One firm making this push is Overlap Holdings, a New York-based venture firm that writes follow-on checks for early-stage frontier tech startups — building capital-intensive products in climate, energy, life sciences, space, robotics, semiconductors, and material science. It recently hired Elizabeth Stockton, former special assistant to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, to lead its new defense tech advisory practice. She'll serve as director of government solutions from Washington, D.C., the firm told Business Insider exclusively.
Stockton always envisioned herself becoming a public servant. "I remember reading my parents' copy of the paper and being more drawn to the international section," she told BI.
After studying international relations at St. Andrews University, she "went from a very small team to the largest bureaucracy in the world" — first in operations and business development jobs at two startups, then to the Pentagon in policy and operations roles.
There, Stockton worked for the Assistant Secretary of Defense, ensuring that the US industrial base could deliver capabilities warfighters need — a role she assumed only six months after Russia invaded Ukraine. "It kind of felt like the broader world was waking up to how our manufacturing capacity has really shifted over the last three decades," she said of this experience.
Her work with both incumbent defense companies and emerging players reignited her interest in the startup ecosystem. At Overlap, she hopes to combine her D.C. and operational expertise to help startups interpret how policy changes affect their business models.
"The decisions that are made in Washington impact companies day in and day out," Stockton said. "The need to expand our domestic capacity across all these frontier technology companies only remains more urgent."
Stockton won't be investing at Overlap. Instead, she'll work with startups directly, offering them tailored guidance on which grants or contracts best suit their stage, sector, and product. She will also tap into her D.C. network to connect startups with key government employees and experts.
With much of the venture capital ecosystem centralized in Silicon Valley, many frontier tech startups often don't know where to start when looking to secure a coveted government contract, which is often crucial to their business models and future fundraising opportunities.
Justin Stevens, Overlap's founder and CEO, is betting that better alignment between frontier tech startups, the venture firms that back them, and the federal agencies they depend upon for contracts will lead to stronger outcomes.
"This world needs that connective tissue in the middle," Stevens said, "for the betterment of the frontier tech ecosystem, but also for the betterment of government and the mission and the country."
This is Overlap's second advisory business. The five-person firm also runs a capital solutions arm, which helps startups raise debt for resource-heavy efforts like building hardware. It's headed by COO Rob Morelli, who previously led syndicate and structuring for mortgage and asset-backed products at UBS.
While Overlap's units' services are available to portfolio companies, the capital and government solutions businesses generate revenue by charging non-portfolio companies a fee, Stevens said.
To Stevens, Stockton is a "Swiss Army Knife" asset to the Overlap team.
"I saw inside the building — and outside as well — that it's not just private market dollars or just government dollars that these companies need to be successful and scale and grow," Stockton said. "It really needs to be that collaboration, and this role really gets to sit at that intersection."
Beyond tariffs and court battles over Trump policies, two pieces of White House palace intrigue emerged Tuesday:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suspended two top Pentagon officials, Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick, as part of an investigation into who leaked word of a planned top-secret briefing on China for Elon Musk.
Axios learned that Musk or Hegseth didn't just decide to call off that briefing after the leak. President Trump himself ordered staffers to kill it.
"What the f**k is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn't go," Trump said, a top official recalled to Axios.
Why it matters: Musk has annoyed several administration officials with his constant presence at the White House,his haphazard social media posts and his slash-and-burn tactics at his Department of Government Efficiency.
The planned Pentagon briefing, however, got him cross with the boss at the Resolute Desk.
"POTUS still very much loves Elon, but there are some red lines," the official said. "Elon has a lot of business in China and he has good relations there, and this briefing just wasn't the right thing."
Trump also had said he wouldn't allow conflicts of interest with Musk on his watch, although critics doubt his sincerity.
Flashback: The China episode became public on March 20, when the New York Times accurately reported that Musk was scheduled the next day to receive a Pentagon briefing on military plans in case of war with China.
At 11 p.m. on March 20, Trump took to Truth Social to call the report "Fake News" from "the Failing New York Times."
"They said, incorrectly, that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon tomorrow to be briefed on any potential 'war with China,' " Trump wrote. "How ridiculous? China will not even be mentioned or discussed. How disgraceful it is that the discredited media can make up such lies. Anyway, the story is completely untrue!!!"
But that Truth Social message wasn't posted until the plan for the Pentagon briefing for Musk had been changed.
Musk still attended a briefing at the Pentagon with Hegseth on March 21. But China wasn't discussed.
In the White House that day, Trump let slip his true feelings about Musk's entanglements with China.
