections.

• Maulik Suchak knows a thing or two about résumés.
• The lead software engineer has reviewed hundreds of his peers' résumés through a résumé-building site he built.
• He shared with BI the résumé that got him a Mag 7 tech job and what he wishes he'd done differently.

You could call Maulik Suchak something of a résumé expert.

His résumés have gotten him to final-round interviews at Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, and Atlassian, and led to multiple offers, including at Yelp, Microsoft, SurveyMonkey, and the Magnificent 7 company he's been at for nearly five years out of his 14-year career.

But, as the 34-year-old lead software engineer told Business Insider, "My deep dive into résumés didn't start because I was job hunting — it started because I was building a product."

Launching a tool to help people strengthen their résumé content and structure

In 2013, at 23 years old, Suchak co-created a résumé-building platform, CVsIntellect, with another engineer. The idea came from wanting to solve a very real problem; Suchak and his cofounder noticed their peers struggling to craft strong résumés, especially those without access to mentors or design tools.

Their vision was to make the résumé-creation process easier by offering a tool that didn't just generate résumés, but helped guide users toward stronger content and structure. This side project became Suchak's crash course in résumé content.

"I wasn't just writing my own résumé — I was reviewing hundreds of others," he said.

The platform grew rapidly, attracting thousands of users worldwide and surpassing over 100,000 résumés reworked via the site.

"This gave me deep insights into both the content and presentation side of résumés: what stands out, what gets ignored, and how different audiences interpret the same information," he said.

Leveraging his years of informal training helped him land job offers

Two years after launching CVsIntellect, while working as a software engineer in India, Suchak leveraged his learnings to finesse his own job-search materials.

"I knew how to write in a way that hiring managers would respond to, because I'd spent so much time thinking like one," Suchak said. Crafting a breakthrough résumé was about storytelling, positioning, and clarity — skills that ultimately helped him first break into Big Tech and later nab a role at his current Magnificent 7 company.

His efforts led to multiple job offers from companies such as Microsoft and Yelp. He accepted the Yelp offer and relocated to San Francisco, California, at the end of 2015.

In just under five years at Yelp, Suchak grew to lead a team of 14 software engineers as an engineering manager. In this capacity, he gained hiring responsibility, which gave him another foray into résumé review.

He also began mentoring other aspiring engineers. "Whenever someone reaches out for feedback on their résumé, I try my best to help," Suchak said. "Every résumé I read adds to my mental library of patterns — what works and what doesn't, what stands out visually and what falls flat, and how different people articulate their strengths."

Suchak followed his natural curiosity about how people at top companies present their experience. "I've spent a lot of time reading LinkedIn profiles, GitHub READMEs, and personal portfolios to understand how engineers craft their narratives — especially those in roles I admire," he said.

His research furthered his understanding of the language and structure common to strong résumés for Big Tech roles.

Landing a job at his current company

In 2019, Suchak moved to Silicon Valley and began applying to a flurry of Big Tech jobs, including several Magnificent 7 companies.

He reached the final round interviews at Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Atlassian, and SurveyMonkey, again receiving several offers. In 2020, he accepted the job at his current Magnificent 7 company.

He attributes much of this success to the first impression his compelling résumé set. "With my résumé, I not only effectively initiated a lot of connections with recruiters and hiring managers, but I landed a job that I'm really proud of," Suchak said.

Five résumé strategies to capture the attention of Big Tech recruiters and hiring teams

Here's the exact résumé that helped Suchak achieve these victories — and five strategies he feels played a major role in ensuring his résumé told a persuasive enough story to open the right doors.

1. Show clear impact of work and projects, not just tasks

Every bullet point on his résumé included a tangible result — metrics or improvements that demonstrated real impact. This framed his work as meaningful and effective, not just functional.

"I always asked myself, 'What changed because I did this?'" Suchak said. "For example, instead of saying 'Worked on improving Yelp Cash Back sign-up page,' I wrote 'Improved Cash Back sign-up pages with various A/B tests with Python and JS resulted in 2X higher conversion.'"

2. Tell a precise story of career growth

Suchak treated his résumé like a narrative. In describing the roles he'd held earlier in his career, he focused on smaller-scale project impact; in his more recent roles, he showcased how he led product decisions or mentored others.

