• Hannah Witton, a sex education YouTuber, quit her popular channel a year ago.
• She cited burnout and becoming a mother as reasons for her shift.
• She now helps creators navigate career changes, focusing on those who have hit a content wall.

Last December, Hannah Witton decided 12 years with her enormously popular YouTube channel, where she became a beacon of knowledge for sex education, was enough.

Now, she wants to be the crisis clinic for struggling creators, using her 12 years of experience to help other YouTubers figure out their next steps.

Witton stepped away from her channel with over a decade's worth of content on sexual health, with a particular focus on sexuality with a disability.

Witton was one of a wave of long-standing YouTubers who left the channels on which they built their businesses over the past year, including MatPat of The Game Theorists and Tom Scott, who ended his famed "Things You Might Not Know" series.

They all did so for different reasons, but burnout and a sense they had hit a wall was a common thread in their decisions.

Witton told Business Insider that having a baby was the biggest factor for her. She had been on the content hamster wheel for so long, beholden to the ever-changing YouTube algorithm, that she didn't realize she was running on empty.

But being raised a feminist, she previously thought becoming a mom wouldn't change her career at all.

"Then when it actually happens, it's like, oh, wait, it's totally normal for this to completely rewire you," she told BI. "Not just physically and mentally, but actually logistically — your circumstances changing and the impact it has on your time, your energy, your resources, and all of that."

So, Hannah retired her channel and her Doing It Podcast, unsure of exactly what was next, but certain of one thing: she was taking a break.

"I was like, oh, I don't have to do that anymore," she said. "It was a risk I was willing to take."

One year after retirement

Witton started making content in 2013 and evolved as a dominant voice in the sex and relationships space, with a particular focus on enjoying sexuality while living with a chronic condition.

Witton herself has been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a chronic autoimmune illness where her digestive system gets regularly inflamed and has a stoma bag — an external pouch that takes on the role of the colon.

One year on from retirement, Witton has leaned into her Patreon. She has a second YouTube channel which she uploads to occasionally and when she feels like it, but it's not a priority in terms of income and career moves.

"Growth isn't one of my main goals at the moment," Witton said. "I'm really judging the success of videos on my enjoyment of it, and then the comment section, and just if other people enjoyed it too."

Witton said her finances did take a hit initially, but in the long term, it worked out. Struggling to keep up with the content mill meant Witton was draining her bank account by hiring freelancers and paying her team.

"I did cut down on a lot of my overheads at the end of last year because, of course, I also removed a big part of my income," Witton said. "But for the most part, I have been a lot financially healthier this year."

The YouTuber crisis clinic

After retirement, Witton organically started having conversations with many other creators about what they wanted to do next. This turned into a business in itself.

"I originally went in being like, I'm going to be a project manager," Witton said. "But it's more that I come in as a consultant or a coach, and then the rest is kind of up to them to execute."

For example, Witton coached a pregnant creator for a few months before her maternity leave, helping her figure out her priorities and what kind of schedule she could realistically keep.

Helping creators launch their Patreon pages is a big part of this process, Witton said, as she's been on there for 10 years and knows how it works inside out.

"It's been really fun and rewarding to use all of this insight and knowledge and experience that I have," Witton said. "It's reassuring for me as well that I do know stuff. I haven't just been talking to a camera — I've been building up all of these skills."

While Witton sees the value she could bring to newer creators, she finds working with more established ones more interesting.

"I want the creator who's going through a crisis," she said. "I want the creator who's been doing it six years and is like, what am I doing in my life?"

That's what gets her excited, she said — helping creators who are burned out, stressed, and confused about the future figure out their next steps.

"A lot of creators are getting to the age where they may be having children or different life responsibilities, or just generally having a different pace of life," Witton said. "It's the life cycle of a creator."

It's hard to turn off the creator voice in her head that tells her she should be doing more, so Witton has to listen to her own advice and not let the hamster wheel take her away again.

She would like a silver play button for her second channel one day, but right now, her priority is creators in need.

"The clinic is open," Witton said. "You can come to me when you're having your existential crisis."

• I'm 67 and am still working 5 days a week. Many of my friends have retired, but I can't afford to.
• I regret not investing in a pension offered to me earlier in life.
• Now I'm planning to move away from my grandchild so I can work less and enjoy a lower cost of living.

I am 67 years old and when people ask me if I've retired yet, my knee jerk response is, "No I haven't! What's retirement?"

I am a Psychologist, was formerly a teacher, and have worked and paid taxes all my life. I am well paid for the work that I do. I have paid my mortgage off and have no outstanding debts. In spite of this, I am now faced with the prospect of living on a state pension, which is just not possible, continuing to work or, as I have now decided, selling up and moving 200 miles away from my only granddaughter so I can live in a location where house prices are lower and I can afford to work less.

This wasn't the plan

It didn't start out this way. I once imagined that somehow I would make such a success of my life that I would be able to retire at 50 or younger, enjoying being a lady that lunches, going on cruises, and doing the odd spot of volunteer work. But I didn't actually have a plan.

I started my working life as a teacher, got married at 30 then found myself to be a lone parent when my children were 2 and 5, with no family support. I was not well advised and ended up with the children, the mortgage, no pension, and an ex-husband who tried his best not to pay anything at all.

Around that time I decided I needed a career change, and started to train as a Psychologist, a long and very expensive process. I'm not quite sure how I did it, but I managed to work, study, and raise children — all on my own.

I was proud of what I accomplished, but had nothing at all in the way of savings; life was a constant struggle to make ends meet. I still did what I could and at 40 I started to pay £100 (about $127 USD) a month into a private pension. Now I know that I was badly advised and if I were to take it, this would only pay me around £1,500 (about $1,905 USD) per year —nowhere near what I would need to live on.

The thing I never did with my money still haunts me

The obvious question is, why didn't I pay into the teacher's pension offered to me earlier in my career? Why indeed.

Not taking advantage of this is one of my greatest regrets. But when I was in my early 20s we didn't have any financial education. Even the teachers' unions didn't send out advice about pensions. To me, it just seemed like a large monthly outgoing from an already meagre salary, so I opted out and didn't give it another thought. Now I know that money would have made a big difference. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I needed to make some tough decisions

I realized around 5 years ago that the only way I could even contemplate retirement would be to downsize and move to a cheaper area in order to have a reasonably substantial nest egg to help me eke out my twilight years. Most of the advice I have read claims that to have a comfortable retirement where I live, one needs a gross annual income of around £40,000 (around $50,802 USD). I have calculated that with my state pension, bits and pieces for my writing, and interest on the surplus when I move, to reach that £40,000 I will still need to work at least one day a week. Not perfect, but a lot better than the five days I have been working.

With this in mind, I put my house on the market. Then my eldest daughter, who lives nearby, announced that she was pregnant. Fantastic as that was, I could no longer imagine moving away, so I carried on working five days.

I'm now more than a year past the typical retirement age and most of my friends seem to be enjoying a fruitful, active retirement. Meanwhile, I'm becoming more and more exhausted, suffering from frequent low-level infections, and becoming increasingly resentful.

Change is coming

Now, my house is back on the market. I will be moving to Derbyshire, where my younger daughter lives and where house prices are around half of those where I live now.

It will be a massive wrench, especially leaving my granddaughter, but I need to do it while I'm still fit and healthy. I have lived in my current house for 38 years and expected to leave it in a box. I've worked out a solution, although not ideal. I will have enough income to work one day a week, more time to focus on my passions, I'll be able to travel and get involved in the local community and still be able to visit my granddaughter every 6 weeks or so.

My advice to young people now? However distant it seems, don't leave it to chance. Make a retirement plan and start paying as much as you can into a good pension. The years fly by and it will be here before you know it.

• 2024 was a big year for artificial intelligence. 2025 could be even bigger.
• Business Insider spoke to over a dozen key figures in the industry about AI's future.
• Here's what they had to say.

If 2024 is the year companies started adopting AI, then 2025 could be the year they start tailoring it to fit their needs.

Some say AI will become so integrated into our lives we won't even notice it's there.

"Like the internet or electricity, AI will become an invisible driver of outcomes, not a selling point," Tom Biegala, cofounder of Bison Ventures, a venture firm focused on frontier technology, told Business Insider by email.

And as companies incorporate the technology into their businesses, they'll likely need to focus more on managing it responsibly.

"In 2025 we expect more enterprise companies will recognize that investing in AI governance is just as important as adopting AI itself," Navrina Singh, founder of Credo AI, an AI governance platform, said.

Business Insider spoke with 13 key figures in tech — from startup founders to investors — for their best guesses on what to expect from AI in 2025.

Investment will continue to soar

"The AI hype cycle may stabilize, but AI investments will soar," Immad Akhund, the CEO of Mercury, which offers banking services to startups, told BI by email.

He believes the sustained interest in AI comes as companies move from experimenting to using it in real-world areas like customer service, sales, and finance.

"Companies will use AI to boost productivity — especially in back-office tasks and document management — helping small teams scale quickly and operate more efficiently," he said.

Under the Trump Administration, the new leadership at the Federal Trade Commission might foster a more favorable climate for mergers, acquisitions, and IPOs in the AI industry.

"I expect M&A to increase by at least 35% next year," Tomasz Tunguz, founder of Theory Ventures, a venture capital firm, told BI. "The top 10 most active acquirers in the software world are falling off a cliff in terms of activity, which requires meaningfully the IPO market to roar open with a combination of AI and other software companies."

The competition will get fierce

Don't be surprised if a leading company takes a hit because of AI.

"At least one major, globally recognized company will fail or significantly downsize due to an inability to compete with one or more AI-native startups. Rapid innovation cycles and the horizontal application of AI will render slow movers obsolete," Stefan Weitz, CEO and cofounder of HumanX, a leading AI conference, told BI.

He believes the tech's threat will extend to the global stage, requiring major powers to regulate AI to maintain their competitive edge.

"As we are already seeing with the US and China regulating or blocking core AI technologies, nations or corporations will experience major geopolitical conflicts over AI algorithms and data, with some countries banning or nationalizing key AI technologies to maintain control over economic and political power," he wrote.

That said, the United States and China are already working together to mitigate the existential threat AI poses to humanity. In November, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed that humans, not AI, should make decisions regarding the use of nuclear technology.

The lines between humans and AI will not be obvious

The idea of humans and autonomous agents working together might soon move beyond the realm of science fiction. That means we'll also need to start drafting rules to govern these interactions.

"Synthetic virtual people indistinguishable from real humans will enter the workforce, even if in limited ways, leading to debates about employment rights and creating a push for 'AI citizenship' to define their societal roles and limitations," Weitz said.

Some predict that the distinction between human-created and AI-generated content will also become increasingly unclear.

"Generative media will hit the mainstream in a big way and will be as much talked about as LLMs in 2024," Steve Jang, founder and managing partner of Kindred Ventures, an early-stage venture firm, told BI. "Generative audio and images are getting better due to more advanced models, and we'll start to see adoption spike across both consumer and enterprise."

Specialization. Specialization. Specialization.

Business leaders told BI that next year will be about custom-fitting AI technology to suit specific needs.

"In 2025, the AI hype cycle will give way to the rise of domain-specific, specialized AI and robotics," Biegala said. "Products will be faster and more efficient while delivering immediate, tangible value compared to general-purpose solutions. This shift will mark the beginning of real, transformative economic impact of AI."

The focus on customization also extends to how we search for information online, with chatbots replacing search engines like Google.

"In 2025, search will no longer be synonymous with a single brand; instead, users will turn to multiple platforms for specific types of queries. Some may rely on AI-powered chatbots for conversational answers, others on domain-specific engines for technical or industry-specific expertise, and still others on visual or voice-based tools for multimedia queries," Dominik Mazur, CEO and cofounder of IAsk, an AI search engine, told BI. "This diversification will create a competitive environment where specialized players and niche solutions coexist with larger generalist platforms, leading to greater innovation and choice for users."

Over the past year, AI leaders have been promoting the value of smaller AI models that can address a company's specific needs better than large-scale foundation models. "There's a lot of pressure on making smaller, more efficient models, smarter via data and algorithms, methods, rather than just scaling up due to market forces," Aidan Gomez, the founder and CEO of Cohere, an enterprise AI startup, previously told BI.

The pressure is rising as the value of building models simply based on computing power decreases.

"The days of using a GPU to brute force compute to build models and applications will be in the rearview mirror," Biegala said.

Companies may also use customizable AI tools more, possibly replacing software-as-a-service applications.

"AI tools are tearing down the moat of SaaS applications as tools that can only be bought vs built, prompting enterprises — from Amazon to ambitious startups — to replace expensive SaaS apps that don't quite totally fit the need with lightweight custom-fit solutions integrated into your stack," David Hsu, founder of Retool, a low code platform for developers, told BI.

Regulation takes priority

With more responsibility comes more risk. Companies are going to start getting serious about regulation.

"I expect to see more voluntary commitments and actions to responsible AI. I think there will be a push to establish guardrails similar to what happened for frontier models, now discussed for AI agents and autonomous AI," Singh said. "Also, I do see a world where we will see the first penalties for noncompliance with AI-specific laws, which will set a global precedent, forcing businesses to prioritize governance or face steep consequences."

Singh, along with others like AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have expressed interest in an international body to govern the use of AI. We may "even see Global AI standards emerge, led by coalitions of nations and enterprises to set the baseline for safety, transparency, and accountability in AI systems," she said.

The value of regulation will be paramount next year amid the growing threat of large-scale AI-driven cybersecurity threats.

