• Investment firm Azoria has delayed the launch of a Tesla ETF after Elon Musk unveiled his "America Party."
• Azoria CEO and ex-DOGE advisor James Fishback slammed Musk's move, saying he was undermining Tesla.
• Tesla investors are uneasy after Musk returned to politics despite saying he would focus on the EV giant.

Elon Musk's decision to set up a new political party is already proving a headache for Tesla.

James Fishback, CEO of investment firm Azoria, said on Sunday that the firm — which has stated its opposition to DEI targets and "woke" companies — will postpone its planned public listing of a Tesla ETF, which would invest in the EV giant's shares and options.

In a post on X, Fishback, who previously worked as an outside advisor to DOGE, said that the billionaire had "gone too far" with his latest plan to set up the "America Party" and take on both Republicans and Democrats.

Fishback, who included a letter to Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm in his X post, added that the new party "creates a conflict" with Musk's responsibilities as CEO of Tesla and "actively undermines" the company's mission.

"I encourage the Board to meet immediately and ask Elon to clarify his political ambitions and evaluate whether they are compatible with his full-time obligations to Tesla as CEO," said Fishback.

Tesla's share price was down as much as 7% premarket on Monday, as investors expressed unease over Musk's decision to dive back into politics.

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wrote in a Sunday note that investors were feeling a "sense of exhaustion" over Musk's new political party.

The longtime Tesla bear said that Musk, who told investors in April that he would step back from his role in the Trump administration to focus on the beleaguered EV maker, was going in "exactly the opposition direction" to what Tesla shareholders wanted.

Ives also warned that the billionaire's extremely public falling out with Trump could create additional hurdles for Tesla in the future.

Other investors expressed similar frustrations. "Waymo has solved autonomous driving. Meanwhile, Elon is starting a new political party," wrote Tesla investor and regular Musk critic Ross Gerber on X.

An outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump, Fishback told Business Insider in January he had served as an outside advisor to DOGE, and proposed the idea of a "DOGE dividend" earlier this year.

The investment banker, who has said that he owns Tesla stock and that the EV giant is Azoria's largest position, also accused Musk of being fixated on "sabotaging President Trump" and said the Tesla CEO was an "absolute failure" at DOGE in a series of posts on X.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment sent outside normal working hours.

• Lawyers have left the federal government as Donald Trump has targeted the nation's workforce.
• Some typical off-ramps have closed as Trump takes a light touch with corporate crime.
• Nine current and former government lawyers and recruiters told BI about the harsh legal job market.

Whenever a new president takes office, the revolving door between the federal government and the private sector starts to spin a little faster. Agency heads, their deputies, and their deputies' deputies typically exit to make room for the new president's picks, and take up jobs in C-suites and think tanks.

At elite law firms, the practice became so routine that it was the subject of a running joke. "Out with WilmerHale, in with Jones Day," law professor Orin Kerr tweeted when Donald Trump won in 2016, a nod to each firm's ideological reputation. In 2020, when Joe Biden won, he flipped the names.

In 2024, Trump and his allies made clear that they were going to do things differently.

It wasn't just Biden's appointees who needed to go; it was thousands of federal workers who the administration saw as roadblocks to its agenda. The goal, Trump aide Russell Vought said, was to "put them in trauma" and make them want to quit. The administration has also prioritized immigration, while de-emphasizing financial regulation and corporate crime prosecution — closing some of the usual off-ramps.

Now, the revolving door is jammed.

Recruiters and lawyers in and outside government told Business Insider that it's increasingly hard to move from public to private sector work: there's a large supply of job seekers, and comparatively low demand for their expertise and experience.

One federal lawyer who recently resigned said it took him months to find a new job despite working in a prestigious role, forcing him to stay at his job longer than he wanted. "I had a responsibility to my family to bring home a paycheck," he told Business Insider.

White collar slowdown

Typically, the roughly 40,000 lawyers who work for the US government can parlay their experience drafting, interpreting, and enforcing a dense thicket of laws and regulations into well-paid jobs for law firms and large businesses.

Over the last few months, law firms across Washington and in New York have been inundated with résumés, and they're being choosy, especially when hiring white-collar criminal defense lawyers — many of whom are former federal prosecutors.

"White-collar demand is down across the board," whether it comes to recruiting from the government or poaching a partner with an established clientele from another law firm, said Karen Vladeck, the founder of Risepoint Search Partners, a legal recruiting firm.

"For your standard white-collar partner right now, they want to see twice as much business as they want to see from another practice." In other words, law firms are skeptical that hotshot criminal defense lawyers can reel in the kind of revenue that they used to.

Another headhunter told BI that only "very senior" lawyers coming out of US Attorney's Offices were getting interviews — and even those candidates were taking haircuts on compensation. The same job seeker who might have been able to get an offer for $1 million or $1.2 million in the past as a defense-and-investigations specialist might get $750,000 today, the headhunter said.

Another issue, said Jack Zaremski, who runs Hanover Search Partners, is that Big Law firms already have a deep bench of white-collar litigators — and a partner at a large law firm said there isn't much work to go around for colleagues who focus on that kind of work.

White-collar criminal enforcement has been declining since the Obama administration, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which compiles federal law-enforcement data. The number of white-collar criminal cases filed yearly fell from a high of more than 10,000 in the mid-1990s to about 4,300 today.

Though prosecutions were down, there was still work for Big Law's ex-prosecutors keeping their clients out of court. After the 2009 financial crash, banks needed outside help dealing with crisis-related investigations, the large law firm partner said. The 2012 Libor scandal and similar rate-rigging allegations led to even more work. That has pretty much dried up, the partner said, and banks' in-house lawyers can do some of the work that they used to have to outsource.

Trump, who was convicted of falsifying business records, has shown skepticism for white-collar criminal enforcement. His Justice Department has slashed its corruption unit and made moves to close its tax division and fold its responsibilities into other parts of the agency. One of his early executive orders paused cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans paying bribes to foreign officials to get business. (Several have since resumed.) He has also pardoned people and companies that collectively owed $1.3 billion for offenses like securities fraud and tax evasion, erasing their debts to the government and their victims.

Matthew Burke, a former federal prosecutor on the team led by Jack Smith that charged Donald Trump with keeping classified documents after his presidency and trying to subvert the 2020 election, said that while his experience deterred some potential employers, it attracted others. Scale LLP, a firm of about 80 lawyers that focuses on the tech sector, said in May that Burke would lead its investigations practice.

"There undoubtedly were doors that were closed to me because of what I've done, but there will also be doors that will be opened," he said. It's been "informative to know what doors have been closed and which have been opened," he added.

It's not just criminal cases where the administration's approach is being felt. Some financial regulatory lawyers are also stuck in a tightening job market, as the administration attempts to pare down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A former bureau lawyer said that among some people who have managed to stay employed, the common attitude is "They're gonna have to drag me out of here."

The Trump administration's efforts to reduce headcount at the Bureau have been put on hold by the courts. The CFPB employees' union said in an email that some of its members have taken other jobs, but "many more remain ready to get back to the work we were hired to do."

Job market challenges aren't universal

Some CFPB managers have been able to parlay their experience into jobs at financial technology firms, law firms, and banks or credit unions, the former bureau lawyer said. And some people leaving the Justice Department are still in high demand. Deep familiarity with international trade restrictions and export-control laws makes some lawyers valuable to tech companies worried about running afoul of US sanctions and trade restrictions. Antitrust experience is also a plus, Vladeck and others said.

Charles Cain, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission's FCPA Unit, went to work at EY, according to a LinkedIn post. He was one of at least five lawyers who announced their departures from the unit at a meeting in late March, according to Mark Yost, a former member of the unit who was present.

Some former feds are having a much tougher time on the job market. Waves of civil rights lawyers have been fired or left the Justice Department and other agencies, like the Department of Education.

"There are only so many civil rights-related jobs out there, and a lot of people are competing for them," said Stacey Young, a former Justice Department attorney who leads the networking group Justice Connection.

Despite competition for open roles, relatively few lawyers, regardless of where they work, are quitting or being terminated without something lined up. While the D.C. area unemployment rate has ticked upward, the national rate for legal occupations — a group of about 1.8 million people of whom 1.1 million are lawyers — was 2.1% in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, below the 4% average across the US workforce. For lawyers, a smaller group of workers for which estimates are less reliable, the first-quarter unemployment rate was about 1%.

Still, a glut of supply on the job market means lawyers will need to broaden their search. Vladeck tells job seekers to think of landing their next job outside government as a Trivial Pursuit pie, with each slice representing a more niche avenue for employment: boutique firms, in-house counsel roles, nonprofits, or legal-adjacent roles.

"In order to get a job in this market, you have to pay attention to each of those slices," Vladeck said. "You can't rely on the DOJ to Big Law path."

Have a tip? Know more? Reach Jack Newsham via email ([email protected]) or via Signal (+1-314-971-1627). Do not use a work device.

• Peter Deng, a former VP at OpenAI, said he looks at teams as if they were products.
• The most successful groups he's worked with had varied skillsets, he said on "Lenny's Podcast."
• Deng said he prioritized staffing his teams with a series of specialists, like the Avengers, rather than generalists.

When investor Peter Deng worked at OpenAI, he treated building a team like a puzzle. All the right pieces had to be in the right places.

"As a leader, you have to set up your team the right way," Deng, who previously was OpenAI's VP of consumer product, said on an episode of Lenny's Podcast. "You have to really think about your team as a product and what are the various pieces you need to really stretch the gamut of what you're thinking about."

Deng, now a general partner at Felicis Ventures, has previously contributed to a series of well-known features, including ChatGPT Enterprise, Facebook's Messenger app, and Uber Reserve.

The VC said the best teams he's worked with throughout his career were those composed of people with diverse skill sets.

"The teams that I've helped build are — the most successful ones are a team of Avengers that are just very different, have very different superpowers," he said. "But together, you as the leader are the one who's helping adjudicate any differences or any disagreements, but you know you're getting the best outcome when everyone's pulling and obsessing over a different thing."

Deng looks to staff his teams with a series of problem-solvers, he said. He thinks about needs that aren't being met, and then works to hire specialists who can close the gap.

"It's almost like you're playing an RPG where everyone has different sliders and you have to create this super team where everyone actually spikes in different ways," he said.

When Deng would search for new additions, he said he largely looked for two traits in applicants: the potential for autonomy and an appetite for continued improvement. Deng did not respond to a request for comment by Business Insider.

"I think the growth mindset thing is so important to me — that we build an org where people are self-reflective, and want to get better, and take that feedback, and give that feedback," he said. "And it just is this meta unlock that I found to be true."

• After a major heartbreak, I pack up and move to a new city — sometimes, even a different continent.
• It makes it easier for me to heal from the heartbreak.
• I've done this three times, and I'm not about to stop now.

Some people cope with a breakup by starting a new hobby, throwing themselves immediately back into dating, or finally giving in to those BetterHelp ads. Me? I pack up my life and book a one-way flight to a new city, sometimes even a different continent.

