• Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene says DOGE-style offices should be in every part of government.
• Greene held a town hall in Georgia, where police tossed out several protesters.
• Greene dismissed concerns over losing Social Security benefits to White House DOGE office cuts.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said at her town hall session in Cobb County, Georgia, on Tuesday that DOGE-like groups that "reduce waste, fraud, and abuse" should be "in every part of government."

"Absolutely," said Greene, who is also the chairwoman of the House DOGE Subcommittee, in response to an on-screen question about whether she could see a role for DOGE-like offices at the state level.

"I think it is happening in Georgia — I've heard there are over 70 counties that have, that are creating DOGE groups," Greene added.

There have been efforts to bring DOGE-like offices to state and local government. The campaigns also often come with names like Wisconsin's GOAT committee, Florida's FLOGE, and the BullDOGEr in North Carolina.

Georgia's proposed version, the Red Tape Rollback Act of 2025, sponsored entirely by Republican state senators, would require state agencies to complete a top-to-bottom review of all rules and regulations every four years and look into the economic impact of all proposed rules.

As of March 19, the legislation moved out of committee in the Georgia House of Representatives.

Greene, currently representing Georgia District 14, went ahead with the Tuesday town hall in a Harris-won county despite House Speaker Mike Johnson urging Republican lawmakers to stop conducting in-person town halls as the GOP faces angry crowds.

The town hall at the Acworth Community Center proceeded under a police presence who were quick to remove protesters. The Q&A session displayed questions on screen instead of interacting with the audience live.

Punctuated with boos and occasional angry yells, the police removed at least five at the event, more than one person was tased, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that at least one was arrested.

The Acworth Police Department and Greene did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Greene also faced on-screen questions concerning how Social Security and Medicaid would be affected by DOGE's firing of workers and closure of some field offices, potentially inducing long wait times and forcing recipients to travel longer distances to reach in-person offices.

"Well, Christina, I'm sure you think you are pretty smart, but the reality is you are being completely brainwashed by whatever source of news you listen to," said Greene to a concerned constituent's question. "No one has lost their Social Security, no one has lost their Medicaid."

• Hongkong Post temporarily halted the delivery of goods from the US, effective Tuesday.
• The service said in a release that the US was "bullying and imposing tariffs abusively."
• Parcels containing only documents will not be affected

Hong Kong's postal service is temporarily stopping the delivery of postal items from the US in retaliation to President Donald Trump's slew of tariffs.

"The US is unreasonable, bullying and imposing tariffs abusively," the service said in a press release on Tuesday.

The service added that it took issue with the US government's decision to "eliminate the duty-free de minimis treatment for postal items despatched from Hong Kong to the US and increase the tariffs for postal items containing goods to the US starting from May 2."

"Hongkong Post will definitely not collect any so-called tariffs on behalf of the US and will suspend the acceptance of postal items containing goods destined to the US," the press release read.

Hongkong Post also said that from Tuesday, it would be suspending the delivery of surface mail — which is sent by land or sea — to the US.

It would also stop accepting airmail destined for the US from April 27.

Postal items only containing documents will not be affected, the release said.

Hongkong Post's announcement comes as trade tensions between China and the US continue to escalate. The two countries have exchanged retaliatory tariffs since Trump first imposed a 10% tariff on goods from China in February.

The US now imposes a 145% tariff on goods from China, and Beijing has responded with a 125% tariff on US-made products.

Trump has also cracked down on the de minimis loophole, which allowed small packages under $800, like those from Chinese retailers Shein and Temu, to be brought into the country tax-free.

On April 9, Trump issued an executive order imposing a 120% tax on small parcels under $800 from China, Hong Kong, and Macau.

The order added that per-item postal fees for these parcels would increase to $100 between May 2 and June 1 and to $200 after June 1.

Representatives for Hongkong Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• David's Bridal shifted production from China to avoid tariffs, CEO Kelly Cook told Business Insider.
• The company reduced China-based production from over 50% to about 30% in recent months.
• David's Bridal is also exploring the feasibility of producing wedding dresses in the US.

The largest bridal retailer in the US started shifting its production out of China months ago in anticipation of the Trump administration's tariffs.

David's Bridal CEO Kelly Cook told Business Insider the company was not "tariff-proof" but "tariff-resilient" going into April, when President Donald Trump's latest tariff push sent companies around the world scrambling and financial markets tanking.

Cook, who took over as CEO on April 1, said the company has 36 design and production facilities around the world, including in China, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, and India. That diversified production allowed the company to proactively respond to potential tariffs.

By the time Trump announced a 145% tariff on goods from China last week, the company had already largely shifted production to its facilities elsewhere.

Cook said that over the past few months the company decreased its China-based production from over 50% of its total to about 30%, a move that was possible due to the production that was already ongoing in other countries.

"We want to do everything in our power not to pass anything on to the customer," Cook said, adding that as of last week, David's Bridal had not raised prices as a result of tariffs.

The majority of bridal gowns sold in the US are produced in China, making the industry highly susceptible to the impacts of Trump's trade war. Independent bridal shops recently told BI that about 90% of their gowns were made in China and that, in some cases, wholesale wedding dress prices were already rising as a result of tariffs.

The average wedding dress sold in the US retails for around $2,000 according to wedding planning website The Knot, so the steep tariffs on China could result in brides or bridal shops being hit with a hefty additional cost. And for couples getting married, that increase would be on top of the average cost of a wedding in the US, which The Knot puts at $33,000.

In addition to moving its own production out of China, David's Bridal is also helping some of the manufacturers it partners with move their operations out of the country and to some of its other facilities.