"I certainly wouldn't want, you know — Elon has businesses in China, and he would be susceptible, perhaps, to that," he told reporters. "But it was such a fake story."
For his part, Musk wrote on X: "I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT. They will be found."
The latest: After Reuters broke the news of Caldwell's suspension, Politico reported late Tuesday that Selnick also had been put on leave and escorted from the Pentagon.
Besides the China briefing planned for Musk, the leak probe focuses on Panama Canal military plans, Red Sea operations and intelligence collection in Ukraine, Politico reported.
Harvard's decision topush back against President Trump's pressure tactics shows other institutions targeted by his administration that there's an alternative to swift capitulation.
Why it matters: Harvard is an international brand with a $53 billion endowment — a rare institution with the resources and willpower to withstand an onslaught of funding cuts and investigations from the government.
The money quote: "Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions. ... Let's hope other institutions follow suit," former President Obama posted on X.
Zoom in: In the last few weeks, American institutions have steadily buckled under pressure from the Trump administration.
Columbia ceded control of an academic department and expanded campus police powers to try to unfreeze federal funding. The University of Michigan shut down its expansive diversity, equity and inclusion program. Several Big Law firms offered nearly $1 billion in pro bono work to get on the administration’s good side.
But Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, rejected the administration’s demands tied to its federal funding, saying Harvard is committed to combating antisemitism but will not concede academic freedom.
"No government—regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue," he wrote.
The Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism is freezing more than $2 billion in response.
Driving the news: Support for Harvard — and resistance to the Trump administration — is bubbling at other universities.
60 current and former university presidents co-signed an op-ed in Fortune backing Harvard.
Stanford, which faces funding threats itself, came out in support of Harvard on Monday. "Harvard’s objections to the letter it received are rooted in the American tradition of liberty, a tradition essential to our country’s universities, and worth defending," Stanford’s president and provost told The Stanford Daily.
So far, 940 Yale faculty members have signed a letter to Yale’s president and provost asking them to "resist and legally challenge any unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance."
Several universities — including Cornell, Brown, MIT and Michigan — are joining a lawsuit against the Department of Energy to challenge cuts to indirect costs or academic research.
The big picture: "If an institution was going to stand up to the Trump administration’s war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list," The N.Y. Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller writes.
Last week, the university secured a $750 million loan from Wall Street to bolster its finances, The Washington Post notes.
What to watch: Several other institutions, like Cornell and Northwestern, have hundreds of millions of dollars of funding on the line.
Their next moves will reveal whether Harvard's defiance was enough to set off a chain reaction.
"If they are good, if we want them back in, we are going to work with them to get them back in as quickly as we can," President Donald Trump said of illegal immigrants in the US.
Kevin Dietsch via Getty Images
President Donald Trump said his administration will be launching a self-deportation program.
Trump said immigrants could be given "some money and a plane ticket" to return home.
Trump said his administration would work with immigrants to return to the US lawfully if they are "good."
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he wants to start a self-deportation program for immigrants in America.
Trump was speaking to Fox Noticias in an interview when he said that his administration would be rolling out new schemes to tackle illegal immigration in the US.
"These are rough, bad people. We want them out, and that's mostly our focus, but what we want to do is we are going to have a self-deportation program, which we haven't even announced yet," Trump said on Tuesday.
Trump added that he hasn't worked out the exact details of the program, though it could involve giving immigrants a stipend so they could return to their home country.
"We are going to give him a stipend, we are going to give them some money and a plane ticket, and then we are going to work with them. If they are good, if we want them back in, we are going to work with them to get them back in as quickly as we can," Trump continued.
Cracking down on immigration has long been a focus for Trump. While on the campaign trail, Trump said deporting millions of immigrants would result in more job opportunities for Americans.
Earlier in the interview, Trump acknowledged that farmers and business owners rely on immigrants as a source of labor and that he would help businesses hire them lawfully.
"We are making it so that if a farmer can give recommendations to people, we're going to be very soothing in terms of perhaps letting that farmer take responsibility," Trump told Fox Noticias.
"But you know, ultimately, at some point, we want people to go out and come back as legal," he added.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
Cloudflare CEO told BI that "it's incredibly handy" to understand the basics of coding.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare's CEO told BI that learning to code is still important, even if you don't write it as much.
Matthew Prince said code would never get released at the company without "significant human review."
He said he's focused on making employees more efficient with AI, not replacing them.
As the CEO of a multibillion-dollar cybersecurity company, Matthew Prince doesn't write much code — but he said "it's incredibly handy" to understand the basics, even as AI tools take over the heavy lifting.
"Even if you're not the person who has your hands on the keyboard writing the code anymore, I think a basic understanding is helpful," The Cloudflare CEO said in an interview with Business Insider.