"AI deepfake technologies will make generating fake identities and documents trivially easy, creating a trust crisis for businesses," Pat Kinsel, the CEO of Proof, a software platform for notarization, told BI. "The ability to distinguish between real and fraudulent identities and secure digital interactions in the AI age will be the key differentiator between resilient businesses and those at risk of costly fraud."

AI will not take your job — yet

The good news is that business and tech leaders only expect to see AI enhance people's occupations next year, not replace them.

"We'll see efficiency gains in industries that automate repetitive tasks, but humans will still be needed for complex decision-making and creative work. 2025 is the year we really see many using AI as a core part of their job and enabling more productivity," Akhund said.

• Mark Zuckerberg is building a 1,400-acre compound in Kauai, Hawaii, with a vast basement.
• Plans for the compound show an underground structure nearly double the size of the average US house.
• In an interview with Bloomberg, Zuckerberg said it was only a "little shelter" for hurricanes and the like.

Mark Zuckerberg said the 4,500-square-foot underground structure in his Hawaii compound is just a "little shelter."

The description was in answer to the question of whether he is building some kind of armageddon shelter as part of his 1,400-acre property on the island of Kauai.

In a video with Bloomberg's "The Circuit" released on December 19, Zuckerberg effectively said the project was nothing to write home about.

Bloomberg's reporter, Emily Chang, asked if Zuckerberg was entering his "billionaire era" with the Hawaiian home.

(Business Insider in April calculated Zuckerberg's property holdings were worth about $200 million, spanning compounds in Palo Alto, Lake Tahoe and Hawaii.)

"The Kauai thing is really fun," Zuck responded. "We're doing ranching down there," he added, saying he was excited about creating "the highest quality of beef in the world."

In the video, the reporter asks Zuckerberg about the ranch's bunker, joking that he knows something we don't. Zuck responded: "No, I think that's just like a little shelter. It's like a basement."

He added later: "There's just a bunch of storage space and like, I don't know, whatever you want to call it: a hurricane shelter or whatever."

The little shelter, though, is fairly big.

Both Wired and local news outlet Hawaii News Now obtained planning documents showing an underground space spanning some 4,500 square feet.

That's close to double the size of the average US family home. Per census data, in Q2 2024 the medium new single-family home came it at 2,161 square feet.

Wired reported the plans for Zuckerberg's shelter, accessed via a tunnel, included a living space, mechanical room and escape hatch.

A local Hawaii realtor, Tom Tezak, told HNN that shelters were a rarity in Hawaii, and that he'd never seen one so large.

Zuckerberg told Bloomberg in response to media interest in the compound: "I think it got blown out of proportion as if the whole ranch was some kind of doomsday bunker, which is just not true."

• Market research company EMARKETER shared its forecast for retail in 2025.
• Chinese apps like TikTok disrupted the e-commerce space, but growth could be hindered in the US.
• Retailers may create more exclusive content for consumers with in-house production studios.

Technology will continue to impact the retail industry in 2025, pushing the boundaries of traditional sales and e-commerce.

Retailers of all sizes are adapting to this fast-changing consumer landscape, which is on the rebound in the United States.

Retail sales rose 0.7% in November compared to the previous month due to increased automobile sales and the success of online retailers, according to the US Census Bureau. A recent boost in personal-care spending could be a signal that US shoppers are now more confident, meaning they're more apt to splurge at e-commerce retailers like Shein or hybrid models like Walmart.

As the industry sets its sights on the coming year, EMARKETER, a research firm owned by Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, published its insights and forecasts.

"As competition intensifies and consumers continue to seek value, retailers will need to double on how to differentiate themselves and offer shoppers what they want, wherever they are," the report said.

From artificial intelligence to retailers like creating production companies, here are five ways the industry will expand and transform in 2025.

Innovative companies will combine generative AI with predictive AI to stimulate business growth

Artificial intelligence has become more prominent in the retail industry, and that trend will only accelerate in 2025. EMARKETER said the way retailers use the technology will become more sophisticated as they leverage both generative and predictive artificial intelligence.

Gen AI is artificial intelligence that can respond to prompts or requests with original content. Predictive AI can help forecast outcomes by recognizing patterns using statistical analysis and machine learning.

"By using the two technologies in tandem, businesses can make faster, more informed decisions," the report said. "They can unlock revenue growth by reducing customer churn, identifying new business opportunities, and forecasting demand — and they can improve profitability by identifying inefficiencies and optimizing operations."

Companies who can harness this technology will win with consumers, EMARKETER said.

The report predicts that companies will be able to make more accurate inventory and assortment planning, which will result in gains in product gross margin. It also says products will arrive on the market faster with less waste and fewer resources.

Americans are enamored with Chinese retailers, but policies and privacy concerns could slow momentum

Several Chinese retailers have dug deep inroads with American consumers in recent years. Cheap products and bullish digital marketing helped brands like Shein, Temu, and TikTok Shop thrive.

Shein generated $2 billion in profits in 2023, while Temu's success helped creator Colin Huang become one of the richest men in China. PDD Holdings, Temu's parent company, said it made about $35 billion in revenues in 2023, a 90% increase from 2022. It's unclear how much TikTok Shop has generated since its 2023 launch, but the company said in its 2024 economic report that the app drove $15 billion in revenue for small businesses in the United States. A March Financial Times report, citing three sources, said TikTok Shop facilitated $16 billion in sales in the United States.

Americans are enamored with these brands, but obstacles lay ahead in 2025.

TikTok, for example, could be banned in the United States before the end of January. Congress passed a law in April that gave ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, a January 19 deadline to divest the app or be removed from US app stores, citing security concerns. TikTok asked the US Supreme Court to block the law, arguing it violates the First Amendment rights of Americans who use the app. President-elect Donald Trump has suggested he opposes the ban, but what actions he would take is unclear.

The report said both Shein and Temu, meanwhile, have faced concerns over data privacy, product safety, and copyright infringement. At one point, Temu and Shein sued each other. Shein's parent company, Roadget Business Pte., Ltd., filed a lawsuit against Temu in 2023 that accused it of creating fake Twitter accounts using Shein's name and trademark. Temu later sued Shen, saying the fast-fashion company violated antitrust laws.

A Shein spokesperson said told BI that it "has robust data security policies and practices in line with industry standards, and we are committed to only collecting and using the minimum amount of data needed to fulfill orders. SHEIN stores U.S. customer data within Microsoft's U.S.-based Azure cloud-based solution and within AWS's U.S.-based cloud-based solution."

The spokesperson said Shein "takes product safety very seriously and is dedicated to providing customers with safe and reliable products."

These e-commerce stores also have to compete with powerhouse retailers in the United States, like Amazon, which launched its own Temu-like discount storefront called Haul in November.

Despite the hurdles, EMARKETER says the TikTok Shop will continue to grow, Shein's supply chain model will become more popular, and Temu could expand its offerings into low-cost groceries.

Major retailers like Amazon and Walmart will continue to dominate ad spending while smaller ones struggle

EMARKETER's report said the influx in new retail media networks — a type of advertising platform that lets retailers sell ad space on their channels to third-party brands — won't dent the share of ad spending allocated to Amazon and Walmart.

"Amazon and Walmart combined will gobble up more than 84% of all retail media ad spending in 2025, representing a pervasive and unyielding dominance within the channel," the report said. "The share of ad spending allocated to all other RMNs increased by less than 1 percentage point between 2019 and 2024. While the pie has grown nearly five times larger since 2019, it has also grown significantly more crowded, with more retailers competing for advertiser investment."

The report said most small and midsize retailers don't have a digital footprint big enough to create "meaningful revenues by monetizing their owned and operated digital channels."

"Many are branching into arenas that enable a more scaled reach, including off-site digital channels with the potential to tap into budgets typically reserved for upper-funnel awareness," the report said. "But success off-site or in-store requires a tough-to-stomach investment to fund capabilities, expertise, and technology."

As a result, EMARKETER said advertisers with fewer resources would likely consolidate their retail media network spending across fewer networks, and ad tech platforms would benefit from companies seeking solutions.

Retailers will rely more on media and entertainment content, including in-house production studios

Retailers want to connect with consumers quickly and effectively, leading some to make their own exclusive content. Ulta Beauty launched a "gamified" loyalty program where users compete in in-app games for perks in 2023. That same year, fast food giant Chick-fil-A said it would create a family entertainment app dubbed PLAY to host video series and podcasts.

Companies like Starbucks and LVMH have also created production studios to deliver high-quality video content for their products.

"Many brands and retailers are also using entertainment content to bolster loyalty programs, drive app downloads, and boost engagement," the EMARKETER report said.

The report said more brands will start production studios in 2025 to create episodic content and daily games to engage with consumers. Streaming will be another method retailers will use.

"Brands and retailers will glean consumer insights to better target customers and then eventually sell advertising space around the content powered by first-party data," the report said.

Retailers are leaning into premium loyalty programs and 'partner perks'

Retailers in 2025 will try to make themselves valuable to consumers by partnering with other companies and offering well-rounded subscriptions. For instance, Walmart+ partnered with Paramount+ to allow certain members access to the streaming site. Similarly, Instacart+ members get access to NBCUniversal's streaming service, Peacock. Amazon Prime members can access Grubhub+ benefits for free.

The EMARKETER report says Walmart could partner with Uber to explore meal delivery and rideshare services. Additionally, quick-service restaurants will be the next frontier for retail partnerships.

"Walmart may expand its partnership with Burger King's parent company, Restaurant Brands International, to bring banners like Popeyes to its membership offerings," the report said. "Target could bolster its Circle 360 membership with Starbucks discounts, as there are already Starbucks Cafes in more than 1,700 Target locations."

• Astronauts take hundreds of stunning photos from the International Space Station.
• This year's best snapshots reveal both Earth and space in glorious detail.
• Check out astronauts' views of eclipses, northern lights, storms, and Earth's grandest landscapes.

Every year, the International Space Station produces some of the world's best photography.

Astronauts tend to be technically skilled with a camera, yes. Many of them are engineers, after all.

Their real photography advantage, though, is the glorious view from space as they circle our planet every 90 minutes.

From blue comets and pink northern lights to snowy volcanos and winding rivers, the view 250 miles above Earth does not disappoint.

Here are the best photos of 2024 from the space station.

You simply can't beat the views from the International Space Station.

So astronauts take hundreds of photos each year.

"How would you not want to take pictures and try and share that with the rest of humanity?" NASA astronaut Matt Dominick told ABC News Radio in August.

This year brought a special treat: the bold, bright Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, or Comet A3.

Of course, astronauts also get front-row seats to the northern lights, aka the aurora borealis.

In April, they watched the shadow of the moon creep across the US during the total solar eclipse.

Earth's atmosphere offers other unique spectacles, such as colorful sunsets and sunrises.

This eerie sheen is noctilucent clouds — extremely rare ice-crystal formations much higher in the atmosphere than any other cloud.

Even these gorgeous photos don't do the real views justice, according to Dominick.

"I've spent a fair amount of time trying to capture what I can see with my eye. I've not been able to achieve it yet," he said.

Not all the views are fun or comforting. Astronauts can see wildfires clearly.

Every year they get a bird's-eye view of hurricanes, too.

Stretching hundreds of miles wide, major storms like Hurricanes Helene and Milton seem to swallow the world below.

Astronauts can even see lightning blaring through the clouds.

One thing they can't often see is borders — like in this spot where Libya, Sudan, and Egypt meet in the Sahara desert.

Astronauts have long described a profound shift in perspective when they first see Earth from above. It's called the "Overview Effect."

They talk about overwhelming feelings of awe, unity, and a sense of Earth's fragility.

The actor William Shatner described it after his 2021 spaceflight with Jeff Bezos: "There's the blue down there and the black up there. There is Mother Earth and comfort, and there is — is there death? I don't know."

"It really is difficult for me to imagine people on Earth not getting along together," NASA astronaut Suni Williams told reporters in September. "It just changes your perspective."

Williams and her crewmate, Butch Wilmore, have been stuck on the space station for months.

They were the first people to fly on Boeing's Starliner spaceship for a roughly week-long flight in July.

Starliner returned to Earth without them after engine issues made NASA officials concerned about its safety.

Now, Williams and Wilmore are scheduled to return to Earth aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon spaceship in March.

They've taken the setback in stride. "This is my happy place. I love being up here in space," Williams said.

The space station's days are numbered, though. It will reach the end of its operational life in 2030.

NASA has asked SpaceX to design a vehicle to push the ISS out of orbit, to a fiery plunge into the Pacific Ocean.

The ISS will have a "big legacy," Dominick said: "Look what humanity can do when they come together and work together."

• Ryan Salame, an ex-FTX executive, appears to have had time shaved off his scheduled release from prison.
• Salame began his 7 ½ year sentence for his role in a massive crypto fraud scheme in October.
• Federal prison records show Salame is scheduled to be released in March 2031.

Ryan Salame, a former top executive at the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, reported to federal prison in October to start his 7 ½ year sentence for his role in Sam Bankman-Fried's multi-billion-dollar fraud scheme.

And it appears that Salame — who was in the inner circle of Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto tycoon and FTX founder — has already had his prison release date moved up by more than a year.

Salame was sentenced in May after he pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to the 2022 collapse of Bankman-Fried's crypto exchange. Salame began his prison sentence at Maryland's medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland on October 11.

Federal Bureau of Prisons records viewed by Business Insider in mid-December show Salame's prison release date as scheduled for March 1, 2031 — which is just over a year short of 7 ½ years.

Salame's attorneys did not respond to requests for comment for this story. A Bureau of Prisons spokesman told BI the agency didn't comment on the confinement conditions of any person in custody, including release plans, but said incarcerated individuals could earn time off their sentence for good behavior under the 2018 First Step Act.