It started in 2014 after a brutal three-month run: a breakup, a messy rebound, and getting fired from a brand-new job. I was sitting at home in Johannesburg, doomscrolling on Facebook, when an email came through from an airline offering a deal on flights to Cape Town, South Africa. My interest? Piqued. My credit card? Ready to swipe. My impulse control? At an all-time low.

I booked a flight for the following week and immediately began boxing up my room at my mom's into three small boxes and sending out invites for farewell drinks at my favorite bar. Little did I know, this major life decision I had made in less than 60 seconds would go on to start a pattern of shaking up my surroundings to an extreme after heartbreak. I did it again in 2021, when I left Cape Town for Namibia, and last year, I said bon voyage to South Africa and moved to France.

Moving after a break-up means I get to break old habits

Is making a major move after a breakup a little dramatic? Absolutely, but there is a method to my madness. Every move forces me to confront the post-breakup identity crisis and answer the million-dollar question: Who am I without anyone else?

Starting over in a new place strips away all the relationship compromises, shared daily routines, and habits. The only thing left is me: my habits, my desires, and my identity beyond another person.

It gives me the space to figure out where I may have been performing in the relationship and identify where I lost myself. The crisis I had where I wondered whether I was changing my mind about having kids? It turns out I was never unsure about having children — I always knew deep down that it wasn't my path. I was just too scared to choose myself and lose my partner in the process.

During my last relationship, I stopped doing all the things I love: DJing, hiking, and going to festivals. It wasn't until it ended and I moved yet again that I realized how much I'd been missing out on when I found myself in Paris at a rave, cheezing so hard my cheeks hurt, asking myself, "How did I forget how much I loved this?"

It's taught me the art of being alone, not lonely

I believe my heartbreak wanderlust has helped me avoid the trap of using other people as emotional Band-Aids instead of processing the pain and grief after a break-up. My self-imposed exile gives me the space to sit with my emotions without any familiar distractions (after all, you can't call up your roster or ex when you're 7,000 miles away in France). It's a launchpad to a life of independence and self-confidence, where I'm showing myself every day how capable I am without someone else, each time I figure out something new.

That said, should everyone move to a new city after a break-up? If you have a remote career like mine and no responsibilities tying you to a specific location, I'd say go for it. Being in a completely different city soothes the sting of rumination because nothing is familiar.

The first time I moved after a breakup was on impulse. When I realized it was helping me process what had happened and improve my relationship with myself, I got curious and wanted to know why. I learned that when I create new memories and daily habits, I'm training my brain to form new associations that aren't tied to my ex. So when I move, I'm rewiring neural pathways, and I'm spending less energy stuck in a loop replaying the same old story.

But if you can't move cities, plan a solo trip for two weeks. You'll still get to reap the benefits of taking yourself out of the familiar and give your heart and brain the chance to reset and interrupt the emotional ties.

It's an incredible heartbreak cure, and reader, it's probably the greatest gift I've given myself.

• Joan Nguyen co-founded Bumo to help parents book last-minute childcare.
• The app features vetted childcare providers and works similarly to Airbnb.
• The pitch deck has raised $10 million so far, with another $10 million seed round coming up.

Modern life makes it easy to order late-night cars home, book spontaneous vacation rentals, and get lightning-fast takeout. But getting childcare on short notice? For many that's still a pipe dream.

Joan Nguyen founded Bumo, an app that allows parents to book empty slots at local childcare centers, after starting two childcare ventures during the pandemic.

From working with parents, Nguyen said she realized that they often needed what she calls "fractional childcare," such as when their nanny called in sick or something pressing came up at work.

"As a parent, I also felt the pain of not being able to get childcare when you absolutely needed it," Nguyen told Business Insider. "Why is it easier for me to find a dog walker than it is to find a sitter or a nanny?"

Launched in 2024 after raising $10 million, the Bumo app was co-founded by Nguyen and Chriselle Lim. It's a continuation of a joint co-working and childcare center they launched in late 2019, followed by BumoBrain, an online learning platform they created at the height of the pandemic to help working parents.

This week, Bumo is preparing to announce a $10 million seed funding round, led by venture capital firms Offline Ventures and True Ventures, Bumo shared exclusively with Business Insider.

The app, which has about 10,000 users and offers services in 200 locations within 13 states, works similarly to Airbnb. Parents can filter and sift through childcare options from drop-in daycares to summer camps, some of them offering same-day availability.

Nguyen said Bumo also fits in with the consumer demand "to want things instantly," now accustomed to quick bookings and deliveries. Meanwhile, "you see childcare as this kind of monolithic thing that hasn't really changed a lot," she said.

Filling a gap in childcare demands

Bumo aims to offer more convenience and fill a gap in the US childcare system.

Parents are more isolated than they have been in generations, not always being able to rely on family members to help them. Many also can't afford full-time daycare, but still need some part-time childcare options.

To ensure safety, Nguyen said every service listed on Bumo is licensed by their respective state and has a "digital footprint" including past reviews. Bumo staff also interviews with each facility at least once a year (sometimes virtually depending on the provider's location) to make sure that they're up-to-date on background checks and that all staff have proper certifications.

Nguyen said that Bumo only uses original photography and videos for each facility instead of stock photos. Parents can also upload photos in their reviews.

Bumo's next step is to keep expanding in other cities; right now, Los Angeles has the highest number of childcare offerings on the app. The goal is to increase Bumo's density in San Francisco and to introduce its service in New York City.

Read the 16-page pitch deck Bumo used to secure $10 million.

Bumo opens with a positive press quote.

It sums up the key benefit of Bumo: expediency.

Introducing the founding team and each member's accomplishments.

The slide features the team members' experience levels, follower counts, and press mentions.

It defines the app and what makes it stand out.

The slide includes a graphic of the app in action.

It addresses the core childcare problems working parents face.

A simple graphic illustrates the obstacles parents face in securing childcare.

It then shows how childcare providers benefit from the app.

It highlights the practicality of the app: childcare providers have empty slots they want to fill, incentivizing them to use Bumo.

The next slide demonstrates how simple the app is to use.

It uses a similar calendar booking system to Airbnb or Rover.

The deck emphasizes lower costs.

Parents don't have to commit to full programs they can't afford.

Another slide sums up the key benefits for everyone.

It emphasizes the mutual relationship between parents and childcare providers.

The deck then transitions into Bumo's accomplishments.

It addresses how many families currently use Bumo, the number of providers, and the social media reach. It also shows investors the opportunities for growth.

Another slide highlights Bumo's commitment to digital outreach.

It shows a concerted strategy to promote the app in smaller parenting communities on Facebook and Instagram.

The presentation winds down by zooming out on the market.

It illustrates how big the childcare market is.

It draws comparisons to other successful apps.

It also asserts that, unlike the other apps, Bumo has no competition so far.

The second-to-last slide shows Bumo's projected growth.

It includes other methods of revenue and its target numbers for childcare service expansion.

The deck ends with a strong tagline.

It brands Bumo as a company that also cares about parents' well-being and understands their struggles.

• $6 billion New Holland Capital has started a new unit to recruit internal investment staff.
• The firm had previously invested in external funds in a structure similar to a fund-of-funds.
• Former North Rock Capital COO Omar Qaiser was hired to lead the new platform named Plum Island.

The competition for top investing talent is higher than ever.

Megafunds like Izzy Englander's Millennium, Ken Griffin's Citadel, and Steve Cohen's Point72 offer moneymakers tens of millions in potential payouts and top-tier perks. Up-and-coming funds and new launches such as Verition, Walleye, and Jain Global are constantly scouring the landscape for investors. Explosive growth in private market assets means PE funds and new private credit firms need head count.

In short, it's a labor market that favors the employee, not the employer. Englander himself called it a "talent bubble" in 2023.

Despite this dynamic, $6 billion New York-based New Holland Capital is expanding from its traditional, fund-of-funds structure with a new unit focused on bringing investment talent in-house. Plum Island Partners, named after a small spit of land off Long Island discovered by Dutch explorers in the 17th century, will be run by Omar Qaiser, according to a note sent to clients seen by Business Insider. Qaiser is the former COO of investment platform North Rock Capital.

"While the majority of our platform will continue to be composed of external teams, we've now established Plum Island Partners to serve as New Holland's internal trading and operations arm," the note reads.

"While our focus on niche, capacity-constrained strategies will not change, this evolution allows us to expand the universe of potential PMs to include those who have no interest in running a business," the note adds.

When it comes to potential payouts, small platforms cannot compete with firms like Millennium and Citadel. But there are investment strategies that can only manage a certain amount of money — say $100 million — that are not of interest to the biggest players because the potential returns are too marginal to make a difference, several smaller platforms have said.

Some tenured investors are also looking for more customized risk parameters, which the largest funds struggle to offer given their organizations' size.

It's why places like New Holland, among other smaller funds, have decided to bring more talent in-house even as bigger firms like Millennium increasingly allocate to external managers.

"We're trying to be indifferent — we want to find good talent and have a home for them," said New Holland CEO Scott Radke, who noted that he still expects most of the firm's investors to be external.

He said the manager has more than 40 external managers right now, while Plum Island has one internal PM, an equity capital markets investor. The new unit expects to add several more this year, but has no set goal.

New Holland began as an investment advisor for Dutch pension plans and has since become independent. Last month, it hired former Brevan Howard executive Stephan Brohme as its chief risk officer.

• Eli Lilly has outpaced Ozempic-maker Novo Nordisk in the race to develop new incretin drugs.
• The company is set to capture 50% of the $95 billion obesity market by 2050.
• We got a glimpse into Eli Lilly's upcoming menu of metabolic drugs to treat obesity, preserve muscle, and more.

In sports, the best athletes compete against themselves. In the world of weight loss drugs, Eli Lilly is quickly becoming that all-star player that bests the competition every time.

"Lilly is the king. They're the king of the mountain," Deutsche Bank's James Shin, director of biopharma equity research, told Business Insider.

Investors are increasingly buzzing about the world's most valuable healthcare company, the one that they say has left its rivals in the dust.

Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk, the company that developed Ozempic, initially seemed unbeatable in the new market for injectable diabetes and weight loss medications. But ever since 2022, when Eli Lilly's tirzepatide was first approved for use in the US, Lilly's been steadily gaining ground.

Now, the company is developing a menu of other obesity drugs that could cater to anyone. There's a pill for weight loss instead of an injection. There are drugs that tap into new appetite-regulating hormones; an antibody injection to protect muscles while burning up excess fat.

"Investors are starting to talk about Lilly on their own cue, rather than in the context of Novo," Asad Haider, Goldman Sachs's lead analyst for US pharmaceuticals, told BI. "They are at the forefront of almost every existing as well as emerging mechanism across anti-obesity, and it's going to be really hard, in our view, to leapfrog them."

So, we caught up with Eli Lilly Executive Vice President Ken Custer, the man overseeing it all. Custer is the new president of Lilly's cardiometabolic health division, and in a recent one-on-one with BI, he shared the strategy behind the company's success so far and how they plan to maintain their big lead in the long run.