"Each role built logically on the previous one, and I highlighted progression — either in scope, skillset, or leadership," he said. "The idea was to show momentum and intentional career moves rather than random hopping around."

3. Stay clear, concise, and to-the-point — aim for 1 page

When building his résumé platform, Suchak often saw résumés that were three or more pages, filled with every job, internship, or online course candidates had ever done.

But when he realized most recruiters review résumés for less than 10 seconds, he wanted to do it differently.

"Each bullet was one to two lines max, and I avoided buzzwords," he said. "This made it easier for a recruiter or hiring manager to scan quickly and still get a full picture of my strengths."

4. Favor projects over certifications

In Suchak's early career, he spent a lot of time collecting technical certifications that he now feels didn't mean much. Over time, he shifted his strategy to emphasize actual working projects over just any certificate.

"In my résumé, I made sure to link to real-world projects, ideally hosted live or on GitHub," he said. He even mentioned one of his projects in a Magnificent 7 interview, he said, "because it showed initiative, technical depth, and a bit of product thinking."

Suchak has also tried to highlight independence. "I'd done a lot of projects on my own from end-to-end, which my employer now really appreciated," he said.

5. Remember readability and formatting

A "last but not least" job-search principle Suchak believes in is that even the best résumé content can be overlooked if the formatting is messy.

"A readable résumé feels more professional, even before a single word is read," Suchak said.

He opted for clean fonts, consistent spacing, and clear section headers. He also avoided dense blocks of text and added just enough white space to make for a comfortable reading experience.

He even printed his résumé out first to see how it looked on paper before submitting it online.

Suchak still doesn't think his résumé was perfect

"Looking back, if I could change anything about the résumé that got me into my Mag 7 job, I'd highlight more personal projects with shorter descriptions of each," he said. "I'd also try to add even more impact and numbers."

While many career experts suggest customizing your résumé for each job and company you apply to, Suchak didn't tweak his résumé at all for the job he ended up landing.

He now recognizes the value in tailoring résumés to the position you want, studying job descriptions, and integrating keywords from them to get past ATS filters.

"This is one I learned the hard way — while I received multiple offers, I also used to get a lot of rejections," he said. "Instead of sending the same generic résumé everywhere, I'd now match my experience to each role," Suchak said.

Do you have a story to share about your tips for landing a Big Tech job? Contact this reporter, Sarah Jackson, at [email protected], or this editor, Jane Zhang, at [email protected].

• Another Big Tech earnings week has wrapped.
• It gave us fresh signs of what major players in the AI space are willing to spend to get ahead.
• Here's a look at which Big Tech companies look more cautious and which look more bullish on AI spending.

A slew of Big Tech companies reported quarterly earnings this week, and with those earnings, some progress reports on the tens of billions of dollars they're funneling into AI.

Some Big Tech companies are showing signs of reining in AI spending while others are plowing full steam ahead.

Cumulatively, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon plan to spend more than $300 billion this year, much of which will be on AI. Apple has also said it plans to spend $500 billion over the next four years.

Here's a look at where some of the biggest players stand:

Google

Google parent company Alphabet estimates $75 billion in capital expenditures for 2025, largely for data centers and server capacity for AI. This is well above the consensus estimate of $57.9 billion and represents an increase of about 43% year-over-year.

"We are confident about the opportunities ahead, and to accelerate our progress, we expect to invest approximately $75 billion in capital expenditures in 2025," CEO Sundar Pichai said in a February earnings release.

"We expect to increase our investments in capital expenditure for technical infrastructure, primarily for servers, followed by data centers and networking," CFO Anat Ashkenazi said during the company's earnings call that month.

First-quarter capex was $17.2 billion for the company, which is breaking ground for several new data centers to support its AI work, including Google Search AI overview and the Gemini chatbot.

Amazon

Amazon previously said it expects increased capital expenditures this year of $100 billion, largely for AI, particularly for the company's AWS cloud computing division.

In Amazon's Q1 earnings Thursday, the company reported capex of $24.3 billion, up more than 70% year-over-year.

CEO Andy Jassy added AWS has seen an "explosion of coding agents."