"Every incarcerated individual earns Good Conduct Time (GCT), which is projected on their release date," the spokesman told BI in an email, explaining that under the First Step Act, "qualifying individuals will be eligible to earn up to 54 days of GCT time for each year of the sentence imposed by the court."

In accordance with federal law, the Bureau of Prisons "continues to pro-rate the amount of GCT earned for the final year of service of the sentence," the spokesman said.

Just before he reported to the federal Maryland lockup, Salame turned to LinkedIn to share a life update.

"I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as Inmate at FCI Cumberland," Salame posted at the time.

He later updated his LinkedIn profile headline to read, "Camper Librarian at FCI Cumberland / Previously Co - CEO FDM (FTX Digital Markets)."

In a profile description under "Inmate / Camper Librarian," Salame wrote: "Incarcerated; manually implemented Dewey Decimal System with no internet access; trained Navy Seal style training daily 2+ hours with no water; honed chess, ping pong, yoga and spades skills; began pursuit of reading every presidential biography; learned to cook plethora of meals with 190 degree water and an iron; taught cryptocurrency courses to fellow campers; never screwed up a daily count."

Salame pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to make illegal campaign contributions totaling tens of millions of dollars and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business.

He was one of four top executives within Bankman-Fried's business empire to plead guilty. Among those former executives was Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried's ex-girlfriend and the CEO of his Alameda Research cryptocurrency hedge fund.

Ellison was sentenced to two years in prison in September after she previously pleaded guilty to conspiring with Bankman-Fried in the $11 billion fraud scheme.

As BI recently reported, it appears Ellison also had some time shaved from her scheduled release from prison.

Earlier this year, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of all seven counts of fraud and conspiracy.

He remains behind bars at the infamous Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn as he appeals his conviction.

• Gong Yoo returns in "Squid Game" season two as the recruiter.
• Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told BI he wanted to explore the character's backstory and true nature.
• That true nature is pretty wild — and Gong embraces it in his performance.

Gong Yoo's ddakji-playing recruiter is blessedly back in "Squid Game" season two — and this time, his appearance is even more memorable.

Gong plays the recruiter, a well-dressed, frankly unfairly attractive man who approaches people and challenges them to a game of ddakji. If they win a round, he gives them money. If they lose, he slaps them. Win-win! After enough time, he'll invite them to participate in a game with a much larger prize pool, and much more severe consequences for losing.

He appears only briefly in season one to recruit Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) into the games. More memorably, he utterly trounces Gi-hun in ddakji, slapping him no less than ten times all while remaining perfectly pleasant and composed. It's enough to, if you're a true freak, make him want to slap you too.

Luckily for those of us who have been thinking about this scene for the past three years, there's a whole lot more Gong Yoo in season two.

"I got many, many requests, people asking me to tell us the backstory about the ddakji man," creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told Business Insider. "I also thought of him to be a very intriguing character, so I wanted to bring him back again in season two and give him is own narrative."

Warning: Spoilers ahead for season two, episode one of "Squid Game."

Gi-hun tracks down the recruiter as a means to an end

In season two, Gi-hun is a man on a mission: he wants to shut down the games, and to do so, he needs to pin down his first point of contact. That's ddakji guy, and Gi-hun enlists a veritable small army of foot soldiers to scour the Seoul subway system for people getting slapped. It's slow going until Gi-hun's former creditor Mr. Kim (Kim Pub-lae) and his associate Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho) actually manage to find him.

They pursue him from the subway, to a bakery, to a convenience store, to a park, and eventually to an alleyway. Unfortunately, Mr. Kim and Woo-seok are no match for six feet of bitch-slapping recruiter, and he captures them and forces them to play a game that leaves Mr. Kim dead.

When Gi-hun returns to the motel where he's taken up residence, he finds the recruiter waiting for him. During their conversation, the recruiter reveals his backstory: after getting brought into the game as a guard, he was given a gun. After killing a player who turned out to be his father, the recruiter realized that his calling was.... leading people to their violent deaths. Sure!

This time, the recruiter challenges Gi-hun not to ddakji, but a modified game of Russian Roulette that will inevitably leave one of them dead. Apparently, he's a man prone to absurd melodrama, because he queues up "Time To Say Goodbye" by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman to set the tone.

After trying to convince Gi-hun to acknowledge that he's a "piece of trash" like everyone else who ended up in the games, the recruiter ends up with the last bullet in the gun — and after Gi-hun calls him a dog, ddakji man pulls the trigger, ending his own life.

No more Mr. Nice Ddakji Guy

In season one, the recruiter was an entrancing figure because of the difference in his demeanor (perfect, poised) and actions (slapping the daylights out of people). This time, however, Hwang told BI that he wanted to not only reveal his backstory, but also, "what kind of state he is in as a human being."

The answer? One untethered to anything except his objectively wild and remarkably strong convictions. This is a man who does it all — harassing people already being crushed by debt, sentencing them to a death game, and murder — for the love of the game. It's not really clear why he believes people, like those he recruits into the games, are trash. On the flip side, it's incredibly clear that he's a sadist who will play any game he initiates to the end, even if he has to forfeit his own life.

Gong brings a charged energy to his sequences in episode one — particularly his confrontation with Gi-hun — that remains largely unmatched by the rest of the season. His physicality, whether it's getting up in another performer's space or spinning the barrel of a pistol, is unmatched.

"Gong Yoo is an actor who's mostly taken on very sweet characters," Hwang said. "He's never done something that's as crazy or insane as this one, so I was personally curious to see how he was going to portray the character as well."

In season one, it was clear that the recruiter was a tightly coiled spring. In season two, Hwang and Gong finally let him snap.

"Squid Game" season two is now streaming on Netflix.

• BYD is chasing down Tesla on EV sales, but the Chinese giant is much more than just a car company.
• As well as cheap EVs, BYD also makes batteries, buses, trains and even some iPhones and iPads.
• BYD is following in the footsteps of Elon Musk's company, which also has lucrative side hustles.

BYD has fast become one of the world's biggest electric-vehicle makers — but the Chinese giant is much more than just a car company.

Like its rival Tesla, BYD, which was founded in 1995 as a battery manufacturer, makes and sells a variety of products alongside its car business, from solar panels to buses.

The EV giant's manufacturing expertise allows it to make nearly all of the components of its vehicles in-house, cutting down costs and enabling BYD to sell EVs for as little as $10,000.

That versatility has proven a crucial advantage, helping BYD to expand rapidly in China's cut-throat EV industry and even briefly overtake Elon Musk's automaker and become world's largest producer of EVs by sales last year.

Here are all of BYD's side hustles.

iPads and iPhones

Apple has long turned to China to assemble its tablets and smartphones, and it is reportedly increasingly relying on BYD.

The EV maker's manufacturing arm, BYD Electronic, now assembles more than 30% of Apple's iPad tablets and is part of the supply chain for the iPhone, according to industry executives and analysts cited by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

Apple CEO Tim Cook praised its partnership with BYD during a visit to China in March, and Apple isn't the only company that relies on BYD Electronic.

EV rivals Xiaomi as well as other smartphone manufacturers Huawei and Samsung are also customers.

Batteries

China dominates the global battery industry, and BYD is one of its biggest success stories.

The automaker is the world's second-largest battery producer, behind fellow Chinese firm CATL, per data released in September by Korean market research SNE Research.

In 2020, BYD rolled out its Blade battery, which the company said had "maximum safety, while offering outstanding strength, range, longevity and power."

The Blade battery is now incorporated into all BYD vehicles, and the automaker also sells it to rivals such as Toyota, which uses BYD's batteries in its cars sold in China.

In October, Bloomberg reported Apple had worked with BYD on designing long-range batteries for its project to build its own car, which it ultimately scrapped.

Energy storage

Just like its rival Tesla, BYD has been able to turn its battery know-how into a lucrative side hustle in energy storage.

Tesla's energy business includes solar panels and its megapack and powerwall batteries, which provide a backup power supply for homes and businesses.

BYD also sells solar panels and its battery-box system — a stack of Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries that the company markets for home and commercial usage.

BYD's energy storage business has grown rapidly in recent years, but the automaker may be about to face more competition from Musk with Tesla set to begin megapack production at its factory in Shanghai early next year.

Buses

BYD may not sell its cars in the US market thanks to tariffs — but the company has been making buses and commercial vehicles in its Lancaster, California factory since 2013.

BYD's commercial vehicle business, which makes everything from school buses to forklifts, has often entered new markets before the company's automotive arm.

BYD has also been contracted to provide London's famous red double-decker buses and has struck a deal to provide Mexico City with a fleet of electric buses.

The company's November figures showed it had sold around 16,400 commercial vehicles, including around 4,200 buses, in 2024 so far.

Monorails

In addition to buses, BYD has also branched out into mass transit with its "Skyrail" monorail.

The company unveiled its first single-track electric train in the Chinese city of Yinchuan in 2017. The company said the Skyrail is cheaper and easier to build than traditional subway systems.

BYD has a contract to build a Metro system in the Brazilian city of São Paulo, and it is also part of a consortium developing a proposal for a monorail system in Los Angeles.

• Google's 2024 saw many changes in the executive ranks.
• As the company doubled down on AI, it got a new CFO and a new head of search.
• There were also several leadership changes in the Cloud unit.

If Google's 2024 could be neatly summed up, it would be: AI, AI, AI. After a turbulent 2023 filled with restructures, layoffs and pivots, this year saw the search giant start to turn the narrative around and reassert itself as a leader in artificial intelligence.

It was also a big year for executive shuffles. While Alphabet saw some new faces and some departures, the most interesting personnel changes happened with executive shuffles that stayed inside Alphabet's walls. That included Google getting a new head of search and a new boss for Europe. The company also got a new chief financial officer this year and saw several changes in its Cloud unit.

Here are the biggest joiners, leavers, and movers of 2024.

Joined: Anat Ashkenazi

Google hired a new chief financial officer this year. Anat Ashkenazi came from pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly, where she spent the last three years as its CFO. Her appointment at Alphabet was nearly a year in the making, after the company's long-tenured CFO, Ruth Porat, announced last year that she would step into a new role overseeing investments and the company's long-term bets.

Ashkenazi arrived at a company facing a different set of challenges, the biggest being its aggressive push in AI and existential threats to its search business from competitors such as OpenAI. Some investors hope that Ashkenazi's arrival will increase transparency in growing Google businesses, such as AI and subscriptions.

Joined (again): Noam Shazeer

In 2017, Noam Shazeer and several other researchers co-authored a paper that detailed the ideas now being used to drive the generative AI boom. Shazeer quit Google in 2021, frustrated the company had let rivals such as OpenAI capitalize on his work and did not seize the potential themselves. He cofounded a new AI startup, Character.AI.

This year, Google brought Shazeer back, reportedly paying an eye-popping $2.7 billion to license Character.AI's technology, a deal that included bringing Shazeer and Character.AI cofounder Daniel De Freitas back to Google. Shazeer has been working on improving the reasoning abilities of Google's Gemini model. In December the company revealed an experimental model "trained to think out loud."

Left: Shailesh Prakash

When longtime Washington Post data chief Shailesh Prakash left in 2022 to join Google, it was considered a huge boon to the search giant's news business and potentially a way to salve tensions between Google News and publishers. Prakash departed in November this year amid a more complicated online publishing landscape that grapples with AI companies taking and using their content — Google being one of them.

(Disclosure: Axel Springer, the owner of Business Insider, is one of the media groups that filed a lawsuit against Google in February, alleging they suffered losses due to the company's digital advertising practices.)

Left: Matt Brittin

Matt Brittin joined Google in 2007 and helped build the search giant's UK business before rising to oversee all of Google's Europe, Middle East, and Africa operations. In October, Brittin announced he intended to step down and appoint a successor, who in December was confirmed to be Debbie Weinstein. Brittin won't officially depart Google until early 2025.

"It's a pivotal moment to be passing the baton," wrote Brittin in a LinkedIn post announcing his plans to step down.

"We're only just starting to glimpse the transformative benefit that AI will have on billions of lives - and people in our part of the world are showing the way," he added.

Left: Adaire Fox-Martin

In March, Equinix announced it had appointed Adaire Fox-Martin as its next president and CEO, ending her near-three-year stint at Google. She joined the search giant in 2021 as its EMEA cloud president before being appointed to run its international and Ireland business the following year.

Left: Bob Frati

In August, Bob Frati left his role as VP of sales for Workspace after just over a year at Google. Before Google, he was Slack's chief sales and success officer.

Left: Amit Zavery

Google Cloud VP and head of platform Amit Zavery left the company in October to become COO of ServiceNow. He spent almost 25 years at Oracle before he joined Google.

"Helping grow Google Cloud from $7.3B to over $41B in annualized revenue and contributing to the creation of the world's fourth-largest enterprise software company has been a career-defining privilege," Zavery wrote on LinkedIn in a post announcing his departure.

Moved: Prabhakar Raghavan

One of Google's biggest leadership changes happened in October when the company's head of search, Prabhakar Raghavan, stepped down. As Google's search lead, Raghavan had also overseen ads, maps, commerce, and Google's voice assistant — responsibilities now falling to Nick Fox, who was elevated to the role. Raghavan's new position is chief technologist, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai in a role that takes him back to his "computer science roots," per a memo from Pichai to the company in October. Raghavan joined Google in 2012 and worked on the company's ads business before taking on Search in 2020.