Eli Lilly is set to dominate the market by 2030

Eli Lilly's tirzepatide, the drug currently leading the charge, is the strongest weight loss drug available so far. While Novo's Wegovy supercharges one of our hunger hormones (GLP-1), Lilly's Mounjaro has two (GLP-1 and GIP), making it a more powerful weekly shot to control appetite and blood sugar.

One recent head-to-head study showed patients who spent a year on tirzepatide lost, on average, about 15% of their body weight, while those on semaglutide (the drug in Ozempic) lost just 8%.

By 2030, Goldman is forecasting, conservatively, that Lilly will capture nearly 50% of the $95 billion anti-obesity medicine market. That forecast includes the injectable drugs we have now, like Mounjaro and Ozempic (for diabetes) plus Wegovy and Zepbound (for obesity) but may also extend to new drugs in the pipeline, both at Eli Lilly and coming from other drugmakers with smaller portfolios. But right now, Lilly seems to be ahead of the competition in just about every category.

In June, at the American Diabetes Association's big annual research conference (ADA), Lilly's updates from ongoing trials were "incrementally better" than investors had expected, Haider said.

"Then on the other side of that, a lot of their late-stage competition — specifically Novo Nordisk, but also Amgen — the updates that you got from them at ADA had a little bit more hair on them, and were frankly met with more disappointment."

1. Speed: 'This ratchet mindset' drives Lilly to develop drugs faster and faster

Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks shared some of the secrets behind the big speed up that's shifted the company from an 11-year average time to market (when he first became CEO in 2017) to a six-year average now.

"We really track things very carefully on speed," Ricks said in an interview last October on the "All-In" podcast. "The big idea is like this ratchet mindset that every time we beat a timeline, that becomes the new norm. We just re-benchmark internally."

Case in point: It took about two decades to get Trulicity, Eli Lilly's first GLP-1 drug, on the market. Tirzepatide? About eight years — "blistering speed," Custer said.

2. Convenience: a cheap(er) pill to rival Ozempic

Eli Lilly is in the late stages of developing the first Ozempic-like pill, designed to be just as strong as Novo's injectable drug. The drug, orforglipron, could be available as early as 2026.

There are only about 8 million people currently on Mounjaro, Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound in the US, which speaks to both the high cost of the injectable drugs and the supply bottlenecks.

"The injectable GLP-1s are wonderful medicines, but manufacturing those medicines is hard," Custer said. "The factories that you have to use to do the sterile filling of the vials, the syringes, the devices, the cartridges are extraordinarily hard to build and operate."

Custer believes a daily pill could completely change the game — opening up this new class of hormone-mimicking weight loss and diabetes drugs called incretins to hundreds of millions more people across the globe.

"I think we're at a defining moment in our company's history," Custer said. He added that he sees this as "a generational opportunity that is probably close to what was seen with the early days of vaccines and antibiotics."

Eli Lilly is already manufacturing hundreds of thousands of orforglipron pills, just to make sure it will be able to meet the demand if the drug is approved for use in the US next year. That's a somewhat risky move, considering that the company's final Phase 3 clinical trials that the US Food and Drug administration requires to evaluate the drug aren't even done yet. If approved, orforglipron should also (thankfully) have a more pronounceable brand name.

Expect the cost of the pill to rival a "fancy gym membership," Shin said, meaning maybe around $300 for one month — a quarter of the cost of some injectable weight-loss drugs.

Other companies' attempts to develop a new weight loss pill have been lackluster. Pfizer ditched its obesity pill candidate earlier this year, while Novo Nordisk's pill version of semaglutide, called Rybelsus, is not nearly as effective as Ozempic: Most patients on the pill lose less than 5% of their body weight, while people using the weekly shot can often achieve 10-15% weight loss, or more.

3. Creating a laundry list of new options to get ahead

The north star of Eli Lilly's strategy now is variety — developing a broader range of options for consumers than any of their competitors.

"If you have a billion people around the world or more living with overweight or obesity, they're not all going to be helped by one medicine," Custer said. "We see this segmenting it into several logical categories."

The shift is already underway to find new weight loss options that will harness different hunger hormones (like amylin), use new routes of administration (pills or IVs instead of just injection pens), and have different dosing schedules (daily, weekly, or monthly).

"They're trying to address every type of patient," Shin said.

Here's the menu, beyond orforglipron:

• Bimagrumab: Looking to protect muscle while you lose fat? This is an Eli Lilly drug which may become available after orforglipron, if the mid-stage trials go well in the next couple of years.

  In the most recent trial results, the company shared on bimagrumab at ADA, patients on the drug achieved 100% fat loss, essentially preserving all their muscles. This idea of making sure patients lose the right kind of weight — not compromising their strength just to slim down — is the holy grail in incretin drug development right now, generating tons of buzz and investment.

• Retatrutide: If it's more powerful drugs you're after, then there's the "king kong" triple agonist that the company has been working on. It won't likely be ready to approve until late 2026, at the very earliest, but in clinical trials, it has shown weight loss on par with bariatric surgery, and some patients have lost more than a third of their total body weight, requiring entirely new wardrobes.
• Eloralintide: Finally, there's Lilly's investigational drug that mimics amylin, another metabolism-regulating hormone. It's still early days for eloralintide and for amylin medications in general. So it's possible that competitors like Novo Nordisk or Amgen could develop a compelling amylin drug before Eli Lilly does.

"What's exciting is we feel like we're leading in most, if not all of those categories, but we'll come up with new categories," Custer said. "It is really about tailoring. I think bimagrumab and eloralintide and retatrutide and orforglipron are really the first part of that story, but of course, we have other ideas we're working on as well."

Investors want in on that action. Both Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank sent BI disclosure statements for this story, because they each have a financial relationship with Eli Lilly (I challenge you, dear reader, to find a major investment bank that does not).

In the long run, Eli Lilly is thinking ahead to a day when this class of medications could even treat conditions beyond metabolism and heart health, including dementia, inflammation, substance abuse, and pain. (Scientists are starting to study whether incretin drugs might treat migraines, for example).

"It may be even in the future, when you're checking out at Kroger, in addition to the 'get your annual flu vaccine,' you see a sign that says 'get your annual metabolic shot,'" Custer said.

• A consulting firm found that tech companies are "strategically overpaying" recruits with AI experience.
• They found firms pay premiums of up to $200,000 for data scientists with machine learning skills.
• The report also tracked a rise in bonuses for lower-level software engineers and analysts.

The AI talent bidding war is heating up, and the data scientists and software engineers behind the tech are benefiting from being caught in the middle.

Many tech companies are "strategically overpaying" recruits with AI experience, shelling out premiums of up to $200,000 for some roles with machine learning skills, J. Thelander Consulting, a compensation data and consulting firm for the private capital market, found in a recent report.

The report, compiled from a compensation analysis of roles across 153 companies, showed that data scientists and analysts with machine learning skills tend to receive a higher premium than software engineers with the same skills. However, the consulting firm also tracked a rise in bonuses for lower-level software engineers and analysts.

The payouts are a big bet, especially among startups. About half of the surveyed companies paying premiums for employees with AI skills had no revenue in the past year, and a majority (71%) had no profit.

Smaller firms need to stand out and be competitive among Big Tech giants — a likely driver behind the pricey recruitment tactic, a spokesperson for the consulting firm told Business Insider.

But while the J. Thelander Consulting report focused on smaller firms, some Big Tech companies have also recently made headlines for their sky-high recruitment incentives.

Meta was in the spotlight last month after Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said the social media giant had tried to poach his best employees with $100 million signing bonuses. 

While Business Insider previously reported that Altman later quipped that none of his "best people" had been enticed by the deal, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said in an interview with CNBC that Altman "neglected to mention that he's countering those offers."

• Elon Musk started a new political party after conducting a poll on his social media platform X.
• But this is not the first time Musk has outsourced his decision-making to social media.
• Musk had run polls on whether he should sell his Tesla stock or step down as X's CEO.

Elon Musk announced the formation of his new political party a day after conducting a poll on his social media platform, X.

But this isn't the first time Musk has outsourced his decision-making to social media.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has conducted several polls on X over the years. Musk has asked users whether he should sell his Tesla stock or if he should reinstate President Donald Trump to the platform.

Here's a list of some of the polls Musk has done, and what happened after.

Selling 10% of his Tesla stock

On November 6, 2021, Musk posted a poll on X asking his followers if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock.

"I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes," Musk added.

Musk's poll received over 3.5 million votes, with over 57% of them supporting the sale of his stock. Then, on November 10, 2021, Tesla said in an SEC filing that Musk sold about $1.1 billion in Tesla stock.

In its filing, Tesla said the sale of Musk's shares was "automatically effected" as part of a trading plan that was adopted on September 14, 2021. It added that the trading plan was in relation to Musk exercising stock options that were set to expire in 2022.

Musk had talked about the planned sale during an interview he gave at the Code Conference in September 2021.

"I have a bunch of options that are expiring early next year, so a huge block of options will sell in Q4. Because I have to or they'll expire," he said.

Buying Twitter

Months before buying Twitter in late 2022, Musk conducted several polls on the platform, asking his followers about their views on it. These polls took place while Musk had been quietly purchasing the company's stock since the start of the year.

On March 25, 2022, Musk asked his followers if Twitter "rigorously adheres" to the principle of free speech.

"The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully," Musk added.

Musk's poll received over 2 million votes. Over 70% of them said the platform did not adhere to the principle.

"Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?" Musk wrote in a follow-up post on March 26, 2022.

"Is a new platform needed?" Musk added.

Earlier, Musk had conducted a separate poll asking his followers if Twitter's algorithm should be open source. That poll received over 1.1 million votes, and nearly 83% of them voted "Yes."

Then, on April 4, 2022, Musk asked his followers if they wanted an "edit button" on Twitter. The poll obtained over 4.4 million votes and nearly 74% of them voted "Yes."

Musk eventually acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and renamed it X in July 2023.

Reinstating Trump's Twitter account

Shortly after buying Twitter, Musk polled his followers on whether Trump should be reinstated to the platform. Trump had been an avid user of the platform but was banned in January 2021 after the Capitol riot.

Musk's poll drew over 15 million votes, with nearly 52% supporting Trump's reinstatement.

"The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated," Musk wrote on November 19, 2022, a day after he had conducted the poll.

"Vox Populi, Vox Dei," Musk continued, using a Latin phrase that translates to "the voice of the people is the voice of God."

Musk had talked about reinstating Trump even before his acquisition of Twitter was complete. In May 2022, Musk said in an interview with the Financial Times that he would "reverse the permaban" on Trump, calling it a "morally bad decision" that was "foolish in the extreme."

Stepping down as Twitter's CEO

A month later, Musk conducted another poll, this time he asked his followers if he should step down as Twitter's CEO.

"I will abide by the results of this poll," Musk wrote on December 18, 2022.

Shortly after acquiring the platform, Musk laid off more than half of the company's employees. Musk's takeover also saw several celebrities such as Elton John opting to quit the platform over misinformation concerns.

Musk's poll received over 17.5 million votes, and nearly 58% voted "Yes."