Prior to starting the company, Prince studied computer science, which places a strong emphasis on skills like coding and software development. He also went to law school after finishing his undergrad degree and later got his MBA. While he doesn't practice law or do much coding nowadays, he said he's "a better CEO" because he understands how Cloudflare's engineering team builds software and how the legal team approaches their work.
"I think the same thing can be true, even if you're a coder and you're spending a lot more time supervising rather than, you know, typing," Prince said.
Prince isn't the only one to support the age-old "learn to code" advice. Google's Head of Research, Yossi Matias, previously told BI that the basics are as important as ever, especially with the growing amount of opportunity to build upon those skills. Cisco executive Liz Centoni also saidthe advice is still relevant, and her foundation in coding helped make her a better problem solver.
Prince also added that the role of a software engineer is still needed, even if AI can now help generate code.
"Especially in a field that is as security conscious as we are, you know, no code would ever get released without significant human review," Prince said.
He also said the same is true in reverse — "no human code would get released without AI review."
Okta CEO Todd McKinnon recently shared a similar sentiment and told BI that software engineers aren't going away just because there's been efficiency improvements in the field — in fact, he thinks they'll be more in demand in the next few years.
The projections come as many software engineers have experienced a major shift in their jobs as AI tools have increasingly been used to automate coding tasks. Google has said over a quarter of new code at the tech giant is generated by AI, and Microsoft's CTO recently said 95% of code will be AI-generated in five years. AI efficiency gains have even led some companies like Salesforce to pause hiring new engineers.
Prince isn't blind to AI's impact and its ability to improve productivity. He told BI that the company is running a series of internal pilots to see where AI can make its team more productive. Prince said machine learning systems have helped identify previously undetected threats. AI systems have also helped save thousands of hours of work in areas like customer support and resulted in improved customer satisfaction and ratings, he said.
Prince told BI that this hasn't resulted in fewer customer support employees being needed. Prince said the integration of AI is less about replacing teams and more about giving them "superpowers."
"AI has helped us not replace people, but help make people better," Prince said.
The Trump administration seeks to make the defense of Taiwan a central element of its Pacific strategy, but its trade policies are making that defense more difficult and conflict more likely.
Democrats are rushing to organize trips to El Salvador as President Trump refuses to comply with a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of a Maryland resident who was erroneously deported to the country.
Why it matters: It's not just about one deportee, or even immigration policy, lawmakers say. "This is about a president of the United States defying the Supreme Court and wanting to be a king," said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.).
Garcia and Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) are trying to secure GOP authorization to lead a congressional delegation to visit deportees at El Salvador's Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), Axios first reported Tuesday.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) is leaving Wednesday to travel to the Central American country. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) is also planning a trip, as Axios first reported.
What they're saying: "We need to spring into action. ... You can't just put up statements. That doesn't mean anything," Garcia told Axios in a phone interview on Tuesday night.
"I think that it's important to say what we're thinking and what our next steps are, but we've got to show action," he added.
"We have to do similar kinds of things for the others who are victims of this dystopian attack on our Constitutional rights," said Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.). "This president is dangerous and we can't let this go."
Zoom out: For months, Democrats have been dogged by the question of how best to demonstrate and display opposition to the Trump administration.
The party's liberal base has been demanding lawmakers throw out their usual playbook and try to match Trump's shock-and-awe tactics with outside-the-box plays of their own.
Some in the more establishment wing of the party have bristled at that approach, arguing it makes the party look frenetic without securing any concrete wins.
What we're hearing: The issue of deportations — particularly Trump's suggestion that deportations of "homegrown" criminals could be next — is lighting up lawmakers' phone lines.
Democratic aides and lawmakers told Axios they were bombarded Tuesday with calls from constituents and activists, similar to how DOGE and tariffs have dominated their switchboards in past months.
"It's a lot," one House Democrat told Axios when asked about the call volume they have received on the issue.
Said another House Democrat: "I just came from a round-table with two Dem activist groups and all they wanted to talk about was El Salvador."
Reality check: The sentiment within the party about rallying behind deportees is not universal.
The second House Democrat who spoke anonymously, a centrist, called the deportation issue a "soup du jour," arguing Trump is "setting a trap for the Democrats, and like usual we're falling for it."
"Rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy ... the thing where his numbers are tanking, we're going to go take the bait for one hairdresser," they said, likely referring to a deported makeup artist.
Only if Trump tries to deport U.S. citizens, the lawmaker argued, will Democrats need to draw a "line in the sand" and "shut down the House."
What to watch: It's not clear whether House Democrats will be able to get their formal delegation.