Jassy said on a third-quarter earnings call last year that the massive investment was justified because AI is "a really unusually large, maybe once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity."

"I think that both our business, our customers and shareholders will be happy, medium to long-term, that we're pursuing the capital opportunity and the business opportunity in AI," he said.

Meta

In its recent Q1 earnings, Meta raised its full-year capex estimate from a range of $60 to $65 billion to $64 to $72 billion now.

The change "reflects additional data center investments to support our artificial intelligence efforts as well as an increase in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware," the company said in its earnings report.

This is a marked increase from the company's 2024 capex of $39.23 billion.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off his remarks in Meta's Q1 earnings call by talking about AI being "the major theme" at Meta right now that's "transforming everything we do."

Zuckerberg noted these are "long-term investments that are downstream from us," but said the company "will be wildly happy with the investments that we are making."

Microsoft

Microsoft is showing signs it may not remain as bullish on AI spending as some of its peers.

CFO Amy Hood said on the Q1 earnings call Wednesday that the company expects capex to grow in the coming fiscal year, but noted, "it will grow at a lower rate than FY 2025 and will include a greater mix of short lived assets, which are more directly correlated to revenue than long lived assets."

The company has said before that it expects capex of $80 billion in fiscal year 2025 in order to "build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world." More than half of the investment will be in the US.

Earlier this month, Noelle Walsh, the head of Microsoft cloud operations, said the company "may strategically pace our plans."

"In recent years, demand for our cloud and AI services grew more than we could have ever anticipated and to meet this opportunity, we began executing the largest and most ambitious infrastructure scaling project in our history," she wrote in a LinkedIn post.

"By nature, any significant new endeavor at this size and scale requires agility and refinement as we learn and grow with our customers. What this means is that we are slowing or pausing some early-stage projects," she continued.

Apple

On February, Apple announced its biggest spend commitment in the company's history, for $500 billion in the US over four years toward AI initiatives, manufacturing, and silicon engineering, among other expenses.

"We're going to be expanding our teams and our facilities in several states, including Michigan, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington," CEO Tim Cook said in the company's Q1 earnings call Thursday. "And we're going to be opening a new factory for advanced server manufacturing in Texas."

• Can DOGE continue without Elon Musk? He thinks so.
• His reasoning: It's "a way of life, like Buddhism."
• He also thinks DOGE could run through Trump's full term, though it's currently set to end in 2026.

DOGE has been called a lot of things, but its de facto head may have just broken new ground by comparing it to Buddhism.

During a Q&A session with reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Elon Musk spoke about what the future of DOGE looks like with him stepping back from the group.

He shook off concerns that his pullback from DOGE to focus on his companies would hamper the organization going forward.

"DOGE is a way of life, like Buddhism," he said. "Buddha isn't alive anymore. You wouldn't ask the question: 'Who would lead Buddhism?'"

He also said it was possible DOGE could continue to exist through the end President Donald Trump's term in 2029, though the executive order creating DOGE designated it a temporary organization with an end date of July 4, 2026.

"I think so," Musk told reporters of a possible extension of DOGE's operations. "It's up to the president."

Musk said last week that he'll step back from DOGE in May.

"Starting next month, I will be allocating far more of my time to Tesla," he said during Tesla's earnings call. "The major work of establishing the Department of Government Efficiency" was done, he added.

Musk's decision to rein in his involvement at DOGE comes amid a turbulent period for the electric carmaker. Tesla's recent Q1 earnings disappointed investors, as the company missed on revenue and earnings-per-share estimates.

It reported revenue of $19.34 billion, down 9% year-over-year, compared to forecasts of $21.43 billion and EPS of $0.12, down 71% year-over-year, versus analysts' estimates of $0.33.

Tesla's first-quarter deliveries also fell short of analysts' estimates.

The company has also faced protests from people taking issue with Musk's right-wing politics and DOGE's mass layoffs.

Some Tesla vehicles, particularly Cybertrucks, and dealerships have also been vandalized as part of the backlash against Musk.

• Tariffs. Tariffs. Tariffs.
• CEOs are being grilled on how President Trump's tariffs will affect their business and consumers.
• Here's what they have to say about how it'll affect their bottom line and customers' wallets.