"I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams," Musk wrote in a follow-up post on December 20, 2022.

In May 2023, Musk announced that he had hired Linda Yaccarino, an executive at NBCUniversal as X's new CEO. Musk said Yaccarino would "focus primarily on business operations" while he dealt with "product design and new technology."

Starting a new political party

Musk's most recent poll took place on July 4, when he asked his followers if they wanted him to start a new political party. Musk had floated the idea of starting the America Party after criticizing Trump and the GOP for the "One Big Beautiful Bill."

The poll received over 1.2 million votes, and over 65% of them voted "Yes."

"By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!" Musk wrote on X a day later.

"When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy. Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom," he added.

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

• Shannon Liu Shair and her husband started saving for college for their children when they were born.
• She puts money into 529 plans and custodial Roth IRAs for both of them.
• The 529 plans have around $100,000 each, and she plans to grow them to $200,000 by college time.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Shannon Liu Shair, a 38-year-old estate planning attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. It has been edited for length and clarity.

As an estate planning attorney at Liu Shair Law, I work with families to plan for the future and establish their legacy. Many of my clients have children, and their primary goal is to ensure their children are provided for through college and beyond.

In addition to understanding each client's goals, I ask how they've already invested and saved for their family. This is something that's deeply personal for me, too, as my husband and I have faced the same questions.

These conversations in my work and my own life have given me a unique perspective on how to get started and stay committed. It helps my clients to have someone they can trust with their sensitive information who also "gets it."

Saving and investing for our kids was not instant or overnight; it's taken years of learning and contributing. First, we had to make sure our own retirement and savings were healthily funded.

Here's how I set up my kids for financial success.

I started 529s for each of my two kids when they were born

529s are special accounts that allow you to save tax-free for education expenses. My parents did the same for me before I was college-age. Not needing to worry about finances, loans, and tuition made it much easier for me to focus on my studies.

We set up these accounts because we want our kids to have flexibility. I want them to be able to comfortably search for their ideal job fit since they already have a savings cushion.

My husband and I have saved over $100,000 in each of their 529s. I fund their accounts so that they'll be similarly situated based on the year they attend college.

Every state has its own 529 providers. I decided to use California's plan, Scholar Share, because it was easy to set up. I want to save 100% of what is expected for a public university in California. The target goal for each of the 529s is $200,000.

We don't have a specific backup plan for the money if one of the kids doesn't attend college, but up to $35,000 can be diverted to a Roth IRA. Additionally, the funds can still be withdrawn (with a penalty on earnings), which is not an issue for us.

We could also change the beneficiary to a different family member (e.g., hypothetical grandchild). I'd rather be over-prepared financially than under-prepared and have to scramble to figure things out.

I also set up custodial Roth IRAs for them

Custodial Roth IRAs are retirement accounts in which a child can deposit earnings from a job while they're minors, allowing them to start their retirement savings early. I've saved five figures in each of their custodial Roth IRAs.

For business owners, there are ways to employ your kids to set up a Roth IRA legally. Now that my kids are 10 and 8, they've been able to help me with shredding paperwork and other small tasks. They know that they're earning money for the work that they contribute to my business.

Anyone can set up a 529 for their loved ones, but custodial Roth IRAs are only available if a child has earned income. If someone is not a business owner and their child is old enough, the child can work and still have a custodial Roth IRA. The work can be with an established business, or even helping others in the community with babysitting and other chores.

They also have their own bank accounts

Their UTMA bank accounts are kept leaner, in the hundreds of dollars. UTMA bank accounts hold money that your child owns, and an adult is the custodian until the child becomes an adult. A portion of birthday money or gifts goes into the UTMA account.

Birthday and Christmas gifts in cash are typically from grandparents or other family members. Because these gifts are not earned income, the "save" goes to UTMA accounts and not to their Roth IRAs.

I don't have a set savings strategy. I add funds when I have more money in my account.

There are 2 things I could've done differently

I could do better at automating a monthly amount to ensure consistency and streamline the process.

Another thing I could've done differently is deeper research into 529 providers. I'm OK with our California provider, but researching more couldn't hurt. 529s can have differences, such as the types of investments available, the funds set up, the minimum amount required to get started, or the maintenance fees.

I tell my clients it's a good idea to teach financial acumen at a young age so their children don't spend their savings inappropriately. Our kids know how much is in their retirement accounts because I want them to learn cause and effect.

They used to get annoyed about helping me with the administrative tasks, but since I've educated them, they understand these funds will help alleviate stress when they enter the job market.

My advice to parents is to see this as a long game

There will be dips, and people need to understand the time value of money and compounding. If they move things around or make big shifts every time there's a decline in the market, it could be counterproductive and go against their goals.

For 529s, I've taken a more passive approach and use age-based funds (enrollment-year portfolios) rather than risk-based portfolios or guaranteed investment options. I have not changed the fund allocations during market shifts.

If you're just getting started or aren't in a position to make big contributions, saving even a few dollars a week or a month is better than nothing. It makes a difference. It's especially helpful if your children are young and time is on your side.

• Hollywood companies continue to integrate AI, even as they challenge its applications in court.
• AI startups like Toonstar and Chronicle Studios are innovating in animation.
• Studios are using the tech to promote content discovery and reduce production costs.

Hollywood giants are pushing back on AI's encroachment. Disney and Universal recently sued Midjourney, accusing it of using tech to rip off their famous characters.

But inside entertainment companies, it's a whole different story. The biggest studios and filmmakers are using AI technology in various ways — and people in Hollywood are taking note. The AI on the Lot conference in May has doubled its attendance to 1,200 over three years, while AI editing company Runway attracted some 1,000 people to its third film festival.

The tantalizing promise of AI is that it could solve big problems in the entertainment business, like content discovery and high production costs.

"No matter how you feel about AI tools in the media and entertainment business, they're here to stay," said Peter Csathy, who advises media companies.

Investors are climbing on board companies like Ecco, an AI startup that helps people find titles across multiple streamers using queries like "find me all the shows about F1." It has raised $7 million from Ben Silverman, Shaquille O'Neal, and others.

One such investor is Ishan Sinha, a consumer partner at Point72 Ventures. He said the hype around AI-generated video hasn't translated into consumer interest. He sees the most potential in companies that use AI to promote distribution through personalization, translation, and IP ownership.

"We believe the winning consumer businesses aggregate eyeballs — they have some type of a hook, whether it's content aggregation, playlists, proprietary IP, etc., that acquires and retains users," he said.

Point72 Ventures' investments include GlobalComix, which uses AI to bring recommendations and language translation to comic book and manga readers that they couldn't otherwise find, and Cheehoo, which is working with studios to simplify animation.

The firm also invested in Chronicle Studios, which aims to help animators grow their audiences and monetize their projects beyond YouTube.

Here are some AI companies transforming different areas of Hollywood, and the pitch decks some of them used to raise funding.

Faster, cheaper animation

AI may still be a long way from making full-length movies, but it's quickly making inroads in animation. Toonstar, a startup behind "StEvEn & Parker," uses AI for tasks ranging from developing storylines to creating images and says it can make episodes at a fraction of the cost of conventional methods.

Chronicle Studios is a startup cofounded by Chris deFaria, a former animation president at Warner Bros. and Comcast's DreamWorks, that's using AI to help creators level up, with a focus on animators. Others chasing the animation or independent creator opportunity are Further Adventures, a new studio that's investing in digital creators and independent filmmakers; Invisible Universe, an animation studio backed by Seven Seven Six; and Promise, an AI studio backed by Peter Chernin's North Road, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google.

"AI can't really make stories that are enduring," deFaria told BI. "The biggest pain point is getting an audience."

Read more:

• A former DreamWorks president just raised $11.6 million to build franchises using AI
• Read the pitch deck for a Toonstar NFT animated series backed by Mila Kunis

AI is transforming special effects

Other companies, such as Runway, which has raised $545 million from General Atlantic and others, and Connect Ventures-backed Deep Voodoo, are using AI to provide tools for de-aging and other special effects work.

Some have entered the rollup stage. Metaphysic, which was known for de-aging Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for the Robert Zemeckis film "Here," was acquired in February by DNEG Group's AI company Brahma. Papercup's voice-cloning IP was acquired in June by RWS, a content solutions company, while its team was acquired by Scale AI.

AI is also being applied to speed the dubbing process, recreate the voices of bygone actors, and restore old films and TV series. With streamers going global, there's a big demand to translate titles for new markets, and new approaches to AI promise to eliminate awkward dubbing of the past.

Runway made news this past year for deals with Lionsgate to train an AI model on its library and with AMC Networks, which will use its tools to generate promotional material for its shows.

One player, Deepdub, which uses AI to dub movies and shows, just extended its tech to real-time dubbing of live sports commentary, esports shoutcasting, and breaking news coverage.

"For the first time, broadcasters can deliver real-time, multilingual dubbing that captures not just words, but the energy, urgency, and authenticity of live content," said Ofir Krakowski, the company's CEO.

Read more:

• Read the pitch deck from Metaphysic, an AI startup behind a viral Tom Cruise deepfake
• How AI Startup Runway aims to simplify video editing and filmmaking
• Here's the pitch deck AI startup Papercup used to raise $20 million to help media go global

Startups are tackling different phases of production

A third area where AI startups have been active in Hollywood is in the content creation process more broadly.

This can involve everything from AI in the script reading phase to scouring video libraries to generate new ideas for titles based on what's performed well in the past.

One, Paris-based Moments Lab, recently raised a $24 million round from backers including Oxx and Orange Ventures to expand its AI tools that are used by Warner Bros. Discovery, Hearst, and others.

Moments can make clips for social media seven times faster than the conventional approach, cofounder Phil Petitpont recently told BI, citing internal research. He said media companies would be able to use AI to help make full-length documentaries based on their video libraries in several months, while predictive modeling tools that can suggest audience-boosting changes are a year away.

"We're not very far from that because audience data is very easily available on YouTube," he said.

Read more:

• This startup raised $24 million to help Hollywood use AI to save time and money. Read its pitch deck.
• A new AI product being tested by top YouTubers like MrBeast scans a creator's catalog to give them fresh video ideas
• The pitch deck Strada, an AI startup to streamline content creation, used to raise $2 million
• Here's the pitch deck Filmustage, an AI startup focused on streamlining pre-production, used to raise $1.5 million

• Tech is hiring again, but the roles and skills in demand look different this time around.
• Atli Thorkelsson, head of network at Redpoint Ventures, put together a slide deck on hiring trends.
• The top of the market is "the most competitive it's been in years," Thorkelsson said.

The tech industry is now split between two starkly different job markets.

On one side, there's a stalled job market where more workers are staying put. On the other there is a rapidly expanding artificial intelligence sector that's reshaping the talent landscape.

To help founders understand the situation, Atli Thorkelsson, head of talent network at Redpoint Ventures, created a slide deck on the state of tech hiring. He presented it at the firm's third annual InfraRed Summit, which brings together founders of up-and-coming companies in cloud infrastructure.

The deck includes data cobbled together from Pave, a compensation management tool; TrueUp, a tech jobs marketplace; and SignalFire, an early-stage venture capital firm.