A spokesperson for House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) declined to comment on whether he would grant Garcia and Frost permission to lead a CODEL.
Garcia suggested Democrats may forge ahead anyway with something more informal, telling Axios: "We've been discussing already what the other options would be. Our intention is to go to El Salvador."
As for the perspective that the issue is a political loser for Democrats, Garcia argued it is "total bullsh*t," saying "this is not just a deportation story ... this is a broader story about Donald Trump consolidating power."
I had literally never heard of MeWe. So I signed up.
It's pretty empty, but it has a history of being for conspiracy theorists.
The Federal Trade Commission apparently thinks MeWe is a big competitor to Facebook. That's what it said this week when it gave a short list of social media rivals — most of which are long gone — at the beginning of a case that's trying to prove Mark Zuckerberg's company is a monopoly.
MeWe, you say? I've never heard of it!
Part of the FTC's complaint says that between 2012 and 2020, Facebook was hugely dominant in the space of "personal social networking" (the kind of social network where you talk to friends and family, as opposed to YouTube or X). And while there were other now-extinct competitors like MySpace or Google+, the only other existing ones are Snapchat and MeWe.
I've covered tech for a long time, but when I saw that, I said to myself: What is MeWe? So I dug into it a little — and even downloaded the app.
It turns out, MeWe was founded in 2016 by Mark Weinstein, who bills himself as a privacy advocate. It says it has more than 20 million users and "contains no ads, no targeting, and no newsfeed manipulation." The company raised $6 million in funding last year, with total funding of around $20 million, according to Crunchbase. It has a freemium user subscription model, similar to X.
As for MeWe this week, it seemed to find the connection to Facebook slightly offensive. "Unlike Facebook, we do not harvest our customers' data or operate any form of surveillance capitalism," Jeffrey S. Edell, MeWe's CEO, said in a statement to Business Insider. "Social media was meant to connect people, not harvest them. At MeWe, our members are valued as people, not turned into data points for sale."
I joined MeWe to see what it's like
I'm someone who loves to join any new flash-in-the-pan social app and spam my friends (looking back over my text exchanges with some friends, it's a long pathetic list of auto-generated invites to fallen soldiers like Houseparty, Squad, Cocoon, Gas). Yet, as I said, MeWe was not on my radar.
MeWe's login page asks you to sign in with something called "Frequency."
MeWe / Business Insider
So I signed up. Here's what I found:
First of all, the signup page was unlike any other app I've joined. Instead of offering a simple "Create a new account," it offered a way to "Continue with Frequency" in a way that looked like when you can log into services with your Google account. I chose that and created an account.
As part of the signup flow, I had to pick topics I was interested in — generic things like "News," "Music," "Animals & Pets."
Once I signed up, I looked around. Now, I consider myself pretty adept at being able to navigate around a social app. Not to brag, but I was Friendster user No. 227. (I know, you're impressed).
But I found MeWe incredibly confusing and inscrutable. I looked for a way to sync contacts or invite friends, but couldn't. (I think this is due to its strict privacy, which frankly, great!) But it meant there basically wasn't anything on my main feed (a classic onboarding problem).
Poking around, MeWe has a section of groups and communities you can join based on interests — things like a group for metal detecting, homesteading, etc. When I looked around some of these, they seemed often dead (no posts since 2024), slightly spammy, or written in Chinese.
I tried posting on MeWe. No one replied.
MeWe / Business Insider
There's a reason for that last part: MeWe found some popularity during the Hong Kong protests of 2019 and 2020 due to its pro-privacy and anti-censorship stance as a Facebook alternative.
In the US, MeWe had a similar miniboom among a certain group of users who were disenchanted with Facebook in the early days of 2021.
Facebook had banned a quickly-growing group called "Stop the Steal" dedicated to discussing how Donald Trump had really won the 2020 election. After January 6, other groups and users on the topic were banned, and people fled to a variety of smaller apps — mainly better-known conservative-friendly apps like Parler, Gab, or Rumble, but also to MeWe.
Various groups you can join on MeWe.
MeWe / Business Insider
When Business Insider reported on MeWe a few days after January 6, 2021, it had gained 200,000 new users in the days since Parler had been taken offline by Cloudflare. We wrote:
One glance into the app's many conservative groups reveals plenty of vitriol and misinformation similar to Parler's. "We all know the capital storming had Antifa and bad actors," one MeWe user wrote, repeating the misinformation that it wasn't Trump supporters that rioted but people who oppose fascism.
Look, I don't think anyone credibly thinks MeWe is a serious contender to competing with Facebook. As for how this plays in the FTC's antitrust case, well, I'm not sure.