Moved: Nick Fox

Nick Fox now runs Google's core search and advertising business, potentially putting him in line for the CEO chair one day. Fox, a longtime executive who joined Google in 2003, has worked on products including Google Fi and Assistant. In 2022, he was appointed interim head of Google's commerce business, which he now oversees in his elevated role.

"I frequently turn to Nick to tackle our most challenging product questions, and he consistently delivers progress with tenacity, speed, and optimism," said Pichai in a memo to the company in October.

Moved: Debbie Weinstein

In December, Debbie Weinstein became one of Google's most powerful people, taking the reins of the search giant's Europe, Middle East, and Africa businesses—and the nearly 30,000 employees that come with them. Weinstein, who has been at Google for just over a decade, was most recently VP and managing director of Google UK and Ireland.

She'll have her work cut out for her in handling European regulators and rolling out Google's many new AI products worldwide.

"This moment is a really exciting one for us — as we continue to drive remarkable breakthroughs in AI to make sure everyone across our region and the world will benefit from this technology," she wrote on LinkedIn.

Moved: Aparna Pappu

Google's head of Workspace stepped down in October, BI first reported. Aparna Pappu, who led the unit from July 2022, said she was ready for her "next opportunity" at Google and announced cloud applications president Jerry Dischler would lead Workspace going forward. Under Pappu's watch, Google has infused its Workspace product with AI, although it has struggled along the way. Google's new Gemini 2.0 features may be the shot in the arm Workspace needs.

• The Ukraine war is a wake-up call for NATO to stockpile more ammunition.
• NATO states need more ammo and defense production to replace losses in a long war.
• Powers like Russia and China have invested in huge numbers of artillery.

The Ukraine war shows that the theory behind NATO's combat doctrine is sound. The problem is that Britain and many other NATO allies lack the resources to implement it, a new report argues.

There is not "compelling evidence to suggest that the war necessitates fundamental changes to key ideas and terms in UK or Allied joint operational-level doctrine, such as the maneuverist approach, the comprehensive approach or mission command," according to the RAND Europe think tank, which reviewed open-source literature on the Ukraine war at the behest of the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense. The report counters other experts who've argued that the West's maneuver strategy for ground combat faces increasing threats.

But to win a large conflict like Ukraine, NATO lacks sufficient equipment and ammunition. The Ukraine war has been marked by heavy losses of armored vehicles and artillery, as well as massive expenditure of munitions that have strained the economies of the combatants. NATO stockpiles and defense manufacturing capacity had already dwindled after the end of the Cold War: providing a steady supply of armaments to Ukraine while replenishing their stockpiles has proven extremely challenging.

"The published literature on Ukraine suggests that the most pressing question is not whether NATO and the UK's joint doctrine is appropriate, but rather whether sufficient resources are available to credibly implement those ideas and principles as envisaged, especially over the course of a long war," RAND warned.

Ukraine is a conflict of contradictions, where 21st-century technologies such as drones exist alongside artillery barrages and trench warfare straight from 1917. While militaries want to learn the lessons for future wars, distinguishing what's old from what's new — and what are specific features of the Ukraine war versus permanent trends — isn't easy.

For example, what is the future of airpower? Crewed aircraft have had a surprisingly limited impact on the Ukraine war, as have helicopters. "The deployment of [ground-based air defenses] has underscored the poor survivability of rotary-wing assets on both sides, with a reduced use of platforms including helicopters for tactical air mobility maneuvers and [casualty evacuation], compared with operations in Afghanistan and Iraq," RAND said. The sheer numbers and accuracy of air defenses like the Patriot (Ukraine) or S-300 and S-400s (Russia) force jets to fly at a remove from the battlefield, one of the reasons the battlefield's lines are largely static.

These issues are hardly academic for NATO militaries. They operate the world's most numerous and advanced air forces, outgrowths from the Cold War strategy of using tactical airpower to stall and fracture the Soviet Union's numerically superior ground forces. If their use is now much more limited, it suggests NATO armies will face a much more difficult ground fight.

Drones have largely replaced crewed aircraft for reconnaissance and attack missions. And, small, expendable drones have replaced larger UAVs such as the Turkish-made Bayraktar 2 strike drone that Ukraine used with devastating effect in the early days of the war. Yet massive use of drones has failed to provide either side with victory.

Ukraine has tried to shed its Soviet-era doctrine in favor of Western-style maneuver warfare, with limited but not decisive success. Russia has used massive artillery barrages and human-wave assaults — the same tactics the Red Army used against the Germans in World War II — to achieve steady but incremental gains at ferocious cost; by one estimate, November was the highest month for Russian soldiers killed and wounded in the entire war.

"Without airpower, neither maneuver nor positional warfare have led to a decisive strategic outcome, but claims in the literature about the demise of such approaches are premature," said RAND.

The apparent neutralization of airpower is bad news for NATO. Western nations have tended to invest in aircraft rather than building huge numbers of artillery pieces, as Russia and China have done.

RAND does see several enduring lessons of the Ukraine war for NATO. One is having adequate quantities of personnel and material to absorb and replenish the constant drain of combat losses in a long war. "While the efficiency afforded by new technology can offset the need for mass in certain situations, it cannot replace the general need for mass. We have not yet observed any game-changing technology or tactic that negates the need for critical mass in personnel, infrastructure, materiel and stockpiles."

These issues are especially acute for the UK. The British Army is shrinking to 72,000 soldiers — its lowest level since the Napoleonic Wars — while the Royal Navy and Air Force are also a fraction of their Cold War strength. In the event of a war with Russia, such as an invasion of Poland or Eastern Europe, the UK might barely be able to scrape together a full-strength mechanized division.

The RAND study also examines how military power emerges from more than just weapons and strategy. For example, the Kremlin's worst error was to underestimate the resolve of the Ukrainian people and government to preserve their independence as a nation. "The war has re-emphasized the importance of a narrative and audience-centric approaches. This includes the crucial but often overlooked role of a national will to fight — a topic extensively analyzed at RAND but often overlooked, especially in Western defense establishments.^"

Perhaps the biggest lesson of the Ukraine war is the importance of adaptability. Ukraine and Russia have proven rigid in some ways, but quite adaptable in others, such as mastering the use of drones. "Technological trends towards automation, process optimization and a more transparent, networked and data-rich battlespace aside, the war has for example reiterated the enduring impact of uncertainty and friction in complicating operations," RAND said.

This means NATO must constantly reassess its doctrine. The Ukraine war "emphasizes the crucial distinction between innovation (combining old with new) vs adaptation (to counter the enemy's new tactics) and the need to promote both (not necessarily prioritizing the new)," RAND concluded.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Former OpenAI employee Suchir Balaji alleged the startup violates copyright laws.
• His death in November reignited a debate about how top AI companies affect humanity.
• In an interview with BI, Balaji's mom shared his initial hopes for AI, and why they were dashed.

In October, Suchir Balaji made waves when he spoke against OpenAI.

In an interview with The New York Times, he discussed how powerhouse AI companies might be breaking copyright laws.

OpenAI's models are trained on information from the internet. Balaji helped collect and organize that data, but he grew to feel the practice was unfair. He resigned in August. And in November, he was named by NYT lawyers as someone who might have "unique and relevant documents" for their copyright-infringement case against OpenAI.

"If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave," he told the Times.

On November 26, the young engineer was found dead in his apartment. The tragedy struck a chord, stoking conspiracy theories, grief, and debate. What do we lose when AI models gain?

In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, Balaji's mother, Poornima Ramarao, offered clues.

Balaji joined OpenAI because of AI's potential to do good, she said. Early on, he loved that the models were open-source, meaning freely available for others to use and study. As the company became more financially driven and ChatGPT launched, those hopes faded. Balaji went from believing in the mission to fearing its consequences for publishers and society as a whole, she told BI.

"He felt AI is a harm to humanity," Ramarao said.

An OpenAI spokesperson shared that Balaji was a valued member of the team, and that his passing deeply affected those who worked closely with him.

"We were devastated to learn of this tragic news and have been in touch with Suchir's family to offer our full support during this difficult time," the spokesperson wrote in a statement. "Our priority is to continue to do everything we can to assist them."

"We first became aware of his concerns when The New York Times published his comments and we have no record of any further interaction with him," OpenAI's spokesperson added. "We respect his, and others', right to share views freely. Our hearts go out to Suchir's loved ones, and we extend our deepest condolences to all who are mourning his loss."

Recruited by OpenAI

Growing up, Balaji's dad thought he was "more than average," Ramarao said. But she thought her son was a prodigy. By two years old, he could form complex sentences, she recalled.

"As a toddler, as a little 5-year-old, he never made mistakes. He was perfect," Ramarao said.

At age 11, he started learning to code using Scratch, a programming language geared toward kids. Soon, he was asking his mom, who's a software engineer, questions that went over her head. At 13, he built his own computer. At 14, he wrote a science paper about chip design.

"Dad would say, don't focus too much. Don't push him too much," Ramarao said.

They moved school districts to find him more challenges. His senior year, he was the US champion in a national programming contest for high-schoolers, leading to him getting recruited, at 17 years old, by Quora, the popular online knowledge-sharing forum. His mom was against it, so he fibbed to her about applying. But he had to fess up by the first day on the job because he couldn't drive yet.

"I had to give him a ride to his office in Mountain View," Ramarao said.

She was worried about how he'd handle "so many adults," but he made friends to play poker with and enjoyed Quora's abundant cafeteria.

She viewed it as a lesson in learning to trust her Balaji.

"Then I understood, okay, my son is really an advanced person. I cannot be a hindrance to him," Ramarao said.

After working for about a year, he went to UC Berkeley, and soon won $100,000 in a TSA-sponsored challenge to improve their passenger-screening algorithms.

It was all enough to be recruited by OpenAI. He interned with the company in 2018, per his LinkedIn, then joined full-time in 2021 after graduating.

An early standout

Over his nearly four-year tenure at OpenAI, Balaji became a standout, eventually making significant contributions to ChatGPT's training methods and infrastructure, John Schulman, an OpenAI cofounder, wrote in a social media post about Balaji.

"He'd think through the details of things carefully and rigorously. And he also had a slight contrarian streak that made him allergic to 'groupthink' and eager to find where the consensus was wrong," Schulman said in the post. Schulman didn't reply to BI's requests for comment.

Balaji had joined the company at a critical juncture, though.

OpenAI started off as a non-profit in 2015 with the explicit mission of ensuring that AI benefited all of humanity. As the startup moved away from its open-source and non-profit roots, Balaji became more concerned, Ramarao said.

When it launched ChatGPT publicly in November 2022, he reconsidered the copyright implications, she said.

Earlier that year, a big part of Balaji's role was gathering digital data — from all corners of the English-speaking internet — for GPT-4, a model that would soon power ChatGPT, per the Times interview. Balaji thought of this like a research project.

Using other people's data for research was one thing, he wrote in a later essay. Using it to make a product that could take away from those creators' revenue or traffic was another.

OpenAI didn't comment on Balaji's concerns to Business Insider. In court, it has argued that the legal doctrine of "fair use" protects how its models ingest publicly-available internet content.

"Too naive and too innocent"

By late 2023 and early 2024, Balaji's enthusiasm for OpenAI had fizzled out entirely, and he began to criticize CEO Sam Altman in conversations with friends and family, Ramarao said.

He used to tell his mom when he was working on "something cool," but more and more, he had nothing to say about his job, she told BI.

When he resigned in August, Ramarao didn't press the issue.

Come October, when she saw his bombshell interview with the Times, she unleashed a torrent of anxiety at Balaji. In shining a spotlight on what he thought was corporate wrongdoing, he was taking it all on his shoulders, she said.

"I literally blasted him," she said of their conversation. "'You should not go alone. Why did you give your picture? Why did you give your name? Why don't you stay anonymous? What's the need for you to give your picture?'"

"You have to go as a group. You have to go together with other people who are like-minded. Then he said, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm connecting with like-minded people. I'm building a team,'" she continued. "I think he was too naive and too innocent to understand this dirty corporate world."

Balaji's parents are calling for an investigation

When Balaji left OpenAI in August, he took a break.

"He said, 'I'm not taking up another job. Don't ask me,'" Ramarao said.

From Balaji's parents' vantage point, everything seemed fine with the young coder. He was financially stable, with enough OpenAI stock to buy a house one day, she said. He had plans to build a machine learning non-profit in the medical field.

"He wanted to do something for society," his mom said.

On November 21, a Thursday, Balaji celebrated his 26th birthday with friends while on vacation. The next day, he let his mom know when his flight home took off, and spoke with his dad on the phone before dinner. His dad wished him a happy birthday and said he was sending a gift.

According to Ramarao, the medical examiner said that Balaji died that evening, or possibly the next morning.

"He was upbeat and happy," she said. "What can go wrong within a few hours that his life is lost?"

On Saturday and Sunday, Ramarao didn't hear from her son. She thought that maybe he'd lost his phone or gone for a hike. But on Monday, she went and knocked on his door. He didn't answer. She thought about filing a missing person complaint. But, knowing he'd have to go in-person to remove it, she hesitated. "He'll get mad at me," she said of her thinking at the time.

The next morning, she called the San Francisco police. They found his body just after 1 p.m. PST, according to a spokesperson for the department. But Ramarao wasn't told or allowed inside, she said. As officers trickled in, she pleaded with them to check if his laptop and toothbrush were missing, she told BI; that way she'd know if he'd traveled.

"They didn't give the news to me," Ramaro said. "I'm still sitting there thinking, 'My son is traveling. He's gone somewhere.' It's such a pathetic moment."

Around 2 p.m., they told her to go home. She refused.