There's been a common refrain in recent company earnings calls and interviews with executives: Businesses are facing extreme economic "uncertainty" and struggling to understand the impact of tariffs on their bottom line.

Some companies are raising prices, a few are absorbing the increased costs themselves (at least for now), and others are still figuring out what they'll do in response to the ever-changing tariffs announcements.

Here's what major companies' CEOs have said about how tariffs are affecting their businesses, and your wallet:

Amazon

CEO Andy Jassy expects Amazon sellers to pass costs on to consumers, he told CNBC.

"Depending on which country you're in, you don't have 50% extra margin that you can play with," Jassy said. "I think they'll try and pass the cost on."

American Airlines

Asked about tariffs and subsequent increases in the cost of aircraft on the company's latest earnings call, American CEO Robert Isom said, "Certainly, it's not something we would intend to absorb. And I'll tell you, it's not something that I would expect our customers to welcome. So we've got to work on this."

AutoZone

AutoZone CEO Philip Daniele said on a September earnings call that "we will pass those tariff costs back to the consumer" in the event of new tariff announcements.

"We generally raise prices ahead of that," Daniele said, referring to tariff policies over the years. "That's historically what we've done."

Prices would gradually settle with time, he added.

Best Buy

Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said on a recent earnings call said that price increases on imported products are now "highly likely" and that "we've never seen this kind of breadth of tariffs."

"Tariffs at this level will result in price increases," she said. "I think it is very difficult to say — given the backdrop that we're in — exactly, precisely how big that is."

Chipotle

"In February, we began to see that the elevated level of uncertainty felt by consumers starting to impact their spending habits," interim CEO Scott Boatwright said on the company's recent earnings call. "We could see this in our visitation study where saving money because of concerns around the economy was the overwhelming reason consumers were reducing the frequency of restaurant visits."

This trend continued into April, he added.

Boatwright has said the company plans for now to absorb increased costs from the tariffs, rather than pass them off to the customer.

"We don't understand which components of the tariffs are transitory and which will be permanent," Boatwright told Fortune in April. "And I think it's unfair to the consumer to pass those costs off to the consumer, because pricing is permanent."

In a separate interview with NBC Nightly News, he said while "it is our intent as we sit here today to absorb those costs," price hikes could occur later if increased costs became a "significant headwind."

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey told Yahoo Finance the company wouldn't raise prices "out of cycle."

"Obviously prices went up because of a whole set of normal things — last year's inflation — that's already happened," he said. "But we're sticking to our current pricing plan because, you know, some things are more expensive and some things are less expensive. And it all goes into the bundle."

Columbia Sportswear

Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle told analysts on an October earnings call that "trade wars are not good and not easy to win."

Boyle also told The Washington Post in October that the company was "set to raise prices."

"It's going to be very, very difficult to keep products affordable for Americans," he told The Post.

In February, he told CNBC that "Tariffs are designed to raise the price of imported products. It's a dampening effect."

Conagra

Conagra Brands CEO Sean Connolly told Reuters in early April that the food company may raise prices to offset the cost of tariffs but said it was too early to know how much prices would go up.

And on a recent earnings call, he said the trade situation remained "volatile."

Costco

Costco CEO Ron Vachris said on a recent earnings call that it's "difficult to predict the impact of tariffs but our team remains agile and our goal will be to minimize the impact of related cost increases to our members."

He expressed confidence that the company will be able to "rise to this challenge by leveraging our global buying power, strong supplier relationships, and innovation" to keep prices steady.

Kraft Heinz

The company's CFO, Andre Maciel, said on a recent earnings call that they "are trying to do everything we possibly can to minimize the amount of price necessary."

"But pricing might be necessary," he added.

Levi Strauss & Co.

CEO Michelle Gass expressed some confidence on a recent earnings call. "As we look at pricing, we do believe that the brand, especially given the health of the brand, that there is pricing power there," she said. "But if we do anything, it will be very surgical."

She also noted in the call that tariff situation is "fluid" and the denim company is just "getting our arms around it."