I think Meta has a claim that other apps like TikTok and YouTube are competitors to Reels, but which apps are or aren't competitors isn't the only aspect of the antitrust case.
Thousands of real estate agents across the US opened their email Saturday night to find an unexpected message from Andy Florance, the CEO of CoStar Group and Homes.com. As the top executive for one of real estate's largest search websites, Florance had a lot on his mind. For months, the industry has been embroiled in a fight over "exclusive inventory" — homes marketed for sale by real estate agents but purposely kept off public search portals like Homes.com or Realtor.com. Florance wasn't writing to complain about this practice, though. He'd set his sights on another target: his company's chief rival, Zillow.
Two days earlier, Zillow had unveiled a new rule threatening to blacklist scores of homes from its well-trafficked website. The surprise announcement took direct aim at exclusive inventory, also known as secret or hidden home listings. A growing number of agents at large brokerages, most notably the national power player Compass, had been hoarding listings and testing the waters by advertising them on their own websites before sharing the homes widely across the internet. Zillow said it would permanently ban from its site any listing that had gone through this preview period. If you're going to market a home somewhere, the company argued, you have to market it everywhere.
Zillow, by far the most popular destination for online home shoppers, framed the move as a defense of consumers: "Fragmented listing access — in which a home is available on one platform but not another, or shared with some agents but not others — creates frustration and distrust," the company said in its announcement. But Florance wasn't having it. He lambasted Zillow's new rule as "an incredible move of audacity and a pure power play of epic proportions." Homes.com, Florance told the agents, would happily welcome any listings scorned by Zillow.
This is the messy state of play in real estate: With sales stuck in a protracted malaise, agent commissions under pressure, and the rules of the game in flux, everyone is scrambling to protect their share of the homebuying pie. Zillow's declaration adds yet another twist, marking an explosive turning point in the long-simmering dispute over exclusive inventory and hidden home listings. The company is flexing its considerable muscle, presenting agents with a daunting choice: Either share your listing with Zillow and everyone else as soon as you so much as stake a sign in the front yard, or explain to your client why their home will never appear on the website that's become synonymous with real estate.
"That's the spark," says Mike DelPrete, a tech strategist and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder. "And now everybody, whether they like it or not, they have to have a position. They have to make some decisions, and they need to act."
Many agents don't bother with exclusive inventory. As soon as they agree to market a home on behalf of a seller, they add it to the multiple listing service, or MLS, a local database that shares the information with other agents, brokerages, and big search portals like Zillow. Once a listing is live in the MLS, it's pretty much everywhere.
But agents have other options that are growing more popular. They can quietly shop a home around to other agents within their brokerage, a practice known as "office exclusives." These are shared via email, word of mouth, or internal listing platforms, so the homes don't actually pop up on the internet for casual browsers to see. Another option is to add the listing to the MLS and advertise the home publicly on the brokerage's website but opt out of the data feeds that share listings with other websites that display homes, including other brokerages and search portals like Zillow. In both instances, a brokerage like Compass, the largest in the country by sales volume, can lure agents and clients with early access to homes they can't find anywhere else. There's been a lot of debate over whether this is actually good for the seller, but the financial upside for the brokerage is enormous.
It's easy to get bogged down in the details of how this all works, and it remains to be seen how Zillow will actually implement these changes. But the spirit of Zillow's new rule, spelled out in last week's announcement, is pretty simple: "If a listing is online, it should be online everywhere." Redfin, another leading search portal, has taken a similar stance, saying it will also ban listings that are not shared everywhere. Both sites notably make exceptions for homes that were originally office exclusives — if a seller wants to remain truly private, they can do so within the walls of their brokerage and turn to Zillow or Redfin later. But as soon as the general public can lay eyes on a home, the broker has a day to share it with everyone through the MLS — or else. (Zillow has said that listings can be unbanned if the seller breaks up with their broker.)
It's not the flex they think it is. It's a tell.
Zillow's hardline stance has already mobilized support. At least two big brokerages — eXp Realty, the third-largest brokerage by sales volume, according to the consulting firm T3 Sixty, and NextHome, which has 6,000 agents nationwide — have made public commitments to abide by Zillow's policy. The Consumer Policy Center, a new nonpartisan think tank, has also come out in support of the new rule.
"We encourage all brokers to support Zillow's efforts to maintain the transparency of real estate markets and prevent their balkanization," Stephen Brobeck, a senior fellow at CPC and a former senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America, said in a statement.