"I sat there firmly," Ramarao told BI.

Then, around 3:20 p.m., a long white van pulled up with the light on.

"I was waiting to see medical help or nurses or someone coming out of the van," she said. "But a stretcher came. A simple stretcher. I ran and asked the person. He said, 'We have a dead body in that apartment.'"

About an hour later, a medical examiner and police asked to speak with Ramarao one-on-one inside the apartment's office. They said that Balaji had died by suicide, and that from looking at CCTV footage, he was alone, according to Ramarao. There was no initial evidence of foul play, the department spokesperson told BI.

Balaji's parents aren't convinced. They arranged for a private autopsy, completed in early December. Ramarao said the results were atypical, but she declined to share any more details. BI has not seen a copy of the report.

Balaji's parents are working with an attorney to press the SF police to reopen the case and do a "proper investigation," Ramarao said.

Meanwhile, they and members of their community are trying to raise awareness of his case through social media and a Change.org petition. Besides seeking answers, they want to invoke a broader discussion about whistleblowers' vulnerability and lack of protections, Ramarao and a family friend, who's helping organize a an event about Balaji on December 27, told BI.

"We want to leave the question open," Ramarao said. "It doesn't look like a normal situation."

BI shared a detailed account of Ramarao's concerns and memory of November 26 with spokespeople for the SF police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. These officials did not respond or offer comments.

Ramarao emphasized to BI that the family isn't pointing fingers at OpenAI.

'Yes, mom'

Ramarao said she shared a close bond with her son. He didn't eat enough fruit, so every time she visited, she'd arrange shipments to his apartment from Costco. He tended to skip breakfast, so she'd bring granola bars and cookies.

Balaji rarely expressed his emotions and always paid for everything. But on November 7, during their last meal together, something made Ramarao try extra hard to pay, give him a ride home, and seek reassurance. He still paid for the meal and called an Uber. But he did offer his mom two words of encouragement.

"I asked him, 'Suchir this is the hardship. This is how I raised you, and if you were to choose parents now, would you choose me as mom?' He didn't think for a second,'" she said. "'Yes, mom.' And you know what? As a mother, that will keep me going as long as I'm alive."

• Distinguished engineers and technical fellows are among the highest-level technologists in banking.
• They are selected through an extensive process that highlights technical prowess and influence.
• BI discussed the the program with execs from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Every two years, a selective group of Morgan Stanley's elite technologists open their ranks to welcome a new crop of distinguished engineers.

This month, the existing distinguished engineers at the firm themselves selected their 19 newest members after a rigorous half-a-year vetting process. The group, now made up of 78 employees from across the firm, represents the top 0.3% of technologists at Morgan Stanley.

"Anywhere we're making those core decisions at the center of tech, you can almost guarantee that all or some portion of the DEs are involved in those decision processes," Michael Pizzi, head of US banks and head of technology at Morgan Stanley, told Business Insider.

Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, last month announced its class of 111 technical fellows, representing the top 3% of engineers at the bank. They specialize in specific domains, and are often tapped to work on some of the firm's trickiest technical issues.

Goldman Chief Technology Officer John Madsen remembers assembling an A-team of about 10 technical fellows a few years ago to make upgrades to an important system that was about to max out on its capacity, he said, declining to specify which business the system supported. "These kinds of moments often go unnoticed by the bulk of the firm, but they highlight the exact value this community brings to Goldman Sachs," Madsen told BI.

At JPMorgan, distinguished engineers represent the highest level of engineer, and includes the likes of Marco Pistoia, who leads applied research on cutting-edge technologies like quantum computing, and William Patrick Opet, the bank's global chief information security officer.

Outside of banking, the technical distinction is picking up traction. Ken Griffin's market maker, Citadel Securities, hired its first technical fellow this year, and BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, introduced its inaugural class in 2021.

While it's usually the rainmakers, investors, and traders who take the spotlight on Wall Street, there's a growing group of technologists whose influence is taking center stage as technology is increasingly viewed as a competitive advantage.

Call them distinguished engineers or technical fellows (depending on the firm), they're who bank leaders go to with their thorniest and most challenging technical problems. They also help put into effect and execute the longer-term firm-wide tech strategy set out by C-suites. For many engineers, it's a dream and one of the highest technical designations in the business.

BI spoke with some of the newly minted distinguished engineers, a long-time tech fellow, and the executives running these programs to find out what they do, how they influence the wider tech strategy, and to get an inside look at the vetting process.

"I wanted it more than anything"

Some of the first tech fellows on Wall Street were at Goldman Sachs, whose program dates back to 2004. Miruna Stratan still remembers the call when she was told she had made it.

"I remember I wanted it more than anything," Stratan told BI of the program that celebrates technologists in a way that was historically reserved for rainmakers and business leaders.

Now, she is a top tech exec within Goldman's lucrative investment-banking division and is one of just four partner-level tech fellows at the firm. The distinction is highly sought after by Goldman's technical population, she said, and the bank even hosts presentations to demystify what it means to be a tech fellow.

Part of the allure is being able to show off your technical chops. But being a tech fellow also means you can shape the firm through your engineering solutions, Stratan said.

"The tech fellows at Goldman Sachs have been at the center of all the major business transformations through technology since the program began. From grid compute and virtual desktops to cloud and data lakes, and now, of course, with AI," she said of previous technology waves.

It's a similar story at Morgan Stanley, where distinguished engineers are expected to spend 15% to 20% of their time on enterprise-level problems, not unit-specific problems, Pizzi said. That additional responsibility, which doesn't necessarily come with a raise or promotion, is actually a plus for many engineers in the program.

"We can help to make some firm-wide decisions in technology and make sure we are moving in the right direction," said Ken Zhang, one of Morgan Stanley's newest DEs and one of the brains behind the bank's generative AI tool, AskResearch.

Fang Song, another newly minted Morgan Stanley DE and executive director in the enterprise computing group, referred to her peers as "technical influencers" who make widely impacting decisions on reusable technology blueprints that are used across departments.

What makes a distinguished engineer or technical fellow?

At Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, distinguished engineers and technical fellows cannot apply for the designation. They must be nominated by senior management or existing TFs and DEs.

While engineering excellence is at the heart of being a DE and TF, it's not the only thing candidates are judged on.

At Morgan Stanley, Pizzi said contributing to the firm's technical reputation externally is important, whether it involves writing technical books and white papers or holding patents. The bank's DEs hold one third of the patents the bank has generated, he added.

Goldman Sachs judges candidates on how they nurture the broader technology population. Stratan said she remembers and keeps in touch with her mentors, who taught her "how to be a senior engineer and how to think through complex problems."

"A very important piece is mentoring and coaching," Stratan said. "Basically the tech fellows are coaching the next generation of tech talent at the firm."

• Elon Musk's private jets made 355 flights in 2024, data from jet-tracking company JetSpy shows.
• The jets' travel shows the billionaire's growing political involvement.
• Over half the jets' trips since November 5 have been to or from the Palm Beach area, near Mar-a-Lago.

Elon Musk has had a busy year. He unveiled Tesla's robotaxi, his net worth surpassed $400 billion, and he became President-elect Donald Trump's "first buddy."

His private jets also spent about 881 hours crisscrossing the globe.

To help shed light on how the world's wealthiest man spent his time in 2024, Business Insider charted Musk's private jets' travel using the jet-tracking service JetSpy.

All told, Musk's two Gulfstream private jets made 355 flights between January and mid-December this year.

The data helps reveal how extensively Musk has burrowed into Trumpworld and, alongside his coming advisory role to the new White House and millions of dollars in donations, provides another window into his growing political involvement.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The jet travel may have been an early clue that the billionaire was growing closer to Trump.

On February 17, one of Musk's planes took its first flight of the year to Palm Beach International Airport — about 5 miles from Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago. Three months later, The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that Trump and Musk had talked about a potential advisory role in the event the former president won reelection.

In total, Musk's jets made 31 flights to or from Palm Beach International Airport in 2024.

It's unclear whether Musk was on each flight tracked. It's also unclear whether he might have visited the Palm Beach, Florida, area for reasons other than a meeting with Trump. Twenty-five of the 31 Palm Beach-area flights were after Trump's election victory. The other flights took place between February and March. More than half the jets' trips since November 5 have involved flying to or from the area.

Musk has been photographed several times alongside Trump at Mar-a-Lago, including at a Thanksgiving dinner.

Following Musk's official endorsement of Trump, his jets also made 13 trips to and from swing states, including various cities across Pennsylvania and Georgia. The Tesla CEO's planes also made ten trips to and from an airport near Washington, DC.

In total, 54 of the 355 flights involved travel to and from the Palm Beach area, Washington, and swing states. In 2023, by comparison, his jets traveled to and from an airport near Washington 16 times.

In 2022, Musk began using a federal program that allows private jet owners to cloak their travels with a temporary aircraft-registration number, and his jets have used the service on and off since then.

This year, Musk's aircraft used a "privacy ICAO address" for 17 flights, according to JetSpy. On election night, a PIA was used to fly to West Palm Beach. The service was employed for several flights in June to and from a Memphis airport near a data center for Musk's xAI startup, a facility the city announced that same month. (JetSpy doesn't rely solely on Federal Aviation Administration data, which enables it to track flights that use PIA.)

Besides politics-related travel, the planes' top destinations in 2024 included airports in Hawthorne, California, and Brownsville, Texas, which are both near SpaceX sites. They also frequently flew to an airport in Austin near Tesla's headquarters and one of Musk's homes.

The planes also flew overseas to France, Poland, Germany, Portugal, Indonesia, China, and the UK. Musk visited Paris for the Olympics and Notre-Dame's reopening, as well as Bali for a Starlink launch.

The two jets used about $2.5 million worth of fuel and emitted nearly 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024, according to the JetSpy data. Per the International Energy Agency, that's about 250 times what the average person in the US emits over their lifetime.

The longest flight recorded between Musk's two jets was 10 hours, from Seattle to Tokyo, in May. Musk's planes also took several quick flights, including nine flights that lasted less than 10 minutes, though some of these were likely the result of the pilot repositioning the aircraft. The average flight time for the two aircraft was about two hours.

Still, despite his global travels, 2024 was comparatively sedate — last year, the planes logged 456 flights.

Do you have a tip? Reach out to the reporter via a non-work email and device at [email protected] or 248-894-6012.

• I love Facebook Marketplace, except for this one problem with how it does geographic searches.
• I often see search results that are inconveniently located because they're across a body of water.
• Make the search functions in travel time, not miles radius!

If there is one thing I absolutely love doing, it's buying cheap crap on the internet. But I feel bad about this; I worry about overconsumption and our planet — not to mention the effects on my own wallet.

Which is why I love Facebook Marketplace. It scratches the itch for mindless consumption in a more sustainable way. I'm simply virtuous — my place in Heaven secured! — for buying a used 8-by-10 rug in good condition for $75 instead of a brand-new one.

I probably spend more time browsing Facebook Marketplace than I spend on lots of other interesting and popular things. My iPhone's screen time tells me that I spent more time on the Facebook app last week than TikTok, Slack, or Bluesky. And you'll have to just believe me when I tell you that I spent a lot of time on those other apps.

However, I have a very specific and very real gripe.

Facebook Marketplace shows me listings for items located across a body of water — even if the items are within my specified distance radius.

Let me explain: For local listings, you can select a distance range of a set number of miles — just a few, or even farther, say 50 miles. Facebook Marketplace will then create a perfect circle of that search radius, giving you as-the-crow-flies distance in every direction.

But in reality, 10 miles to the east isn't always the same as 10 miles to the west. Especially in cases where a river or body of water is involved.

Let's say I'm in downtown Brooklyn. If I search a 4-mile radius, Facebook Marketplace will show me items for sale deeper into Brooklyn, easily accessible by car or subway, and it will also show me results in lower Manhattan (more annoying to drive to) — and worst of all, it will also give some results in New Jersey.

This is by no means a knock on the great Garden State. In fact, I've often observed in my Marketplace searching that New Jersey has some of the most desirable furniture and other items. But it is a massive pain to get from Brooklyn to New Jersey just to pick up a used end table— the tolls alone make it not worth it.

Consider searching around suburban Connecticut, where things are more spread out, and 20 miles of driving isn't unreasonable. However, this creates a big enough search radius that it extends across the Long Island Sound, into the northern tips of Long Island. Do you have any idea how long it takes to drive from Bridgeport, Connecticut to Huntington Station, New York? Long enough to drop dead, that's how long.

This isn't just an East Coast problem, either. In fact, for Meta employees, this should hit close to home. Menlo Park, California — where Meta is based — is located along a body of water. That makes it quite annoying to get to the land on the other side of the bay, either by public transportation or car.

I have a proposed solution here: One option could be that instead of making a perfect circle of a search radius, you could draw your own search shape with your finger. Zillow has a version of this that it uses for its home search.

Another option — and my preference — would be to factor in driving distance or public transit access. It would be great to say, "Show me all the coffee tables within 30 minutes driving distance," instead of a perfect circle on a map.

When I asked a representative for Meta if they viewed the water issue as a problem, they seemed slightly puzzled and asked if I was seeing things that were actually errors — results outside the specified range.

Currently, Meta doesn't really directly profit from these in-person Marketplace transactions — when you show up at someone's home and hand them cash for their stuff. (Meta does take a cut if the monetary transaction is completed on Facebook, typically for shipped items.) It may not be a big profit center for Meta, but it definitely is important.