PepsiCo

"As we look ahead, we expect more volatility and uncertainty, particularly related to global trade developments, which we expect will increase our supply chain costs," CEO Ramon Laguarta said in the company's earnings release. "At the same time, consumer conditions in many markets remain subdued and similarly have an uncertain outlook."

Pfizer

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said the pharmaceutical giant might be making "tremendous investments" in the US if not for tariffs.

"If I know that there will not be tariffs and a heavy certainty, then there are tremendous investments that can happen in this country, both in R&D and manufacturing," he said in a first-quarter earnings call. "In periods of uncertainty, everybody is controlling their cost as we are doing."

Procter & Gamble

In the company's earnings release, CEO Jon Moeller said it's a "challenging and volatile consumer and geopolitical environment" and that the company is "making appropriate adjustments to our near-term outlook to reflect underlying market conditions."

Moeller also told CNBC price hikes were "likely."

Stanley Black & Decker

Stanley Black & Decker CEO Donald Allan said on a February earnings call that "our approach to any tariff scenario will be to offset the impacts with a mix of supply chain and pricing actions, which might lag the formalization of tariffs by two to three months."

And last October, Allan said, "Obviously, coming out of the gate, there would be price increases associated with tariffs that we put into the market."

Target

Target CEO Brian Cornell told CNBC in March that consumers could see price increases in grocery, particularly fresh foods that are often imported from Mexico.

"Those are categories where we'll try to protect pricing, but the consumer will likely see price increases over the next couple of days," he said.

Walmart

Walmart CEO Doug McMillan has sounded more confident than many of his peers, saying on an earnings call in February that "tariffs are something we've managed for many years, and we'll just continue to manage that."

And at a recent investment community meeting, he said while Walmart is "not immune" to the effects of tariffs, it is "positioned to play offense,"

"Nothing about the current environment impacts our confidence in our business or our strategy," he said.

Yum! Brands

Yum! Brands, the company behind fast food chains like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, expects little impact from tariffs on its supply chain, CFO Chris Turner said on a recent earnings call.

"In general, our business has minimal supply chain related tariff risk as most markets source within their country or with countries where there is not currently tariff risk," he said. "As a result, we expect tariffs to have an immaterial impact on our system wide supply chain."

• Many businesses are bracing for negative impacts from tariffs. WeWork actually sees an upside.
• Its CEO told Semafor that tariff uncertainty is actually a boon for the coworking space company.
• "With all the uncertainty around tariffs, who's prepared to commit to a 10- or 15-year lease?" he said.

Many companies are sounding the alarm on the negative repercussions of tariffs on their businesses. Not WeWork.

WeWork CEO John Santora said Thursday at the Semafor World Economy Summit that the economic uncertainty around tariffs has actually attracted more business for the coworking space company.

"So if we look at it and just take today's environment with all the uncertainty around tariffs and what's happening, who's prepared to commit to a 10- or a 15-year lease with $50 or $100 million spend?" Santora said.

"The world, business, investments are all on a pause right now until you determine what impact it's going to have on your company, on your supply chain, on the cost of all of that," he added. "So we're seeing companies that are in our spaces today extend, companies that haven't been in our spaces before talking to us about 'Can you fill the short-term gap for us? What can you do for the next six months?'"

Santora expanded on his remarks in an interview with Bloomberg on Friday, saying WeWork's clients "look to a player like us to give them that flexibility."

"You have to pause," he told Bloomberg of how his clients are thinking of the uncertain economic environment. "You have to think about it. You have to think whether or not to invest that major capital in a market, at least through this short term. You have to step back."

Besides tariffs and their consequences, return-to-office mandates could also drive business for WeWork, Santora said.

"The other thing is, do we really know how many people are going to be in the office? We don't," he told Semafor. "We don't know whether it's going to be three days a week, four days a week, five days a week. We can mandate it, or firms mandate it, but by taking that short-term look at it, do two years with us, do three years with us. At that point, you know where your business is heading."

It's been a tumultuous few years for WeWork, which saw the exit of founder and former CEO Adam Neumann in 2019. His departure followed a failed IPO marred by concerns about WeWork's business model, valuation, and governance. WeWork eventually went public via a SPAC in 2021. The company later filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023.

WeWork declined to provide additional comment.