But there are problems with Zillow and Redfin's position. Ironically, they could push more home listings into the shadows by encouraging brokerages like Compass to pursue "office exclusives" rather than sharing homes publicly on the Compass website. They also risk appearing power-hungry and desperate to preserve their web traffic (and bottom lines) at all costs.
"It's not the flex they think it is," says Amanda Orson, the founder and CEO of Galleon, an alternative marketplace that connects homebuyers and sellers directly. "It's a tell. Zillow realized that not having all of the inventory available is their Achilles' heel, and they just telegraphed it."
Glenn Kelman, Redfin's CEO, doesn't see it that way. The search portals, like the MLS, track how long a house has been on the market and whether the seller has dropped the price — data points that end up harming sellers, in Compass CEO Robert Reffkin's telling. If that's the issue, Kelman says he's fine with dropping that info entirely. Redfin has called on MLSes to create an option that would allow agents to share listings while preventing websites from showing price drops and days on market, which Kelman describes as a middle ground. The most important thing, he says, is for consumers to be able to see all the homes no matter which website they visit.
"You shouldn't have to go to 10 different websites to see 10 different sets of inventory," Kelman tells me. "That will be a challenge for consumers."
Here's one thing I'm sure of: This is a mess. There are more than 500 MLSes around the country, each with its own policies and enforcement mechanisms. Compass appears unlikely to back down from exclusive inventory, setting up more battles down the line. In an email to Compass agents the day after Zillow's announcement, Reffkin advised agents to "keep doing what you're doing."
"This moment goes beyond a policy — it's about control versus choice," Reffkin wrote.
Emotions are just running high right now.
For the average American trying to hop into the housing market, the new battle will likely only cause confusion and frustration. Sellers may not know what they're agreeing to when they opt for a limited advertising campaign, or they may turn litigious when they realize their homes have been blacklisted from Zillow. Buyers may be forced to scour a range of websites to get an idea of what's out there, and even then, they could risk overlooking their dream home. Even real estate executives are confused about some of this stuff — now imagine the reaction of a typical buyer or seller, who goes through this kind of transaction only a handful of times in their lives.
When confusion runs rampant among regular consumers — when the very rules of the game are unclear — that's usually a sign that government intervention could be on the way.
"As much as many of us wouldn't like that to happen, it's kind of getting set up to where it could happen," Saul Klein, a longtime real estate executive and the CEO of the San Diego MLS, tells me. "And so I think we've got to be real careful and work not to keep confusing the marketplace."
Indeed, Andy Florance's email to agents over the weekend included a postscript with a link to contact the Department of Justice. But government action is hardly guaranteed, and it could be years before anything happens. In the interim, expect the fight to get uglier.
"There is something larger at stake than just who gets control of the inventory," Kelman tells me. "It's the US housing market, and we're supposed to all be at an age where we actually care about that. And I think everybody does, but emotions are just running high right now."
James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.
When Gustavo Schwed was considering a career in finance in the late 1980s, climbing the corporate ladder was a preoccupation for working people, not students.
"People didn't really give their job as much thought until, really, the summer between their junior and senior year — if then," said Schwed, a New York University professor who started in investment banking and then worked in private equity for about 25 years.
The path to enter Wall Street has changed radically since then. Investment banks now compete with multibillion-dollar hedge funds, private equity firms, "elite boutique" banks, and even tech companies for talent, resulting in a mad rush for recruits earlier than ever.
Students who aspire to become dealmakers, traders, and investors must begin preparing as soon as their freshman year to win the internships that open the right doors. Those who wait or don't learn the recruiting game quickly enough risk being left behind. (This is the first in a series of stories about how the path to Wall Street is changing and the impact it is having on young people and the industry at large.)
Even willing participants recognize the absurdity. A Wharton student who recently signed a 2026 internship offer at an investment bank put it this way: "I am a sophomore in college, and it's kind of outrageous that we have to decide at this age — I just turned 20 — what my first job is out of college."
So why are they doing it? What is motivating record numbers of students in some cases to pursue Wall Street jobs when the path is such an obstacle course? And do they understand how crushing an entry-level job on Wall Street can be, with stories of people collapsing from exhaustion?
To help answer these questions, Business Insider sent out a survey to undergraduate finance students and members of campus finance clubs — which are often used as a stepping stone to a Wall Street internship — asking about their career tracks, expectations, and motivations. In addition to the 150 survey responses we received across about a dozen schools (which is not a scientifically representative sample), we also interviewed about 30 students from schools such as the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, and New York University. They asked to be anonymous to protect their future careers.