Thorkelsson notes that the charts throughout the deck represent fast-growing tech firms. Since Redpoint used data from vendors that mainly serve tech clients with open roles, those companies end up overrepresented.

Here's an exclusive look at the 13-slide deck that Redpoint shared with founders.

Tech is hiring again, but the roles and skills in demand look different this time around.

The top of the market is "the most competitive it's been in years," Thorkelsson said.

Throkelsson said more employees are staying put in a tougher job market.

Retention is key. An analysis of pay data suggests companies are burning more equity and cash to keep people happy.

The companies that are hiring are hiring across the board.

The bulk of new hires have gone to AI companies.

Entry-level hiring is on the decline. An efficiency drive means leaner teams packed with battle-tested veterans.

AI companies tilt toward technical talent more than their peers at the same stage.

Premium talent is landing at AI firms, and with that comes premium paychecks.

Machine learning engineers are pulling in more cash and equity than their software engineering counterparts.

Red lines show individual contributors; white lines indicate managers.

Interviews are getting more AI-focused. Candidates are being asked about their AI skills far more often than a year ago.

In recent years, some HR teams toyed with shorter or front-loaded vesting schedules. Now, most are reverting to the standard linear vest, sticking with what candidates already understand, Thorkelsson said.

San Francisco still leads for AI jobs, but New York City is gaining ground as a tech hub.

• Perplexity AI is cautiously growing its ad business.
• Its main ad product is 'sponsored follow-up questions,' and it recently introduced a perks program.
• Perplexity has a revenue share program with publishers, but its ads business is still nascent.

Perplexity AI is taking a softly, softly approach to building its ad business.

The AI company had a low-key presence at last month's Cannes Lions ad festival in France. Amid the huge multimillion-dollar beach structures erected by tech giants like Meta, Amazon, and Google, Perplexity sent just a handful of executives to meet with current and potential business partners.

Perplexity, a conversational AI-powered search engine, began testing ads last year. Brands such as Whole Foods and Indeed have bought "sponsored follow-up questions," which appear alongside an answer to a user's prompt, encouraging them to dig deeper into the topic. Advertisers themselves don't write or edit the sponsored questions, which are generated by Perplexity's AI.

It's a contrast to traditional search engine marketing, where ads typically appear before the organic results.

Speaking to Business Insider at Cannes Lions in June, Ryan Foutty, Perplexity's VP of business development, said the company is still figuring out which advertising model will work best.

He described sponsored follow-up questions as "a really incredible brand advertorial."

"It's additive because you're helping users figure out the next question they need to ask to make a better decision or figure out what they're trying to do versus just trying to put something in your face," Foutty said, adding that 40% of its users click on related questions.

Perplexity advertisers pay on a CPM, or cost to reach a thousand impressions, model. A Perplexity spokesperson said advertising currently comprises less than a tenth of a percent of the company's total revenue, and declined to comment on the company's current ad prices.

In recent weeks, Perplexity has also introduced a perks program, where it provides subscribers to its Perplexity Pro service with offers and discounts from brands including Turbotax, the smart ring company Oura, and hotel booking service Selfbook.

Both Perplexity ads and perks are only active in the US. Foutty said the company was also considering more ways to monetize Perplexity's shopping and travel booking features, which could theoretically include further ad formats.

"It's very manual today," Foutty said, "But when we find something that works for everyone, then it's very easy, naturally, for us to scale it."

Perplexity hasn't released its user numbers, but its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, said the company received 780 million queries in May, up 20% from April. But compare that to Google's AI Overviews, which the search giant said reached 1.5 billion monthly users in May. Google recently brought advertising to more areas of its AI Overviews product, and it's testing ads within its AI Mode, a newer feature where users can conduct deeper research.

With its relatively small scale and only one specific ad format available, Perplexity's advertising offering is only getting tepid interest from marketers for now, said Eric Hoover, director of search engine optimization at the digital marketing agency Jellyfish.

"I don't see strong adoption by users," Hoover told BI. "People rarely click out of 'regular' AI results; I don't see them being eager to click on sponsored ones."

Perplexity wants to build 'long-term incentive' deals with publishers

Perplexity shares a portion of its ad revenue with the publisher partners it uses to help source its answers, which include Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel.

The company doesn't cut up-front licensing deals with these publishers because it isn't building foundational large language models that require content for training, Foutty said. It does offer these partners access to its enterprise product and APIs that can help publishers embed Perplexity's tech, like conversational search, into their own sites. (Disclosure: Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, has a multi-year content licensing deal with Perplexity rival OpenAI.)

"The model that we're creating on the revenue share side is a long-term incentive," Foutty said. "It's not a one-and-done."

When asked whether any publishers were making serious money from the program, Foutty said it was still early days. The publisher program launched in June of last year.

"We're focused on building the right product before we scale it to everyone," he added.

The relationship between AI companies and publishers can often be fraught, and many are locked in legal battles. Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post filed a lawsuit last year alleging that Perplexity engaged in copyright infringement by scraping and using their content. Perplexity said last year that the facts alleged in the complaint were "misleading at best" and that it planned to defend itself.

This week, the content delivery network and security provider Cloudflare announced it has begun automatically blocking AI crawlers from scraping the websites it powers unless site owners explicitly opt-in or the AI companies pay.

• Lucia Soares is helming Carlyle's AI transformation after years of bringing tech to big companies.
• She spoke to BI about the firm's AI rollout and how it's already resulting in cost savings.
• She also spoke about life as a bicoastal executive and what she learned from her immigrant parents.

Lucia Soares had been working for Carlyle for four years when the private equity giant's CEO called to ask if she would take on a new role.

"I originally focused on using tech to create portfolio value," she told Business Insider, referring to the companies Carlyle controls. "Then, two years ago, our new CEO called me and said, 'Can you please do what you're doing for our portfolio companies but for our own company internally?'

Now, Soares — as Carlyle's chief information officer and head of technology transformation — is taking on a new challenge: Bringing artificial intelligence to the investment giant's 2,300 global employees.

She spoke with Business Insider about the rollout, including the successes, the pitfalls, and how the company is implementing checks and balances. She explained where the company is already seeing cost savings, for example.

She also walked us through her life as a bicoastal tech executive — and how she learned to hustle from a young age, helping her immigrant parents sell plants at the flea market on weekends. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are your tech goals for Carlyle?

In my 27 years in technology, I've learned that you can't start with technology itself as the goal. People said that e-commerce is the goal, or that digital is the goal. Now, they say AI is the goal. And actually it's not.

Instead, we start with our business goals: we want to grow, create efficiencies, and build a strong tech foundation. AI and other technologies are levers to achieve these goals.

Tell us about Carlyle's AI rollout.

Increasing our employees' AI fluency is a strategic priority. They get AI training from the day they start at Carlyle, and are introduced to a wide range of tools they can use.

Now, 90% of our employees use tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot. We also have an AI champions' council where early adopters can play around with tools and eventually share best practices.

We're using AI to transform our workflows through Project Catalyst, which automates processes. We're also developing custom tools that leverage proprietary data to deliver insights instantly—saving investors from sifting through endless materials. Today, Carlyle's credit investors can assess a company in hours using generative AI, instead of spending weeks on research.

How is AI impacting the average worker at Carlyle? Are they required to use the technology?

It depends. Some business leaders have made it a requirement to put all investment committee memos in an AI tool for them to review. Others are not so direct about it, but everybody is seeing how it can make their jobs easier and challenging their teams in meetings to talk about the value they are deriving from AI tools.

As a firm, we have a return-on-investment strategy, and my team aims to deliver a certain amount of ROI every year.

We're not eliminating people's jobs, but we believe that it can help reduce dependency on outside services costs. For example, we can use AI to review legal invoices and catch errors that will reduce our costs. We've seen real savings as a result.

How do you balance autonomy with the risks of adoption?

I think a lot about that. I worry about kids in school using a tool to write an essay and not being able to think. But you have to wonder how people felt when the calculator came out, and if they thought no one would ever be able to do math on their own again.

We never allow AI to make a final decision. There's always a human in the loop, and someone needs to be accountable for the final results.

For example, when employees use AI to write a report, we have employees write a final paragraph summarizing the output to ensure they're thinking critically about it.

Can you give examples of success and failure in Carlyle's tech transformation?

Let's start with success.

When investors invest with us, we can at times receive up to 80-page documents with questions about everything from our employees to cybersecurity training. It's very manual.

We had one team decide they'd try to use AI to make investor diligence easier. Despite having just one technologist, this team found a solution to automate the process, which we're launching later this year.

We seek to empower people to solve things themselves, with embedded technologists across the organization.

We experienced more challenges dealing with regulatory restrictions on large language models globally. We learned the hard way that these regulatory hurdles require a lot of evaluation. We're launching solutions, but it's taking longer than expected to deploy.

You might think you can go fast with AI, but it doesn't always work that way, especially in today's global climate.

Has any single piece of career advice stuck with you over the years, and what is it?

Early on, I was advised to always raise my hand for the extra hard assignments. In other words, take a risk and bet on yourself.

My parents are immigrants, and I learned work ethic, courage, and audacity from them. But when I entered the workforce, I had impostor syndrome. With blue-collar parents, the office environment was completely different for me.

By taking on difficult assignments, I created relationships and visibility and was able to learn and grow more.

Tell me about your parents.

They are from the Azores Islands in Portugal. They came to the US during the dictatorship years. My dad only went to school up until the age of 10, because his family could not afford to pay for more education. He can add, subtract, and multiply, but was never taught how to divide.

He came to the US after serving in the Portuguese Army to give his family a better future. He knew no English.

He became a custodian, cleaning schools, and had a side hustle selling house plants at a flea market on the weekends. We all helped cultivate and sell the plants. I learned a lot from my parents.

What does your morning routine look like?

I am bicoastal: I spend one week a month in DC and also time in New York, but I live on the West Coast and work out of our Menlo Park office.

On the East coast, I might start my day — work permitting — listening to news podcasts, going for a run, meditating, and eating a healthy breakfast.

At home, I start really early in the morning. I don't always get that workout in, but I start with some early calls, and then take a break to drive my daughter to school before heading to the office.

When I get to my desk, I write down the day's priorities. I've done this my whole career, and try not to let constant fire drills overtake those priorities. When you're driving transformation, you have to keep strategy at the forefront.

What are the most important meetings of your week?

The most important meetings are the unplanned ones. For example, I run into a coworker, and we start talking about our kids. Then they bring up a company we should partner with. Or I run into an administrative assistant, and they show me new ways they're using Copilot. I get inspired by solving problems with people in real time.

The second most important meetings are the ones where we drive strategy and brainstorm. As technologists, you can fall into the Dilbert category of employees, where you just work through problem resolutions. So I force strategy onto the calendar to ensure we think big and ambitiously about tech transformation.

• Hinge Health and Omada Health sparked fresh hope for digital health IPOs after their strong debuts.
• Some top startups are now preparing for IPOs in 2026 as market uncertainties remain.
• These are the 9 digital health startups that could knock on the IPO door next.