Marketplace is a cornerstone of Facebook's strategy for young people. Despite its sometimes fuddy-duddy reputation, Facebook is actually growing its Gen Z user base. So, improving Marketplace is important to Facebook's overall health. Many young people tend to live in urban areas near bodies of water (rivers, bays, oceans). No one wants to have to drive over a bridge to buy a couch.

My plea to Mark Zuckerberg is to take a break from the kickboxing and focus in on this important issue. End the Marketplace search that goes across water boundaries!

• I decided to cook five of the top-rated recipes of 2024 on The New York Times' Cooking app.
• Some dishes were a hit — while others left me frankly confused.
• Following the ranking, which is based on a popular vote, allowed me to broaden my food horizons.

As a personal treat this year, as part of Black Friday sales I finally took the plunge on something I've long coveted: a subscription to NYT Cooking.

The recipe juggernaut celebrated 10 years of publishing in September, following a massive expansion in 2021 and the development of a wildly successful app.

As a product, it's bolstered The New York Times' business model. Other publishers have tried to get in on the act, including The Guardian, which launched its own subscription-based food app, Feast, in April.

NYT Cooking says it published around 1,000 recipes in 2024, and it's clear that much of the appeal is on comfort food, un-fussy recipes, and shrewd attention to social media trends.

Last week, it released its annual top 50, which I took as a challenge.

I chose the five recipes with the highest number of ratings and which all had five stars at the time of writing (I couldn't obtain a key ingredient for one, so skipped to the sixth in that instance.)

Some recipes wowed me — while others left me frankly puzzled.

1. Creamy, Spicy Tomato Beans and Greens were incredibly moreish.

Creamy, Spicy Tomato Beans and Greens, published in April, was fourth on the list in terms of ratings, and I was excited to give it a try.

It's been quite the year for the humble bean. Beans and legume-based recipes have been all over my TikTok feed, and I can see why — they're cheap, easy to cook, vegan, and add heft and creaminess.

Combining cannellini beans with sun-dried tomatoes, cream and parmesan in this recipe — similar to the combo that's in the super-viral Marry Me Chicken — it was easy to see where the flavor was going to come from.

The most fun part was turning this, into this.

Into the pan went the onion, crushed pepper, and garlic, and then the beans and sauce.

It was beautiful to watch the sun-dried tomato and puree slowly melding into heavy cream.

What made the dish really work was the panko and arugula.

The beans themselves were hearty and rich — I couldn't finish a modest portion, but despite the description, the dish didn't come out remotely spicy. Perhaps the crushed red pepper I bought was milder than the recipe allows for.

Crusty bread with a drizzle of olive oil was also a must — as were the toasted Parmesan panko crumb and arugula, which added much-needed texture and freshness.

2. Something went terribly wrong with the Sticky Miso Salmon Bowl.

Third on the list was the Sticky Miso Salmon Bowl.

Everything about this dish — butter-laced sushi rice, tender broiled salmon in a sticky glaze of miso, honey, ginger, and grapefruit — called out to me.

But somewhere along the way, I messed up.

The glaze should taste amazing. But it didn't.

The recipe called for two teaspoons of fresh grapefruit zest. But as I tasted the glaze it was off-the-charts bitter.

I restarted with half as much zest and ended up with a marmalade-like substance to coat the salmon, hoping that the broiling process would mellow it out.

It didn't.

I'd cook the dish again, but would be much more careful.

It's clear that the grapefruit — citrusy, aromatic, and a little bitter — is the stand-out flavor twist for this recipe.

But either due to me messing up, or perhaps getting an extra-amped grapefruit, the result tasted harsh and metallic.

The sushi rice was glorious, however. Stirring butter and diced scallions in made it glossy and rich, an almost decadent accompaniment to the avocado.

Done right, this dish would pretty much be my dream meal, but I'll have to be extra careful next time around.

3. The Taverna Salad was a massive hit with my family.

Salad is generally my least favorite method of getting nutrients, so I wasn't too excited about this one, which was second on the list.

But the Taverna Salad is a good proposition — as the author says, it's based around a mashup of fattoush, a Lebanese dish, and Greek salad, making this a sort of Mediterranean super-salad.

Inside the dish are chickpeas, capers, tomatoes, red onion, parsley, scallions, cucumber, bell pepper, and Kalamata olives, along with cheese and croutons, and a garlic and red wine vinaigrette.

Fat and starch balance out the healthy parts.

You can make this dish with store-bought pita chips, but it's worth the effort to fry them fresh in lashings of oil.

And with the toasted halloumi, the residual warmth and fattiness makes the salad super moreish.

I took this one around to my parents' house, and it went down a storm, almost eclipsing the main event of steak.

There's plenty of salty 'meatiness' in the form of the capers, olives, and cheese to balance out the freshness and crunch of the vegetables.

4. One-Pot Chicken and Rice With Caramelized Lemon looked fancy but was super easy.

The One-Pot Chicken and Rice With Caramelized Lemon, which was top of the ranking, was rustic and full of flavor, and combined the richness of chicken fat with unctuous, caramelized lemon.

It's all done in stages but in a single pot.

This recipe works by browning off the chicken thighs and caramelizing the lemon slices separately, before starting the rice and broth in the same pan.

The dish is then topped with the chicken and lemon, and it all goes into the oven.

The result was deeply comforting.

This dish was delicious. But if I made it again, I'd make some adjustments — I ended up with way too much rice, and I needed to cook it in the oven for longer than stated, as my chicken was still a little pink.

I also used the leftover Kalamata olives from the Taverna Salad, which turned out a little too salty for my taste. The recipe says you can also use green olives, which is what I'll use next time.

5. I really wanted to love the Peanut Butter Noodles.

I wasn't able to make the Cheesy Green Chile Bean Bake, which was fifth on the list, due to not being able to get my hands on pinto beans, so I turned to the sixth choice, Peanut Butter Noodles.

The comment section on this recipe is a massive love-in — people are wild for this extremely simple dish.

"I wanted to eat this alone, naked, in a closet. It's that good," one commenter wrote.

I was curious to see for myself.

It's just 5 simple ingredients.

This dish involves just a handful of ingredients: noodles, butter, soy sauce, Parmesan, and, of course, peanut butter.

Everything about the recipe seems designed to be as simple as possible: You're encouraged to use the cheapest peanut butter you can find, and the noodles are from packet ramen.

You can also use spaghetti, so in the interests of science, I resolved to try both.

The spaghetti was a disaster, but the ramen worked well.

The dish is just a matter of cooking your spaghetti/ramen, then mixing some of the cooking water with the rest of the ingredients to make a glossy sauce.

As soon as I tasted the spaghetti version, I knew it wasn't for me: they were just too thick and heavy with the cloying sauce.

The texture with the springier noodles, however, had just the right chew.

Even so, I won't be making it again.

The recipe is clearly designed to be an umami-fest that you can blearily throw together after a night out. But it was just too bland and salty for me.

Overall, this was a great adventure for me and my assistant.

Before I started, I had hit a bit of a cooking rut and was fresh out of ideas.

It was brilliant to throw the choice open to the popular vote, and to see what people — 17,265 devoted NYT Cooking readers at the time of writing — were eating and loving.

Most of the five dishes were not recipes I would have chosen myself, but they've broadened my outlook — and I'll definitely be cooking some of them again soon.

The offers and details on this page may have updated or changed since the time of publication. See our article on Business Insider for current information.

Affiliate links for the products on this page are from partners that compensate us (see our advertiser disclosure with our list of partners for more details). However, our opinions are our own. See how we rate tax products to write unbiased product reviews.

• Head of household is a federal filing status for unmarried taxpayers with qualifying dependents.
• Single parents and caregivers may be eligible to file as head of household.
• They get a bigger standard deduction than single filers and often lower tax rates.

Your filing status is one of the most important decisions you make when you do your taxes each year. For unmarried individuals who have dependents, filing as head of household rather than single could lead to big tax savings.

What is the head of household filing status?

All taxpayers must choose a filing status on their federal tax return, Form 1040. The options are single, married filing jointly, married filing separately, head of household, and qualifying surviving spouse.

The head of household filing status is for unmarried taxpayers who are financially responsible for a dependent, says Rachael Burns, a certified financial planner whose California-based firm, True Worth Financial Planning, services divorcées and widows.

“Divorced or otherwise single parents are great examples of someone who may benefit from the head of household status,” she says.

In 2021, the latest year for which IRS data is available, only 13% of taxpayers — about 21.2 million people — filed as head of household, and most had low to moderate income. More than 9 in 10 head of household filers made less than $100,000 and 7 in 10 made less than $50,000.

Importance of choosing the correct filing status

Your filing status determines the size of your standard deduction and which tax brackets you use. Your status doesn’t have to be the same from year to year, so consider consulting with a tax professional if you’ve experienced a divorce, birth, or other household change that may impact who you claim as a dependent.

“Your filing status impacts how much tax you pay, so it’s important you choose the one that’s best for you,” Burns says. If you qualify for the head of household filing status, it can help you unlock lower tax rates and a bigger standard deduction than filing single, she adds.

Filing status also helps determine your eligibility for tax credits and deductions, since different income thresholds and phase-outs apply for each status.

Quick tip: The IRS offers an online tool to help taxpayers choose the correct filing status.

Eligibility requirements

Marital status

Taxpayers have to be single, legally separated, or divorced by December 31 to use the head of household filing status. If you were still legally married, you may be able to qualify if you and your spouse lived separately for the last six months of the year. Otherwise you’ll need to choose married filing jointly or married filing separately.

Maintaining a home

Head of household filers must prove that they paid more than 50% of the cost of maintaining a home for a dependent during the year, says Derrick Doerr, a CPA and vice president at financial-services firm Nepsis in Minneapolis. That can include expenses like groceries, rent or mortgage payments, and utilities.

Qualifying dependents

Lastly, the qualifying dependent needs to live with the taxpayer for more than half of the year.

“There is a wide range of dependents that can qualify,” Doerr says, including foster children, stepchildren, adopted children, minor or adult siblings, and grandchildren. A parent can also qualify as a dependent but does not need to live with the taxpayer.

Tax benefits of filing as head of household

Higher standard deduction

A standard deduction is available to every taxpayer who does not itemize their deductions.

Head-of-household filers receive a standard deduction that’s larger than single filers but smaller than married joint filers. The amounts are adjusted each year to reflect cost-of-living changes.

Lower tax rates

The same income tax rates apply to all filing statuses, but the bands of income for each one vary.

In general, head of household filers have more leeway than single filers — meaning they can earn more than single filers before jumping to the next highest tax rate.

For example, a single filer with taxable income of $60,000 would have a marginal tax rate of 22%, while a head of household filer at the same income level would have a top tax rate of just 12%. As a result, the head of household filer’s tax liability is about $1,380 lower than the single filer’s with the same income (before any credits are applied).

For incomes above about $100,500, the tax brackets for both tax statuses are virtually the same.

Credits and deductions

Head of household filers may be eligible for credits that help offset the cost of caregiving, such as the Child Tax Credit or the Child and Dependent Care Credit. The Earned Income Tax Credit is available to all filing statuses, but those with children can get a larger amount.

For 2024 taxes, the Child Tax Credit is worth up to $2,000 per qualifying child. The maximum income you can have to qualify for the credit ($200,000) is the same for all filing statuses, except married joint filers ($400,000). Up to $1,700 of the credit is refundable.

There’s no maximum income threshold for claiming the Child and Dependent Care Credit, which allows you to write off some expenses associated with the care of a child under 13 or a dependent of any age who is mentally or physically disabled. Once your adjusted gross income, or AGI, reaches $43,000, regardless of filing status, your maximum credit is either $300 for one qualifying dependent or $600 for two or more.

How to claim head of household status

Gathering necessary documentation

Filing taxes as head of household can be more involved than filing as single. You’ll need to provide supporting documents to confirm your marital status and the eligibility of your dependent.

To prove qualifying dependency status, you need to provide the following with your tax return:

• Birth certificates or other official documents of birth or letters that verify your relationship
• School, medical, daycare, or social service records that verify your address is the same as the dependent (unless they are your parent)

To prove that you paid 50% or more of the costs of keeping up a home for your dependent, attach:

• Rent receipts
• Utility bills
• Grocery receipts
• Property tax bills
• Mortgage statements
• Repair bills

Common scenarios and examples

Single parents

A person who has sole legal and physical custody of a child (also known as the custodial parent) will typically qualify for head of household status. The child can also be a stepchild, foster child, or adopted child.

Divorced or separated individuals

Divorces where children are involved can make filing taxes a bit tricky. Generally, only one parent can file as head of household in a given tax year and also claim deductions and credits for the dependent.

“If you have multiple children with your ex, there’s a possibility that both parents can file as head of household,” Burns says. Each parent must pass the residency and support tests for each dependent they claim.

Supporting relatives

Nieces, nephews, siblings, grandchildren, parents, step-parents, and in-laws may all be considered qualifying dependents for purposes of the head of household filing status.

The same residency and relationship tests apply as for children of the taxpayer, but there’s an exception for parents: They do not need to have lived with you, but you must still have covered at least 50% of the cost of keeping up a home for them, including nursing care or a retirement home.

Potential challenges and how to overcome them

Proving eligibility

Doerr says there may be an increased audit risk for those filing as head of household versus single. Be prepared for the IRS to ask for additional financial records or verification.

“Head of household definitely can draw IRS scrutiny and the IRS can definitely scrutinize claims, especially in the case of divorce or shared custody, requiring you to provide detailed documentation,” Doerr says.

Understanding the rules

If you’re unsure whether you qualify for head of household status, consult with a tax advisor. And if you’re dealing with an ex-spouse, be sure to communicate about your tax-filing plan before either party files.