The students we talked to expressed complicated feelings about their chosen career track. Some of them have embraced the challenge, while others said they worried about the industry's reputation for chewing up young talent. They are skeptical of Wall Street institutions' recent promises to do more to protect them from burnout, but ultimately feel they have little choice if they want a career in investment banking, private equity, or hedge funds.
Investment banking still rules at the entry level
It used to be that investment banking was the only point of entry to the vast majority of finance jobs, but many hedge funds and private equity firms, including the investment behemoths Balyasny and Citadel, are now investing in their own training programs.
Despite the growing number of options, most of our survey respondents — 74% — said they planned to start their finance careers through the traditional investment banking path. In interviews, students said they saw this path as opening the most doors, making it ideal for people who aren't quite sure what they want to be when they grow up.
As one Columbia junior who has secured an investment bank internship explained: Investment banking is simply ground zero for every other job in finance. (It also offers the most entry-level jobs in finance.)
"There's so many avenues in which you can kind of exit," the Columbia student said, referencing opportunities to get recruited to work for hedge funds, private equity, and even private credit, which raises money to make unregulated loans.
The Wharton student agreed, saying the range of possibilities was the most attractive reason to pursue banking after graduation.
"If I like it, I can stay with it. If I don't, there are other opportunities out there," he said. "I think working at a job like investment banking keeps those doors open."
The downsides to a career in finance
When the students were asked to rate their level of concern with five common topics relevant to a finance career — on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 being not concerned about a given point and 4 being very concerned — long hours had the highest average score, followed by high stress.
Entry-level investment bankers, who carry titles like analyst and associate, are known to clock in anywhere from 80 to 100 hours a week, often working on tedious tasks like formatting PowerPoint presentations and cleaning up Excel sheets. The junior banker lifestyle can be so grueling that entire businesses have spawned to poke fun at it online. Hours can be less onerous at private equity and other so-called buyside firms, but still much more than a 9-to-5 job.
The debate about junior banker working conditions intensified during the pandemic, when M&A jumped to record levels, and again last year following the death of a 35-year-old Bank of America associate. His cause of death was a coronary blood clot, which prompted widespread speculation and drew attention within the bank to what current and former employees said were weaknesses in systems for tracking junior banker hours. Bank of America and JPMorgan later announced new guardrails meant to prevent burnout.
The students who spoke with BI, however, said they didn't believe Wall Street's hard-charging apprenticeship model would change.
"Who are the decision-makers? It's people who are 20, 30 years older. They don't care. It's just the generation they were raised in," a junior at New York University said.
A second NYU student described the long hours and tedious work as a rite of passage — a badge of honor, of sorts.
"I feel like it's a culture of giving back, but in a negative way. People I talk to are like: 'Wow, you guys are so lucky as analysts, you guys can actually go home to sleep. Back in my day, you slept at the desk.'"
What they want
To understand students' motivations for pursuing finance careers, we asked them to score the importance of five factors they might want in their first job on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 being "not important" and 4 "very important."
Students rated compensation and exit opportunities, or the ability to transition to better roles or firms, as the two most important factors.
Investment banks pay their entry-level analysts upward of $110,000 in base salary with year-end bonuses that can add anywhere from $40,000 to $60,000 to their yearly compensation, depending on deal activity. (By comparison, the average yearly wage in the US is about $66,000, according to the Social Security Administration.)
Finances also ranked highly when it came to long-term goals. When asked about their future careers, the majority rated financial freedom as the most important quality. Meaningful work and the ability to control their own schedules ranked lowest in importance on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being the most important.
What students really want could also be gleaned from their write-in answers to other survey questions. When asked about their dream finance jobs, many of them spoke of investing or becoming their own boss one day.
Some 29 out of 150 write-in responses included aspirations of entrepreneurship, running their own business, or holding a C-Suite position.
These responses included aspirations like being an "entrepreneur," "starting my own business," "running my own investment firm," as well as becoming a "CFO of a Fortune 500 company" and "CIO of a hedge fund."
Many of these answers also overlapped with buy-side aspirations — like students who said their dream was to "own my own hedge fund," or "run my own small PE firm."
Eighty-five answers (equivalent to about 57% of respondents) mentioned private equity, hedge funds, or venture capital in some way. Notably, just 15 answers about long-term dream jobs in finance mentioned banking.
Determined to succeed
Students interviewed by BI seemed to understand the challenges they could face on Wall Street. Some said they welcomed the grind.
"My goal, especially right out of college in those first five years from when I'm 22 to like 27, is to work as hard as I can," the sophomore at Wharton told BI, adding, "I think people that work hard get rewarded."
Other students seemed to see Wall Street's hard-charging apprenticeship model as the price of entry. An NYU student whose older sibling also took the investment banking career track said she was nervous but pushing ahead.