After a long drought, digital health is finally seeing signs of life in the public markets.

In May, physical therapy startup Hinge Health became the first digital health startup to go public in years. Two weeks later, diabetes-focused Omada Health followed with its own IPO.

Both Hinge and Omada saw their shares jump on debut, signaling that investors might be warming up to new digital health public listings. That's welcome news for the late-stage healthcare startups that have been stuck in IPO limbo since the last window slammed shut in 2022.

To get a better sense of which digital health startups might go public next, Business Insider spoke with half a dozen bankers and investors. Those people requested anonymity to speak freely about potential IPO candidates.

The reopening appears more like a crack than a floodgate. Bankers told Business Insider in June that many late-stage healthcare companies are now eyeing IPOs in 2026 or later, due in part to continued market uncertainties.

Some startups are pushing their plans even further out, including Sword Health, a close rival to Hinge Health. CEO Virgilio Bento told TechCrunch last year that a 2025 IPO was a possibility for Sword. But in June, he told the publication his preferred IPO timeline was "maybe 2028."

"We believe market conditions currently lack the stability needed for an IPO to be the kind of accelerator we're looking for," Bento said in a statement to BI.

Whether or not startups decide to take the plunge this year, though, Barclays' head of Americas equity capital markets Rob Stowe told BI in June that Hinge Health's and Omada Health's IPOs send positive signals for the IPO market.

"The market is pretty robust. It's not going to be for all companies, but conditions feel as strong as I've seen them in a while," he said.

Here are 9 healthcare startups that could be knocking on the IPO door next, in alphabetical order.

Aledade

Healthcare startup Aledade could be an important proof point for the public markets on the viability of value-based care enablement technologies, bankers and investors told BI.

Founded in 2014 by former national coordinator for health IT Dr. Farzad Mostashari, Aledade sells data-driven software to independent primary care practices to help them deliver value-based care, improving patient outcomes while lowering costs. The company has steadily grown its presence across Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurance programs, now working with over 2,400 practices to support 3 million patients.

To date, Aledade has raised about $660 million in funding from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Venrock, most recently grabbing a $260 million Series F round in June 2023. The company didn't share its valuation at the time.

Aledade said in 2022 that it had been bringing in more earnings than losses, before subtracting for expenses like taxes, for the past two years. In 2023, after its Series F raise, the company said it brought in $475 million in revenue the previous year. Its high revenue and apparent profitability could help position the company for an IPO, although the company will have to differentiate itself from prior value-based care tech listings such as Agilon Health and Privia Health, which have seen their shares decline on the public markets since their 2021 IPOs.

"Aledade is focused on building our business and doing what is good for patients, practices and society, as well as for shareholders, consistent with our public benefit mission. An initial public offering in the future is always possible, based on timing, conditions and financial needs," said Aledade senior VP of communications Julie Bataille in a statement to BI. "However, we don't comment on specific plans and remain focused on the important work of advancing efforts to support independent primary care organizations and their success in value-based care."

Datavant

Health data startup Datavant has been deal hunting this year, and its acquisition spree could hint at a coming IPO.

Datavant, which manages patient data exchanges between providers, payers, and life sciences organizations, spun out of Vivek Ramaswamy's Roivant Sciences in 2017. Datavant last shared its valuation when it merged with Ciox Health in June 2021 in a $7 billion deal, giving it the highest valuation of the startups on this list.

In the past year, Datavant has made four acquisitions, most recently buying health records retrieval company Ontellus in June. Datavant previous acquired venture-backed real-world-evidence startup Aetion in May, and picked up data privacy organization Trace Data and two data analytics products from healthcare AI startup Apixio in September.

Private equity firm New Mountain Capital is Datavant's controlling shareholder. Flare Capital Partners' Parth Desai told Business Insider in December that he expects private-equity-backed healthcare companies to make tuck-in acquisitions in 2025 as they look ahead to potential IPOs in 2026.

"With New Mountain Capital's support as a longtime shareholder that is bullish on our business, we are fortunate to have flexibility as we continue to grow and diversify for our clients," said Datavant CEO Kyle Armbrester in an email to BI. "If market conditions are right, and there's a need for cash to continue to grow the business, a public offering is a potential option we would consider in the future."

Lyra Health

Founded in 2015, Lyra Health is the highest valued startup in mental health. The company was last valued at $5.58 billion in January 2022, when it raised $235 million in Series G funding.

The startup provides mental health services to employers like Morgan Stanley and Zoom, aiming to help clients save thousands of dollars in healthcare claims with its evidence-based treatment. Newly public Hinge Health and Omada Health also contract with employers with similar cost-cutting aims, and their public market debuts could bring Lyra's IPO prospects into focus.

In December, Lyra Health said its cofounder, David Ebersman, would transition from the role of CEO to board chairman following the death of his son in 2024. Jennifer Schulz, most recently the CEO of Experian's North American division, joined Lyra as its new CEO.

Bankers said Schulz's experience in a leadership role at publicly traded Experian could be a boon to Lyra, though the startup may wait until she's further settled in the role to accelerate IPO plans.

Lyra has raised more than $900 million in funding to date from investors including Dragoneer, Coatue, and Salesforce Ventures.

Lyra declined to comment for this story.

Medline

Medline is a long-standing healthcare company, not a startup. But its IPO could make waves across the industry.

Medline was founded in 1966 to manufacture and sell medical supplies to hospitals and clinics. In December, it said it had confidentially filed its S-1 to go public.

Bankers told BI that Medline's IPO would be an important example for the markets of private equity buying a healthcare company and taking it public at a premium. Blackstone, Carlyle, and Hellman & Friedman acquired Medline in 2021 for $34 billion. Reuters reported in December that Medline's IPO could raise over $5 billion and value the company at up to $50 billion.

However, President Donald Trump's shifting tariffs policies could force Medline to delay its public market debut further. Robert Stowe, head of Americas equity capital markets at Barclays, told BI in June that public investors are sensitive to businesses that could be exposed to tariffs. Medline manufactures many products in China, which has been aggressively targeted by Trump's tariff proposals.

Medline didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.

Maven Clinic

Maven, which provides care for women and families through employers and health plans, could provide critical evidence for the market viability of women's health companies with a potential IPO.

Founded in 2014, Maven is backed by leading VC firms including General Catalyst, Sequoia, and Oak HC/FT. The company last raised $125 million in Series F funding in October, led by the private equity firm StepStone Group at a $1.7 billion valuation. The raise boosted Maven's total funding to over $425 million.

The company now says it works with over 2,000 employers and health plans to provide fertility benefits, maternity care, menopause support, and related care.

Investors previously told BI that Maven's IPO, if successful, could help validate the women's health sector for investors and pave the way for more women's health startups to raise funding and find exits.

Maven's strongest signal of its IPO ambitions can be found in its C-Suite. In the first half of the year, the company hired multiple executives with experience guiding companies through public listings.

BI reported in October that Maven let go of its chief financial officer to bring in a new CFO with public market experience. The company said in June it had hired Katie Rooney as its CFO, who previously served as CFO and COO at Alight Solutions through its divestiture from Blackstone-owned Aon Hewitt and its public listing in 2021 via SPAC merger.

Maven also said it had hired a new chief commercial officer, chief legal and administrative officer, and chief communications officer. Maven's new chief legal and administrative officer, Susan Stick, most recently served as general counsel at Life360, leading the company through its 2024 IPO.

Maven declined to comment for this story.

Spring Health

Spring Health has long sought to separate itself from the pack with its AI-powered approach to precision mental healthcare.

Spring Health's algorithms help tailor care plans to an individual's needs, with various types of care provided through its app, such as coaching therapy, psychiatry, and meditation exercises. The company sells its services to employers including Microsoft, Pfizer, and the Coca-Cola Company, as well as health plans.

The Tiger Global-backed startup raised $100 million in Series E funding in July 2024 at a $3.3 billion valuation. According to PitchBook, Spring Health has raised about $466 million since its 2016 founding.

As AI takes off in digital health, Spring says it's embedded AI in its electronic health record system, its patient app, and its real-time analytics for employers. The startup has also expanded the range of its mental health services over the years, most recently digging deeper into pediatric care and support for substance use disorders.

Per Rock Health, mental health was the top-funded clinical indication in 2024 for the sixth year straight, with mental health startups bringing in $1.4 billion last year. Despite high fundraising levels, however, the sector hasn't seen an IPO since 2021. Bankers said Spring Health and Lyra Health are consistently discussed as the most likely two candidates for the next mental health public listings.

Spring Health didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.

Transcarent

Transcarent contracts with employers to provide health navigation and virtual care to employees. The startup looks a lot closer to an exit after a big acquisition earlier this year.

The startup bought the public health benefits company Accolade in a $621 million deal that closed in April. The acquisition looks to have significantly increased Transcarent's customer base and thus made a big contribution to its top line — before the Transcarent deal, Accolade said it contracted with over 1,400 employers and health plans, and the company reported $414 million in revenue in the fiscal year 2024. Now, with Accolade on board, Transcarent says it works with over 1,700 employers and health plans. Transcarent hasn't publicly shared its revenue.

The Accolade acquisition was financed by Transcarent investors including General Catalyst and CEO Glen Tullman's 62 Ventures, cash on Transcarent's balance sheet, and debt provided by JP Morgan. Transcarent has raised about $450 million since its 2020 founding, including $126 million in a Series D funding round in May 2024 at a $2.2 billion valuation.

Tullman has by far the most experience with taking companies public of the CEOs on this list. Before Transcarent, he led three companies through public listings — Livongo, Allscripts, and Enterprise Systems. His success with Livongo, the diabetes care company he founded, stands out as a rare example of blockbuster digital health returns; Livongo went public in 2019 at a $2.5 billion valuation, before being acquired by Teladoc the next year for $18.5 billion, at the time the biggest deal ever in the digital health market.

That experience could set Transcarent up to pursue an IPO when market conditions look favorable. Tullman told MedCity News in May 2024 that he had "no interest" in selling the company, but would consider an IPO in the future.

Transcarent will have to separate itself from previous care navigation IPOs, however, including Health Catalyst, whose stock has declined more than 85% since its 2019 IPO. It'll also need to contend with Accolade's cash burn, since the health benefits company reported a net loss of $100 million in the fiscal year 2024.

In a statement to BI, Tullman said Transcarent is focused on integrating its solutions to bring its AI-powered platform, called WayFinding, to more members and employers to make healthcare more accessible and affordable.

"At Transcarent, our priority is meeting the needs of our Members and delivering measurable results for our clients. If we do those things well, the rest will follow," Tullman said.

Virta Health

Omada Health's June IPO could set up diabetes care peer Virta Health to follow in its footsteps.

Founded in 2014, Virta Health made its name in virtual diabetes care, helping patients reverse type 2 diabetes through personalized, low-carb nutrition plans. It's expanding quickly into obesity treatment and added GLP-1 prescriptions like Ozempic for weight loss in January. The company previously prescribed GLP-1s only for diabetes.