Estimate your taxes

FAQs about filing as head of household

Can I file as head of household if my spouse and I are still married?

Yes, you can file as head of household if you are legally separated but still married and have a qualifying dependent. You can also file as head of household if you're still married but live separately for the last six months of the year. Ex-spouses cannot, however, claim the same child in the same tax year.

What counts as maintaining a household for head of household purposes?

Maintaining a household for head of household purposes means providing more than 50% of the cost of housing, food, and other essential expenses.

How do I know if my dependent qualifies me for head of household?

Your dependent can qualify you for head of household status if they lived in your home more than half the time, and you paid more than half the cost of keeping up the home.

What should I do if my filing status is challenged by the IRS?

If your filing status is challenged by the IRS, it is likely related to your dependent. Be prepared to provide additional records or receipts to prove that you financially supported and housed the dependent for more than half of the year.

Are there any exceptions to the general head of household rules?

Yes, there is an exception to the general head of household rules: A parent can be a qualifying dependent even if they didn't live with you. But you must have paid at least 50% of the cost of maintaining their primary home, whether that's a nursing home, retirement community, or another living situation.

• The all-new BMW i5 is the first EV variant of the brand's iconic 5-Series luxury sports sedan.
• I recently drove a 2024 BMW i5 in M60 trim with xDrive all-wheel-drive.
• I came away impressed by its exhilarating performance, luxurious cabin, and understated styling.

The BMW 5-Series has been the benchmark for luxury sports sedans for the past five decades. This year, the Bavarian automaker launched the i5, the first all-electric version of the 5-Series that will sell alongside the new eighth-generation internal combustion-powered 5-Series.

The i5 joins a segment comprised of established players like the Audi e-tron GT and Tesla Model S, as well as newcomers like the Mercedes-Benz EQE and Lucid Air.

I recently reviewed a 2024 BMW i5 M60 xDrive with an as-tested price of $95,395. I was impressed by the BMW's exhilarating performance, luxurious cabin, and understated styling.

The base rear-wheel-drive BMW i5 eDrive40 starts at $66,800, while my range-topping, all-wheel-drive i5 M60 xDrive test car starts at $84,100.

Here are 14 features that help make the i5 a great high-performance luxury EV.

Understated styling

BMW's styling has drawn the ire of many brand loyalists in recent years, especially regarding the growth in the size of its signature kidney grilles. Fortunately, BMW exercised restraint with the 5-Series, resulting in a subtle design that exudes a certain understated elegance.

The boxy, squared-off lines leave no doubt that this is a BMW 5-Series.

Nifty modular platform

The BMW i5 is not built on a dedicated EV platform like many of its rivals but one shared with its ICE siblings. Fortunately, the BMW CLAR modular platform that underpins the i5 was designed to accommodate ICE, hybrid, and battery-electric models.

As a result, the i5 retains the long-sloping hood of its internal combustion brethren and the space where a silky smooth BMW straight six once occupied.

Under the hood, a large plastic panel covers the electronics and an electric motor for the front axle.

Supercar-like power

My BMW i5 M60 xDrive came with a 257-horsepower electronic motor mounted at the front axle and a larger 335-horsepower electric motor at the back. Together, they produce a stout 593 total system horsepower and up to 605 lb-ft of torque.

Fast charging

Beneath the i5's floor, you'll find a large lithium-ion battery pack with 84.3 kWh of usable energy.

According to BMW, a DC fast charger can charge the car from 10% to 80% in about 30 minutes.

The EPA rated my high-performance test car for 240 miles of range, but I was able to extract about 250 miles during my time with it.

Those looking for more range will need to opt for the less powerful i5 eDrive40, which can go up to 295 miles on a single charge.

Great handling

The BMW 5-Series is known for its poise in the corners and power down the straight.

And the i5 delivered on that promise and is flat-out fast. Its acceleration was swift, brutal, and utterly glorious.

I've driven more than a few supercars in my time, but the immediacy of the Bimmer's acceleration off the line caught me by surprise a couple of times. I loved it.

According to BMW, the i5 M60 xDrive can sprint from 0 to 60 in just 3.7 seconds, but Motor Trend was able to do it in 3.4 seconds. I'm leaning toward the quicker time.

BMW says the i5 can reach a top speed of 143 mph.

On the winding mountain roads of North Georgia, the all-wheel-drive i5 was a pleasure to drive. With perfect 50/50 front-rear weight distribution, the i5 felt balanced and precise around the corners. It does a good job of hiding its hefty 5,200-pound curb weight.

Beautifully executed cabin

The i5's cabin is unmistakably modern, with massive infotainment screens and lashes of carbon fiber, but everything is sensibly packaged in a way that won't offend any automotive traditionalists.

BMW did a great job offering drivers a multitude of ways to engage with the vehicle, from voice activation to touchscreens to capacitive touch buttons.

I found the interactive LED light strips on the center stack and doors, which double as touch-sensitive climate controls and seat controls, to be a neat touch.

Despite a few cheap-feeling plastic power window switches, the i5's overall material and build quality were excellent. I was particularly impressed by the beautiful glass shift toggle and rotary infotainment controller on the center console.

Advanced driver cockpit

In front of the driver are a leather-wrapped, flat-bottom BMW M-Sport steering wheel and a new 12.3-inch digital instrument panel. The configurable instrument display offers a multitude of layouts and embedded systems that range from navigation to parking assistance.

Also in front of the driver is an optional head-up display.

Supportive front seats

The i5's burgundy-red seats, which are upholstered in perforated Veganza imitation leather, were wonderfully supportive and comfortable.

Feature-packed infotainment system

The focal point of the i5's front dash is a massive 14.9-inch screen running the latest version of BMW's much-improved iDrive infotainment system.

The system can be operated by voice command, touchscreen, or a nifty glass rotary controller on the center console.

The screen is also home to the i5's drive mode menu and its surround-view camera system.

Apple CarPlay and Android Auto come standard.

Panoramic roof

The i5 comes standard with a traditional power glass moonroof, but buyers can upgrade to a massive panoramic Sky Lounge Roof as part of the Executive Package.

Luxurious rear cabin

The i5's rear cabin provides more than enough room for two adults to travel in comfort and style. The burgundy-red faux leather seats are soft and comfortable. There are retractable sunshades, dedicated AC vents, USB-C sockets, and seatback mounting points for tablets.

Remote start

The i5 can be started remotely by pressing the BMW logo on the key fob three times in quick succession.

Safety tech

The i5 comes loaded with standard safety and driver's assistance tech, including active driving assist, active blind spot detection, and lane departure warning. However, adaptive cruise control requires the $2,000 Driving Assistance Pro package.

Stylish wheels

The i5 comes standard with 19-inch alloys, but my test car had these snazzy $1,800 optional 21-inch bi-color wheels.

The offers and details on this page may have updated or changed since the time of publication. See our article on Business Insider for current information.

Affiliate links for the products on this page are from partners that compensate us (see our advertiser disclosure with our list of partners for more details). However, our opinions are our own. See how we rate tax products to write unbiased product reviews.

• Tax-exempt interest comes mainly from municipal bonds and U.S. Treasury bonds.
• Interest from Treasury bonds, bills, and notes is federally taxed.
• Muni bond interest is not federally taxed and may be exempt from state and local taxes.

There are plenty of reasons to buy bonds. Many investors are attracted to municipal bonds and U.S. Treasury bonds, in particular, for their tax-exempt status.

"Individuals are always looking for a return on principal, and so tax-exempt interest is a very appealing item to individuals, especially those who live in zero-income-tax states," says Danny Moore, a certified public accountant and managing partner of tax at Galway Family Office.

Tax-exempt interest refers to interest that's excluded from your gross income calculation at the federal level, the state/local level, or both. Here's how it works.

Tax-exempt interest from municipal bonds

What are municipal bonds?

Municipal bonds, or muni bonds, are typically issued by state and local governments and U.S. territories. They finance government operations and projects, such as building schools or restoring roads.

The two main types of muni bonds are revenue and general obligation. Revenue bonds can be slightly riskier because repayment relies on revenue from a specific project or source. Repayment of general obligation bonds comes from the issuing state or local government, which can raise taxes to pay off the bonds if needed.

Tax advantages

Usually, bondholders receive two interest, or coupon, payments a year, which are not subject to federal income tax. After a set period of time, bondholders receive their original investment back.

Investors can buy muni bonds from the state or locality in which they reside, or from another state or locality. Typically interest income from muni bonds — or muni bond funds — issued by your home state is not taxable there.

Risks and considerations

Your muni bond interest income may not be fully tax-exempt at home if you buy an out-of-state bond, says Derrick Doerr, a CPA and vice president at financial-services firm Nepsis in Minneapolis.

State rules vary, but generally, the interest you earn from an out-of-state bond can trigger taxes in your home state. Exceptions include Washington D.C. and some states with no income tax, such as Florida.

Also, Doerr notes, "Municipal bonds are generally low risk, but not risk-free." One risk is that muni bonds can be called early by the issuer. This often happens when interest rates fall, and can leave an investor choosing from lower-paying alternatives.

If you're a high earner, there's something else to consider: Interest from private activity bonds, a type of muni bond issued by a private business and not a government entity, may not be tax-exempt if you pay the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). AMT may apply to individuals with incomes over $609,350 or married couples filing jointly with incomes above about $1.2 million.

Note: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission recommends reading official statements and disclosures from bond issuers and reviewing trade prices of municipal bonds you are considering buying.

Tax-exempt interest from U.S. Treasury Securities

What Are U.S. Treasury Securities?

Tax-exempt interest income can also come from U.S. Treasury Securities. Interest is paid semiannually and subject to federal taxation, but exempt from state and local taxes.

Treasurys are backed by the federal government and are categorized by their maturities, or how long it takes to return your original investment (principal). Bills mature within a year, notes mature within 10 years, and bonds mature in 20 or 30 years.

Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) are a type of Treasury bond that protects your investment from inflation. They're available in terms of five, 10, or 30 years. The interest rate is fixed, and semiannual payments are only federally taxable, but your principal can fluctuate.

Interest earned from Series EE and Series I Savings Bonds are also exempt from state and local taxes. Interest, which is collected at maturity or whenever you cash the bond, could be exempt from federal taxation if you use the proceeds for qualified higher education expenses, though several rules apply.

Tax advantages

Treasurys produce fixed interest that's not subject to state or local taxes, offering predictable income for bondholders.

For T-bonds, bills, and notes, you have to include the interest in your federal gross income each year that you collect it. For savings bonds, interest isn't paid until the bond is redeemed, so you have the choice to pay federal taxes on it in the year you collect or spread it out over the life of the bond.

Risks and considerations

Treasurys are the closest thing to a risk-free investment since they're backed by the full faith and credit of the federal government. But you still owe federal taxes on the interest income.

Much of the risk associated with Treasurys is in how long they take to mature. Interest rates are fixed for the life of the bond, which can be as high as 20 or 30 years for bonds or up to 10 years for bills. If interest rates rise on newly issued Treasurys, the value of existing bonds drops. This is referred to as interest rate risk.

If rates go up and you decide to sell a bond before its maturity date, you may experience a significant loss because there's less demand for lower-yield bonds. If you hold on to the bond, you may be losing out on a higher-return investment.

Tax-exempt interest from other investments

Other types of investments may produce a kind of tax-exempt interest or return. For example, investment gains in a 529 college savings plan are not taxable at the federal or state levels if the funds are used for education.

Similarly, some might consider Roth IRAs a tax-exempt investment, since the accounts are funded with posttax dollars, which grow tax-free and can be withdrawn penalty- and tax-free under certain circumstances, such as reaching age 59 and a half.

Taxable interest vs. tax-exempt interest

Many corporate bonds have higher advertised interest rates than tax-exempt bonds, but the interest is fully taxable. It can seem like a no-brainer, then, to opt for a bond that gives you a tax break over one that doesn't.

But, Moore says, "It's not just a federal tax-free amount" with municipal bonds. "You have to look at the states and you have to look at somebody's complete tax picture to see if it makes sense."

When comparing bonds, investors need to find the tax-equivalent yield of their bond options to see which produces a higher after-tax return, says Doerr. A specialized calculator, like this one from Fidelity, can help crunch the numbers.

And although the IRS (and many state governments) exempt certain interest income from the computation of income tax, those amounts may later be added back in other situations.

For federal income tax calculation purposes, tax-exempt interest is added back to figure your modified adjusted gross income, which is a crucial figure that determines deductible contributions to traditional IRAs, eligibility for a Roth IRA, and qualification for education credits, healthcare credits, and the Child Tax Credit. It's also used to figure out how much of your Social Security benefits are taxable.

Estimate your taxes

FAQs about tax-exempt interest income

Is interest from my savings account tax-exempt?

No, interest from savings accounts isn't tax-exempt. You'll get a 1099-INT from your bank with the amount of interest earned during the year, which should be included in your gross income.

Are dividends from stocks tax-exempt?

Dividends from stocks and generally not tax-exempt. Qualified dividends are taxed at capital gains rates (0%, 15%, 20%), while nonqualified dividends are taxed at ordinary rates (10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35%, 37%).

How do I report tax-exempt interest on my tax return?

Tax-exempt interest is reported on Line 2a of your Form 1040. You'll find the amount of tax-exempt interest you earned in Box 8 of your 1099-INT. Reporting the interest is required, but doesn't make it taxable.

Over a span of days, Joshua England's pleas for help became more desperate.