"My dad was really worried," she said of her sibling's early banking career. "It does scare me, but that's just part of the job. We already know that. You know this going into it."
Of course, few undergrads have actually experienced 80- or 100-hour workweeks, as another Georgetown student noted.
"Saying that to a lot of people who have not worked even, like, 40 hours in a week before in their lives with no conceptualization of a normal workweek — that's going to go in one ear and come out the other," the student said.
This student avoided the traditional investment banking route specifically because of its reputation for grinding down young talent.
"Part of my consideration for asset management was definitely like, I would not risk my own mortality by a career choice," he told BI.
And while most seemed to accept the prospect of being tethered to their desks, one student said she planned to push back if demands got too onerous.
"Any job, regardless of exit opportunities, how much you're passionate about the job, how much larger your pay — it should not be killing its employees," said the second NYU student, who is set to intern at an investment bank this summer. "There's just certain things I won't compromise regardless of outcome. I think dying is one of those things. You know, if you think you're going to be hospitalized in a day, you feel faint in a day, like, I think you just have to set boundaries."
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Guy Fieri said his youngest son Ryder tried negotiating a different deal for his inheritance.
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Guy Fieri's rule for his children has always been: "If you want this cheese, you got to get two degrees."
Fieri told Business Insider that his son Ryder, a freshman in college, has tried to negotiate.
"He's like, 'Dad, come on, give me a break. How about if I get great grades the whole time?'" Fieri said.
Guy Fieri may have a $100 million contract with Food Network, but that hasn't changed the celebrity chef's rule regarding his children's future inheritance.
"If you want this cheese, you got to get two degrees," he told them, borrowing a quote from NBA legend Shaquille O'Neal.
Fieri's eldest son Hunter, 28, will graduate with an MBA from the University of Miami in May. Meanwhile, his 26-year-old nephew Jules, whom Fieri has helped raise since his sister died in 2011, recently graduated from the law program at Loyola Marymount University.
"Poor Ryder is just finishing his freshman year at San Diego State University," Fieri said of his youngest son, who is 19. "The boys rib him all the time. They're like, 'You know, we're done. You still have to go finish college and go get your postgraduate.'"
Fieri said his son Ryder has tried to negotiate his way out of their arrangement.
"He's like, 'Dad, come on, give me a break. How about if I get great grades the whole time?'" Fieri recalled with a laugh.
The celebrity chef told BI he's passing down lessons his father taught him.
"It's a thing that my dad said to me when I was a kid. He said, 'When I die, I'm leaving you nothing except a funeral bill,'" Fieri said. "It's a joke because my dad already gave me everything. My dad gave me an education. My dad gave me awareness. My dad gave me the tools of life. It was very clear at a very young age that I was going to have to go make it on my own."
"And these boys all know that I'm going to back them up and be there for them and help them out," Fieri added. "But I told them, 'You gotta go do this. You gotta go stake your claim and go figure out what you're going to do.'"
Guy Fieri with his son Hunter, who will graduate with an MBA this year.
Manny Hernandez/Getty Images
It's something that Fieri instilled in his children from a young age, even making them drive his dad's old truck when they were in high school.
"Hunter went to a private school, and all the kids at his school drove Range Rovers, Corvettes, Mercedes, and here's Hunter in a 1990 green Chevy pickup," Fieri recalled.
Hunter saved money for a new truck by washing dishes while working his way up at one of Fieri's restaurants. Then, the 1990 green Chevy pickup was passed down to Jules.
"By the time Ryder got his license and needed something to drive, the green truck's dead," Fieri said. "So Ryder is positioning and said, 'Maybe I could drive one of your trucks.'"
Fieri wanted to pass down the lessons he learned from his father to his children.
Frederick M. Brown/GettyImages
But Fieri wasn't letting his youngest son off the hook.
"We bring everybody together for Ryder's 16th birthday, and we give him the key," Fieri said. "He hits the button, and it's my parents' old champagne-colored minivan."
"Ryder said, 'No way. There's no way I'm driving that,'" he continued. "And I said, 'Then ride your bike.'"
Ryder works for San Diego State's basketball team when he's not in classes, while Hunter is helping his dad on "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" and "Guy's Grocery Games." While on set, Fieri said he had everybody taste his new Waterloo flavors — Lemon Italian Ice, Huckleberry Cobbler, and Spiced Mango — while developing the recipes.
Although Ryder still has many years of education ahead of him, Fieri said everyone is looking forward to a "big graduation" reward this summer in honor of Hunter and Jules' recent accomplishments.
"The whole family, we're all going to Italy!" Fieri said.
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