CEO Sami Inkinen told Business Insider in January that Virta was bringing in over $100 million in annual recurring revenue, up 60% from the year before. He said he expected even faster growth in 2025, driven by surging demand for Virta's weight-loss care.

"An IPO is the next milestone for us," Inkinen said at the time. He declined to provide details on Virta's potential IPO timing, but said the company wants to be profitable before it braves the public markets.

Virta was last valued at $2 billion in 2021, when it raised $133 million in Series E funding led by Tiger Global. Inkinen said in January that Virta would be profitable by the end of 2025.

In a conversation with BI at the end of June, Inkinen declined to share specifics about a potential Virta IPO or a likely timeline for its public listing. However, he said it's always been his plan for Virta to be an independent public company, adding that Virta is tracking towards that goal.

Inkinen said Virta's growth rate is accelerating and that the company is ahead of its financial targets for the year. He's not stressing about timing the market, he said.

"The very best investor relations is fantastic financials. If you have those as a company, that's the best marketing before IPO, and for the IPO and beyond. Build a great business, and the rest will take care of itself," he said.

Zelis

Zelis was started 30 years ago under the name Stratose, later merging with GlobalCare and Pay-Plus Solutions to create Zelis Healthcare. The company now sells healthtech software to payers and providers to manage medical claims and process electronic payments.

Bankers told Business Insider that Zelis's business is stable with strong economics that could position it well for an IPO.

Zelis's profile isn't too dissimilar from Waystar, a private-equity-backed healthcare payments company that went public in June 2024 with an initial market cap of about $3.5 billion. Since then, Waystar's stock has risen about 88%, and as of late June, the company boasts a $6.7 billion market cap. That success could set Zelis up to follow in Waystar's footsteps.

Zelis announced it had sold a minority stake for an undisclosed price in December, led by Mubadala Capital and including Norwest and HarbourVest. The recent capital raise could push Zelis's IPO back if the company doesn't see a significant financial benefit to going public, bankers said.

Zelis declined to comment for this story.

• Debbie Boyd moved to Panama with her 97-year-old mother for lower costs and healthcare options.
• Boyd, a retired real estate broker, sought a more affordable lifestyle with different politics.
• Boyd said Panama has offered a vibrant culture and supportive community for her and her mother.

This as-told-to interview is with Debbie Boyd, 71, who moved to Panama from Atlanta with her 97-year-old mother, Doris Britto, who has dementia. Boyd and Britto moved in early 2025 and have enjoyed their time so far. Boyd has particularly appreciated the medical resources and lower cost of living abroad. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I moved to Panama in March this year, and my mother followed a few weeks later. I had always considered the possibility of relocating outside the US and had looked into moving for a couple of years before I retired. I read about the lower cost of living being less, but I think what spurred my action was the political climate.

My first impression is that I love it here. The people in Panama are very friendly and caring. Our goal now is to get more entrenched in this new life.

I've had a number of different careers

My mom and I are both native New Yorkers. She was a long-distance operator for the New York Telephone Company for over 40 years. I relocated to Atlanta in 1983, and my mom followed me there in 1986, when she retired. We were in the Atlanta area up until this year.

She traveled with her friends and helped me raise my son. She became active in some senior citizen groups in the area.

I had a couple of careers. I've been a real estate broker with my own residential real estate firm, worked as an administrative assistant, and taught classes in criminal justice for online universities as an adjunct professor. I retired in 2016.

I found that I was becoming bored and wanted to make better use of my time. After retiring, I took swim classes, got together with friends for lunch, and traveled.

After I initially retired, I took about one year to decompress and give some thought as to what I wanted for the next phase of my life. I spent mornings reflecting over a healthy breakfast and good coffee. I enrolled in Water Zumba classes and started a walking regime. I also used this time to reconnect with friends and making quite a bit of lunch dates with my former tennis team members.

I went back to work after a couple of years in a work-from-home position.

In 2018, I got a bladder cancer diagnosis, and it involved a serious surgery. I wasn't well enough to take care of my mother, though she and I lived together. She moved into a nursing home and lived there for seven years.

Once I determined earlier this year that I was going to move to Panama, I asked my mom if she wanted to come. She said she did.

I decided that it was probably best for both of us. Otherwise, she would be in Atlanta, and I would be abroad. My son and grandchildren are grown up and have very active lives, so I knew she would be pretty much alone in the nursing home, which I didn't want for her. Panama checked a lot of the boxes. Healthcare seemed excellent, and I had a friend who retired there who answered my questions.

At the time, we were doing fine financially. We're not wealthy people, but we've worked our whole careers, paid bills on time, handled finances responsibly, and have good credit. But things have gotten so tight in the US; it's really hard to make ends meet as a retiree living off of Social Security and a small pension.

As an African American, I feel we are being targeted and knowledge of our proud heritage is constantly under assault.

The first few weeks abroad involved managing many logistics

I did three scouting trips. I wanted to come first to find a place that was suitable for us logistically. My mother's in a wheelchair, so I looked for a place that was more level. We got as much paperwork done as we could ahead of time so she could leave her facility.

My son made time to help me out by bringing my mother a few weeks later. I set up an appointment with a doctor, and he was able to see her within a week of her getting here, making sure we could transfer her medications and prescriptions.

My mom told me that since I'm here and I've handled everything, she's happy and has enjoyed it so far. She came down with a cold a few weeks ago and lost her appetite, but she started eating again and felt better. She's happier to not be in a nursing home environment. We're now looking to find more activities we can participate in together.

My friend who retired here introduced me to another person who had a sister with MS and who connected me with a home care agency. A young lady comes in six days a week to tend to my mom; she helps bathe her, prepare her meals, change her sheets, and do her laundry.

I get much more home for the same price here

Rental prices are a little higher than what I expected they'd be, but there's a gamut of price ranges. I've seen everything from $500 a month up to beyond $3,000 where I'm located. I have a four-bedroom house, an in-ground pool in the backyard, a very large living room, dining room, and kitchen.

The rent is $1,500 a month, a bit more than what I was paying for my mortgage on my house in the States, the mortgage on which is $777 a month. I still own my home. However, there have been recent property tax and home owner insurance increases and I estimate my mortgage will be approximately $250 more in 2026. I get so much more for the same amount of money.

The utilities aren't too bad. One month, I had a $70 bill, but the next month was $300. Each bedroom has its own individual air conditioning unit, so we're trying to figure out when to run it and for how long.

I'm still doing some paperwork and making phone calls to get things settled. A couple of friends have come to visit, and my son has come three times. I have a lot more company coming over the next two months.

I handle my business here like I would at home; I go to the grocery store, the bank, and the pharmacy. I take Ubers because I don't want to drive here; they drive really fast. An Uber one-way is about $2.20.

I'm still getting acclimated

I've discovered, though, that Panamanians love to party and love music. There are also always dogs barking early in the morning and late at night, so I'm trying to get used to the noise.

We don't live in an expat neighborhood. I wanted to be immersed in Panamanian culture. It's been about two months since we've been here, but I haven't had much of a chance to meet our neighbors yet. All of the houses are gated individually, so it's not like you can just walk up to your neighbor's front door.

But when I go to the mall, people talk with me. When they realize I only speak a little Spanish, everybody's helpful, pleasant, and willing to help me find things.

I haven't gotten to eat out much, but I've gotten really into going to the market and getting fresh fruit and vegetables. The hospital near me has a program where they will accept Medicare Advantage if you have an emergency situation and are hospitalized, which I'm applying for. I'm also applying to a program that's $220 a year to have any tests, blood work, or lab work done. I have Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and I was on oxygen when I was back home. I haven't had to use it since I've been here.

My goal now is to get more involved with expat groups. I joined one recently and went to a very nice luncheon, where I met new people. I hope to continue expanding my social network. I plan to make this my new home and get more involved in volunteering.

• Logan Kilpatrick is Google's head of developer relations and runs the company's AI Studio.
• He's also become a one-man marketing machine, regularly hyping up Google's AI products on X.
• Google has sometimes struggled to get credit in the AI race, but Kilpatrick told BI he's keen to change that narrative.

He's not an executive, a company spokesperson, or a world-class researcher. But he might be Google's secret weapon in winning the AI race.

If you're an AI developer, you've likely heard of Logan Kilpatrick. As Google's head of developer relations, Kilpatrick, 27, runs AI Studio, the company's AI developer software program.

He has also become Google's delegate for speaking to the AI community and — intentionally or not — a one-man marketing machine for the company's AI products. He's a prolific poster on X, where he'll sometimes hype Google's latest Gemini releases or tease something new on the horizon.

Above all, he is one of the people tasked with translating Google's AI breakthroughs to the global developer community. It's a crucial job at a time when the search giant needs to not just convince developers to use its products, but capture a new generation of builders entering the fray as AI makes it easier for anyone to make software.

"If you want AI to have the level of impact on humanity that I think it could have, you need to be able to provide a platform for developers in order to go and do this stuff," he told Business Insider in an interview. "The reality is there's a thousand and one things that Google is never going to build, and doesn't make sense for us to build, that developers want to build."

Company insiders say Google has recognized Kilpatrick's strength and given him more responsibilities and visibility. He could be seen onstage at this year's Google I/O conference and even had a fireside chat with Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

"People really crave legitimacy, authenticity, and competency, and Logan combines all three," Asara Near, a startup founder who has occasionally contacted Kilpatrick with development questions, told BI.

LoganGPT

In 2022, OpenAI was preparing to launch ChatGPT and fire the starting gun on one of history's most profound technological shifts. Kilpatrick, who has a technical background and worked at Apple and NASA, saw an online job ad for OpenAI and was soon facing a tricky decision: to work at what was then Sam Altman's little-known startup, or take a gig at IBM.

He decided that OpenAI was worth a shot — and within a few months, found himself at the center of the biggest tech launch since the debut of the iPhone in 2007.

"The OpenAI experience was a startup experience for about six months and then it became basically a hyperscaler," he told BI. It was chaotic, but it helped Kilpatrick learn how to build an ecosystem and cut his teeth as the developers' go-to guy. There, developers nicknamed him "LoganGPT."

When he left OpenAI in 2024 for Google, developers and peers made clear it was a huge loss for the ChatGPT maker, and a big win for Google in the AI talent transfer window. AI Studio was then still a project inside Google's Labs division, and Kilpatrick and his team were tasked with migrating it into a fully-fledged product inside Google's Cloud unit. It was again like going from zero to one: AI Studio was pre-revenue with no customers, but with a long tail of developers ready to jump on board.

"It has felt oddly almost like the same exact experience I've lived through at two different companies and two different cultures," he told BI.

In May this year, Kilpatrick was promoted, and his team running AI Studio was moved from the Cloud unit to Google DeepMind, bringing them closer to the researchers working on the underlying models and the employees working on its Gemini chatbot.

"He's kind of all over the place, and that's his superpower," said one senior employee who requested anonymity because they were not permitted to speak to the media. They said that Google has put Kilpatrick in charge of more products as leaders have recognized his ability to engage so effectively with the developer community. "Logan is 90% of Google's marketing," they said.

Helping Google win

On paper, Google is an AI winner. The reality is more complicated.