"I've been puking all night, and now I'm puking what looks like blood," he wrote to his medical providers on May 22, 2018. "My stomach hurts so, so bad." At the medical clinic that day he clutched his abdomen and described his pain as sharp and intense — an 8 out of 10. But he was seen by a lesser-trained licensed practical nurse, who didn't give him a complete abdominal exam or send him for any lab work. Instead he was given Pepto-Bismol and told to drink water and eat fibrous food.

The Pepto-Bismol didn't help. The next day England wrote that his pain was so bad he could barely breathe. He couldn't eat or sleep. He again went to the clinic, where he said he'd had bloody stool and his pain was now a 10 out of 10. The physician assistant found that his pulse was racing but didn't conduct an abdominal exam. Instead, he chalked up England's symptoms to constipation and prescribed a laxative.

At that point someone with England's symptoms might seek out a new clinic, to get a more thorough workup, or even head straight to an ER. But Joshua England didn't have that option. He was inmate No. 775261 at Joseph Harp Correctional Center, a medium-security facility in central Oklahoma. He'd been sentenced to 343 days in prison after he and some buddies set some hay bales on fire one drunken night. This reconstruction of the events of those days in May 2018 is based on prison and medical records obtained by Business Insider in collaboration with The Frontier, a nonprofit newsroom in Oklahoma.

Four days after he first requested help, England submitted his fourth sick call — a one-page form that prisoners at Joseph Harp used to request medical attention. He again wrote down how it was hard to breathe or even lie down. This time the licensed practical nurse who saw him consulted with the prison's supervising physician, Robert Balogh. Balogh prescribed ibuprofen over the phone. He, and the physician assistant who saw England earlier, each had marks on their records: Balogh had been fined and put on probation for a time by the Oklahoma narcotics bureau, and the license of the PA had once been revoked for prescription fraud.

As medical professionals downplayed England's symptoms, he continued to deteriorate. He couldn't work or eat or shower; instead he remained in his cell, curled up on the floor in tears. Other prisoners reported that he had lost weight, his skin color had changed, and he no longer seemed fully cognizant.

On May 29, 2018, a corrections officer discovered England slumped over on the floor next to his cell. The Choctaw Nation kid who loved fishing and cattle ranching had died, just weeks after turning 21. Autopsy records show that the cause of death was a ruptured appendix.

Appendicitis is easily treated with minimally invasive outpatient surgery. Even treating a ruptured appendix is considered routine as long as the patient is immediately hospitalized. In this case, the PA was notified of his declining condition the morning of his death; he later told investigators he didn't believe England's condition had been life-threatening. A licensed practical nurse who saw England a few days earlier said she suspected he was in withdrawal and seeking painkillers.

Five years after England's death, the Oklahoma legislature approved a $1.05 million settlement with his mother, Christy Smith, to resolve a claim under the Eighth Amendment, which bars "cruel and unusual punishments." During litigation, the Oklahoma attorney general maintained that the prison's course of treatment was legitimate; in settling, the state admitted no wrongdoing.

Balogh, who no longer works for the department, confirmed the probation and said he was cleared to work without monitoring in 2015. He said he worked remotely for Joseph Harp so was reliant on information provided over the phone by the nurse, who he said did not mention that England had been having symptoms over a span of days. "You had a system where, many times, the physician was not there," Balogh said. "There were some ways that information could fall through the cracks."

A spokesperson for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections declined to comment about the case, as did Joan Kane, a clerk for the Western District Court of Oklahoma, on behalf of Judge Charles Goodwin, who presided. "It is atypical for federal judges to speak publicly about specific legal situations or cases," she said. No other judge on a case mentioned in this story agreed to comment.

Few cases win outright

Business Insider analyzed a sample of nearly 1,500 federal Eighth Amendment lawsuits — including every appeals court case with an opinion we could locate filed from 2018 to 2022 and citing the relevant precedent-setting Supreme Court cases and standards — and found that a settlement like Smith's was exceedingly rare.

The cases in BI's sample overwhelmingly detailed serious claims of harm, including sexual assault, retaliatory beatings, prolonged solitary confinement, and untreated cancers. Prisoners lost a vast majority of them — 85%.

Roughly three-quarters of civil suits filed in the United States settle, and nearly half of nonprisoner civil-rights suits do. In BI's sample of Eighth Amendment cases, just 14% settled. Many of the settlements were sealed. Of the rest, none involved an admission of wrongdoing by prison officials. BI was able to identify just six cases that settled for $50,000 or more; half of those, including the England case, involved prisoner deaths.

Many of the cases settled for modest amounts: An Oregon prisoner received $251 over a claim that she was sexually assaulted by another prisoner and then pepper-sprayed by a guard. A Nevada prisoner got $400 on a claim that guards beat and pepper-sprayed him while he was in restraints. A New York prisoner won $2,000 for claims that he suffered debilitating pain while prison officials delayed treating his degenerative osteoarthritis.

In 11 cases — less than 1% of the sample — the plaintiffs won relief in court.

Seven of these plaintiffs won damages, the result of six jury trials and one default judgment; plaintiffs in the other four cases, including two class actions, were granted motions for injunctive relief, such as being freed from a prolonged stint in solitary. In one of these cases, a plaintiff in Wisconsin was granted access to gender-affirming surgery to treat her gender dysphoria after a seven-year delay. Along the way, the 7th Circuit granted the officials qualified immunity, which protects the conduct of public officials in the line of duty, so the plaintiff was denied damages. Beth Hardtke, the director of communications for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, said the department updated its transgender-care policy in response to the ruling.

Litigants without lawyers

Another pattern jumped out: In every case in BI's sample in which a prisoner prevailed, the plaintiff was represented by legal counsel. They were outliers.

In the vast majority of cases, 78%, prisoners litigated pro se — without counsel — in large part because a Clinton-era law, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, tightly capped attorney fees, making it prohibitive for lawyers to take prisoner cases. BI interviewed 10 attorneys who represented prisoners or their families in cases that prevailed; they all said the cases would have struggled to succeed without counsel.

"Pro se litigants do not win cases in federal court," said Victor Glasberg, one of a team of attorneys who successfully proved in 2018 that conditions on Virginia's death row violated prisoners' Eighth Amendment rights. "When faced with abysmal anti-plaintiff litigation and jurisprudence, the chance of a pro se litigant getting to first base is about as good as my flying to the moon."

Even lawyers struggle to master the convoluted standards that now guide Eighth Amendment claims, said Chris Smith, a Mississippi attorney who won a constitutional claim over inadequate medical care in 2021.

Smith told BI that his team's ability to access documents was critical for winning the case; he and his colleague spent days combing through 5-inch binders containing years of medical records to prove the corrections department was responsible for treatment delays.

But prisoners face a litany of hurdles, he said, starting with the difficulty they face obtaining records.

They don't have experience in the rules of civil procedure, he said. They don't know how to plan a litigation strategy, or draft jury instructions, or take depositions.

In England's case, because he had died, his mother was the plaintiff in a 2019 lawsuit alleging that corrections and medical staff had failed to treat his appendicitis. Since she was not incarcerated, she was able to secure legal counsel free from the PLRA's fee caps.

The settlement, reached after a four-year legal battle, did not require the defendants to admit to any wrongdoing. State taxpayers, rather than the named defendants, footed the bill.

"The people that actually were responsible for it," England's stepfather, Darren Smith, said, "have no accountability whatsoever."

Prisoners succeed more before juries

One federal judge, Lawrence Piersol of the South Dakota District Court, said that in his experience, jurors are not generally sympathetic to imprisoned plaintiffs. BI's data indicates that plaintiffs actually fare somewhat better before juries than before judges. Of the 1,488 cases in BI's sample, prisoners prevailed more often before juries. Just 2% of the cases BI reviewed were decided by a jury. Yet more than half of the 11 prisoners who won their suits had jury trials.

Glasberg, the Virginia attorney, said he suspected that if more cases were decided by jurors, it would "significantly improve the plight of people in prisons and jails." Many prisoners, he said, see their cases dismissed preemptively by a judge, before a jury has the chance to hear evidence.

One Louisiana prisoner, Tony Johnson, was awarded $750,000 in 2020 after a jury found that a guard at Angola had sexually assaulted him. The guard denied the allegations.

Johnson's lawyer, Joseph Long, told BI that the verdict was the result of years of litigation, including obtaining dozens of depositions and spending nearly $40,000 on the case. The underlying Eighth Amendment claim, he said, entailed abuse with the potential to infuriate even jurors sympathetic to law enforcement.

"Prison isn't supposed to be good, but when they get raped by a guard even the most hard-bitten conservative has to admit that's wrong," Long said. The guard resigned from the prison in 2014 and was never criminally charged; four years after the verdict, Long said, his client has yet to receive his money from the state. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections declined to comment on the record.

Chris Smith's client, a Mississippi prisoner named Thad Delaughter, had complained for years about severe hip pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis. Eventually, in 2011, he was allowed to see an outside specialist who found that he needed surgery to reconstruct his hip. The operation was scheduled, only to be abruptly canceled; one of Smith's arguments in court was that prison officials didn't want to foot the substantial bill.

The treatment kept getting delayed as his condition deteriorated. At trial, jurors found that Gloria Perry, the department's chief medical officer, had violated Delaughter's constitutional rights by delaying the procedure; he was awarded $382,000 in damages and, in 2022, had the operation.

Perry denied any wrongdoing, saying in court filings that her actions didn't rise to the level of a constitutional violation; her motion for a new trial was denied. A representative of the Mississippi Department of Corrections said Perry no longer worked for the department and declined to comment on litigation matters; her attorney did not respond to queries.

'I want him to live'

Among the jury wins for prisoners in BI's sample were two cases filed against doctors who worked for Wexford Health, the private correctional healthcare company. In one case, an Illinois prisoner named William Kent Dean convinced a jury that his kidney cancer had metastasized after healthcare providers failed to diagnose and adequately treat his symptoms over a span of seven months. At one point, email records showed, Wexford employees discussed admitting him into hospice in lieu of paying to treat his illness. "He's the love of my life," Dean's wife, Cynthia Dean, said during the trial, "and I want him to live."

In 2019, Dean won $11 million in damages at trial against Wexford and two of its medical providers. Appeals court judges of the 7th Circuit then sent the case back, after finding that Dean hadn't proved the defendants were "deliberately indifferent" to his suffering, as the Supreme Court requires.

One 7th Circuit judge, Diane Wood, dissented, writing, "Wexford directly learned of the lack of significant medical intervention and the arc of Dean's cancer's progression, yet still did not act efficiently or effectively."

Dean died of kidney cancer in 2022 at the age of 61.

Wexford and the Illinois Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.

In August, a new jury again found in favor of Cynthia Dean, who had taken over as plaintiff. This time the award was $155,100. Wexford, in a court filing, denied all of the allegations.

BI's database is packed with cases that also allege significant harm — but the plaintiffs lost.

One was another Illinois prisoner under the care of Wexford, who sued his doctor for waiting over a year to test for an abdominal hernia — prolonging his pain and delaying corrective surgery. Another involved an Oklahoma man who filed suit saying that a prison doctor had improperly discontinued his medication to treat chronic nerve pain from tongue cancer. Both cases were dismissed when judges found the prisoners could not prove their doctors were deliberately indifferent.

A woman in California sued after doctors persistently misdiagnosed a growing lump that, years later, was diagnosed as Stage 4 breast cancer. Even then, she said, doctors denied and delayed chemotherapy as the cancer spread.

The US District Court for the Eastern District of California dismissed her case when she died. There was nobody to take over for her as plaintiff.

Terri Hardy, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, declined to comment on the breast cancer case and said the department works to ensure that its complaint process is fair, thorough, and timely. A spokesperson for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections declined to comment on the tongue cancer case.

Large settlements for prisoner deaths

One way for a plaintiff to win a large settlement, BI found, is to end up dead.

Of the six lawsuits BI identified that settled for $50,000 or more, half of those were filed by family members such as Josh England's mother, Christy Smith, whose sons or brothers died behind bars. Unlike prisoner plaintiffs, these surviving relatives didn't have to overcome the PLRA's hurdles.

"Somebody has lost their life, so there should be a lot of money," said Paola Armeni, a Las Vegas attorney. "They're not getting their loved one back."

Armeni's case is one of a handful in our sample in which a lawsuit forced substantive change. She represented the family of Carlos Perez Jr., a Nevada prisoner who was killed in 2014 at Nevada's High Desert State Prison by a trainee officer named Raynaldo-John Ruiz Ramos. Ramos shot Perez multiple times with birdshot, a kind of ammunition used to hunt small game. "They lit him up," Armeni told BI. "The birdshot was from his waist up. It was a murder."

Six months later, a prisoner named Stacey Richards was permanently blinded when a corrections officer shot him with birdshot at another Nevada prison, Ely State.

After an eight-year legal battle, the state settled last year with Perez's family for $1.6 million. That same year, a case filed by Richards settled for $2.25 million. In exchange, Richards' attorney agreed that his client wouldn't talk to the press about the case. Ramos maintained in court that firing his weapon was a reasonable use of force to break up a fight between prisoners.

As a result of Perez's death, the state corrections commissioner was forced out and the department commissioned an external review of its use-of-force policies, ultimately agreeing, in 2015, to phase out the use of birdshot, which prison guards had deployed for decades.

In reaching a settlement with the Perez family, the state did not accept liability for Perez's death, even though the Clark County coroner's office had ruled it a homicide.

The Nevada Department of Corrections declined to comment; Ramos' attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.

Ramos was charged with involuntary manslaughter. In 2019, he entered a plea deal. In exchange for community service and a mental-health evaluation, he avoided prison.