Its latest Gemini 2.0 Pro model ranks top of multiple leaderboards across a range of testing areas, but this hasn't always been reflected in the number of users. Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said in May that the company's Gemini app has more than 400 million monthly active users. That's well behind the 500 million weekly active users for ChatGPT, according to figures shared by Altman in April.

"DeepMind doesn't get nearly as much credit and attention as they deserve, and that's because comms is vastly underperforming capabilities," communications executive Lulu Meservey posted on X in May. Responding to another person, she wrote: "Logan is like 90% of their comms."

Some of the struggle, insiders say, is due to Google owning multiple products that aren't always clearly distinct. Developers can build using Vertex in Google Cloud or AI Studio. Meanwhile Google has a consumer-facing app simply called Gemini. The same models aren't necessarily always available across all three places at the same time, which can get confusing for users and developers.

There's also the problem of being a quarter-century-old tech behemoth with more nimble startups nipping at its heels. "OpenAI can put all their messaging arrows behind one thing, while Google has messaging arrows behind 10,000 things," former Google product manager Rajat Paharia told BI.

Kilpatrick recognizes that Google has work to do. "I think Google on a net basis is doing so much in the world right now, and AI is around everything that we're doing, and I think a lot of narrative doesn't capture innovation is happening," he said.

A big part of Kilpatrick's job is trying to cement that narrative among the global developer base. At OpenAI, Sam Altman's Jobsian showmanship has made him a highly effective salesman both for his company's products and his vision for the future of this technology. Or, as Paharia described Altman to BI, a "showman with rizz."

Google may have found its equivalent in Kilpatrick. He told BI that he often posts on X because it has become something of a town square for AI developers and enthusiasts, all champing at the bit for the latest crumb of news. It's a community filled with hype, AI "vagueposting", and steeped deeply in lore (what did Ilya see?).

On a day that OpenAI's latest release sucking is grabbing everyone's attention, Kilpatrick may log on and post a single word — "Gemini" — just to rev the hype engine a little.

Kilpatrick often has "a thousand" emails from developers that need responding to, he told BI. "I spend probably as much time as I physically can responding to stuff these days," he said. And that's between the numerous product meetings (he had 22 meetings scheduled on the day we spoke in early July, 23 the day before). He once posted on X: "I am online 7 days a week, ~8+ hours a day. If you need something as you build with Gemini, please ping me!"

Developers say they like that Kilpatrick takes the time to engage and listen to their feedback. "The few times I've emailed him to get help with something, they near-instantly responded and helped resolve the issue," said Near, the startup founder. "This is the opposite of my experience through normal support channels."

Andrew Curran, an AI commentator who frequently posts to X, wrote last month that Kilpatrick had been "an incredible hire" for Google. "To a lot of people he is now the face of Gemini, I bet most people don't even remember his OAI days," he wrote.

Kilpatrick told BI that because he is a developer himself, he finds it easy to understand the core target user. He said this has helped in building out Google's AI Studio, and that engaging with developers comes naturally. "It's just the obvious thing to do if you want to build a product for developers, is like, go talk to your users," he said.

But the definition of developer is changing with approaches like vibe coding, which lets non-technical people create software by describing what they'd like to an AI tool.

"What it means to be a developer right now looks a little different than it did two years ago or three years ago, and I think it's going to look fundamentally different in 10 years," said Kilpatrick. He believes the developer group will "massively expand" in the next five years. His job at Google is to make the next generation believe Google is where they should be developing, but that job is also evolving in this new era of artificial intelligence.

"Our mandate is actually AI builders, already encompassing this group of people who maybe don't identify as developers and don't write code, but they build software using AI, and I think that's going to accelerate in the next few years," he said.

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• President Donald Trump has threatened 10% tariff on countries aligning with BRICS policies.
• A BRICS statement from the group's annual meeting voiced concerns about tariffs and the Gaza war.
• Trump has previously targeted BRICS, threatening a 100% tariff rate on countries seeking to ditch the dollar.

President Donald Trump has issued a new tariff threat.

"Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Sunday night.

"There will be no exceptions to this policy," he added.

Trump's comments come amid a two-day BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro. The group of emerging nations includes key members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

On Sunday, the BRICS group issued a statement expressing "serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures which distort trade and are inconsistent with WTO rules."

The group also condemned US and Israeli military strikes on Iran, a BRICS member. It called for negotiations to achieve a ceasefire and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.

"We reiterate our grave concern about the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, with the resumption of continuous Israeli attacks against Gaza and obstruction of the entry of humanitarian aid into the territory," the statement said.

Not Trump's first BRICS tariff threat

It's not the first time Trump has taken aim at BRICS.

In December, he threatened a 100% tariff on countries pursuing alternatives to the US dollar. Economists said at the time that the move could backfire.

Even so, BRICS nations have been exploring alternatives to the US dollar. De-dollarization discussions accelerated after sweeping sanctions against Russia over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

On Sunday, the BRICS group said it would continue discussing a cross-border payments system among member states.

Trump's threats of even more tariffs on countries aligning with BRICS come ahead of his administration's plans to send letters to trading partners informing them of new tariff rates on their imports to the US.

Trump said in a separate post that the letters would be delivered starting at noon ET on Monday.

• Elon Musk announced the formation of his new political party, the America Party.
• But President Donald Trump said Musk's party won't succeed.
• Trump said third parties "have never succeeded in the United States."

President Donald Trump said on Sunday that it is unlikely Elon Musk's new political party, the America Party will succeed.

"I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely 'off the rails,' essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

"He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States - The System seems not designed for them," Trump continued.

Trump said having a third political party would create "Complete and Total DISRUPTION & CHAOS." He added that the GOP, in contrast, is a "smooth running 'machine'" that passed his "One Big Beautiful Bill" last week.

Musk announced the formation of the America Party on Saturday, a day after Trump signed his signature tax bill on July 4. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO had publicly criticized Trump's bill and floated the idea of starting his own party last month.

"It is obvious with the insane spending of this bill, which increases the debt ceiling by a record FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS that we live in a one-party country — the PORKY PIG PARTY!!" Musk said in an X post on June 30.

"Time for a new political party that actually cares about the people," he added.

Musk revisited the idea on Friday morning, when he conducted a poll on X. The poll obtained over 1.2 million votes, with over 65% of them supporting the creation of the America Party.

"By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!" Musk wrote in an X post on Saturday.

Musk previously said on Friday that he envisioned having the America Party "serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws" given the "razor-thin legislative margins" in Congress.

"One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts," Musk wrote on X on Friday.

Trump's dismissal of Musk's America Party is not without basis. Past attempts at developing a third political party have faltered.

Billionaire Ross Perot ran as an independent presidential candidate for the 1992 election. While Perot did get nearly 19% of the popular vote, he was unable to obtain any electoral college votes.

Perot made a second attempt in 1996, when he ran under the Reform Party ticket, a party he founded in 1995. This time, Perot's share of the popular vote fell to about 8% and he did not receive any electoral college votes.

Perot's party didn't manage to win any House or Senate seats in subsequent elections, though its candidate, Jesse Ventura managed to win the 1998 Minnesota gubernatorial election. Ventura, however, left the party just a year after taking office.

Musk and the White House did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Lily Wu, now 31, was born in the US to Chinese parents and grew up in Boston.
• Her response to the question "Where are you from?" has evolved over time.
• She moved to Hong Kong in her early 20s and now says, "I grew up in the US, but I'm ethnically Chinese."

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lily Wu, a 31-year-old Chinese American compliance professional who moved to Hong Kong in her early 20s. Her words have been edited for length and clarity.

If you'd asked me where I was from 10 years ago — before I moved to Asia — my answer would've been very different.

"Where are you from?" has become the poster question for how Asian Americans are often treated as foreigners in their own country. I used to reply, "Boston," very matter-of-factly. I grew up there. I'm American. I speak English. It was a defensive answer, like: "Don't challenge me."

Now, I just say, "I grew up in the US, but I'm ethnically Chinese." It's honest, efficient, and I'm less defensive about it than I used to be.

American, born and raised

I was born in Ohio but spent my early years in China while my parents studied in the US as part of the first wave of Chinese students to leave under Deng Xiaoping's 1980s reforms.

We eventually settled in Boston, my hometown. I grew up surrounded by other Chinese or Chinese-American kids, and it felt like a little cultural cocoon.

Later, when I started middle school at Boston Latin School, I met kids from around the world — including China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Mexico. A lot of kids at my school were local to Boston, but most non-white students, like me, were children of immigrants.

That shift gave me my first understanding of how wide the world was.

I grew up in a Chinese enclave and went to a diverse, progressive school where overt racism wasn't socially acceptable, at least not in my circles.

Cantonese was my first language — my mom's family is from southern China — but over time, I stopped using it. One day, I started answering my parents in English, and they let it stick.

Eventually, we became an English-speaking household.

Looking back, I wish I spoke better Cantonese and Mandarin. Like many Asian Americans, I wanted to fit in — and while maybe my parents could've pushed harder, my brother and I were probably just stubborn.

As a kid, I didn't think much of it, but now I feel a growing pull to reconnect with my roots. I was still surrounded by Chinese culture: I went to Chinese school, played the yangqin (a Chinese instrument), and watched "My Fair Princess," a TV drama, with my mom.

Now, there's so much I still want to learn — not just the language, but everything that comes with it.

Next stop: Hong Kong

I studied international relations and economics at Tufts University, then joined a rotational finance program working across departments. My first role was in asset management in Boston.

For my final rotation, I asked to be placed in Hong Kong, and the company made it happen. I'd spent most of my life in Boston, with a study abroad year and an internship in London, so moving to Hong Kong — a city I'd only visited once as a kid — felt like the right kind of adventure. I was 23 and ready to see more of the world.

The transition was surprisingly smooth. Hong Kong is easy for foreigners to navigate — English is widely spoken, and the infrastructure is world-class.

But being Asian American here is complicated. You blend in until you open your mouth — then people switch to English. It's efficient, but also a reminder that you're not quite "one of them."

Culturally, I'm a "gwei mui" — Cantonese slang for a Westernized girl. I used to feel embarrassed by that, but now I've learned to accept it.

Still, I see the value in understanding Hong Kong more deeply through its language and customs. It's ironic: I spent my childhood trying to be fully American, and now I find myself wanting to be more Chinese.

Asia shifted my perspective

When I visit the US now, I feel a kind of reverse culture shock — the streets are wide and quiet, and hardly anyone walks.

Growing up in the States, I was constantly told how amazing it was, but I was rarely told how great other cities around the world were, too.

That's starting to change, thanks to social media showing things like food delivery robots in China, high-tech toilets in Japan, and Hong Kong trains that run every few minutes. You'd never see that in Boston — I don't miss waiting 30 minutes for the subway in the freezing cold.

Things just run more efficiently here. Still, I love going back to the US to see my parents and friends. I appreciate the space and calm.

But these days, landing in Hong Kong feels more like coming home.

Got a personal essay about moving to Asia that you want to share? Get in touch with the editor: [email protected].