Cook said the company also has about 300,000 gowns already state-side in its 193 stores located throughout the US, so they wouldn't be subject to tariffs.

"We are very focused on ensuring that that level of inventory stays voluminous so we can anticipate needs like this," she said.

Cook added that with so much uncertainty around tariffs, David's Bridal is focusing on the factors it can control — "optimizing, looking at cost controls, moving production," she said. "We'll just continue to stay focused on that until the dust settles on all of the tariffs."

David's Bridal is also exploring the possibility of producing gowns in the US. Cook said the company is visiting a potential manufacturing location in June to evaluate if production could occur stateside.

The National Bridal Retailers Association, which represents about 6,000 independent bridal shops, recently told BI that the US does not currently have the infrastructure to produce the quality of dresses at scale that can be produced in China.

"There's no doubt that we can find the labor and the talent in the US to do the same thing," Cook said. "It's about timing and location and other economic factors like capital and so forth that we will evaluate."

• Nvidia said in a Tuesday SEC filing that it expects up to $5.5 billion in charges due to a new export rule.
• Nvidia fell over 6% after hours, while Asian suppliers such as TSMC fell on Wednesday morning.
• The Trump White House is eyeing tariffs on chips as a way to encourage onshore manufacturing.

Nvidia expects up to about $5.5 billion in charges as a result of the Trump administration's licensing requirement to export the company's H20 chips to China, according to a Tuesday evening SEC filing. The news sent shares of Nvidia and key suppliers down.

The chip designer said in the filing that the government informed Nvidia that the export rule would be "in effect for the indefinite future." Nvidia said the charges are expected to be reflected in the company's first-quarter earnings, which ends on April 27.

"First quarter results are expected to include up to approximately $5.5 billion of charges associated with H20 products for inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves," the company said in the filing.

The announcement caused Nvidia stock to slide more than 6% after trading hours.

In Asia, where the company's supply chain is concentrated, stocks of Nvidia suppliers declined as markets opened on Wednesday.

Japanese testing equipment maker Advantest dropped 5%. Shares of semiconductor wafer producers Samsung Electronics and TSMC fell 2.6% and 2%, respectively. Memory maker SK Hynix slumped 3% and testing and assembly company Wistron fell 2.8%.

In a note on Wednesday, Bernstein analysts said banning the H20 chip made "little sense" to them.

"H20 performance is low, well below already-available Chinese alternatives," analysts led by Stacy A. Rasgon wrote in the note. "A ban essentially simply hands the Chinese AI market over to Huawei."

According to Bernstein, China's H20 sales amounted to about $12 billion in revenue, which is "not trivial but not enormous in the grand scheme of things."

Nvidia's H20 chips were specifically made to comply with Biden-era export controls on chips sent to China as the world's superpowers remain in an AI arms race.

The current administration sees the new export rule as a means to address the risk of China developing its own supercomputer, the company said in the filing. The rule doesn't stop the export of H20 chips — but it requires Nvidia to get a license to export them.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment and an Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment.

Where the charges come from

Exporting the H20 chips themselves isn't costing the company up to $5.5 billion.

According to the filing, the charges instead could include H20 chips that have already been manufactured and now may be more difficult to sell due to the new requirement. Nvidia is also accounting for costs related to producing the chip and additional funds that may be needed to cover potential future losses.

The Trump administration has taken steps to pave a way for tariffs on chips, including probes led by the Commerce Department into semiconductor imports. The investigations seek to determine what impacts those imports have on national security, which could give President Donald Trump a reason to implement tariffs on key tech goods.

In general, Trump has said that his tariff strategy is part of a broader effort to encourage domestic manufacturing of key goods. The president is also hoping to use the levies to push China to negotiate a better trade deal with the US, although the specifics around his demands are not clear.

On Monday, Nvidia reiterated its commitment to invest $500 billion over the next four years in the US, promising AI supercomputers and data centers.

The White House promoted the announcement as a win, calling it "the Trump Effect in action."

• The Supreme Court told Donald Trump to bring back a man his administration has deported to a prison in El Salvador.
• It doesn't look like Trump is going to comply — or even try to comply.
• Checks and balances among wings of government are built into the US system. What happens if that breaks down?

The Supreme Court has told Donald Trump to do something. It looks like he's not going to do it.

What happens next?

And by next, I mean two things:

Most immediately: What's going to happen to Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national the US says it mistakenly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador?

But really, what's going to happen to the United States?

Because we have entered uncharted waters: The president, who is supposed to govern alongside Congress and the court system, now appears to be acting with next to no constraints.

I don't want to get into the weeds about the Abrego Garcia case, and the US government's conflicting explanations about why it sent him to El Salvador and why it says it can no longer get him back. I also don't want to debate the merits of Trump's mass deportation campaign (I think it's awful; many Americans feel otherwise).

But I do want to underline the big picture: We're supposed to live in a country with a system of checks and balances. And right now things seem very unbalanced. Donald Trump is doing mostly what he wants to do.

Some of what Trump is doing is a super-charged extension of what presidents have been doing for decades — expanding powers originally meant to be at least partially the domain of Congress, and relying on executive orders instead of trying to get congressional sign-off. (Punchbowl News, on Tuesday: "Trump has signed fewer bills into law at this point in his presidency than any new president taking office for the last seven decades, according to government records.")

Ignoring court orders is a completely different ballgame, and a very rare one, as many legal scholars note with increasing alarm. That's why people who say Trump should do that, like Vice President JD Vance, have to go back to an 1832 case to find a precedent.

It may also explain why Trump himself says, repeatedly, that he wants to obey court rulings — particularly from the Supreme Court, as he said last week.

But on Monday, Trump made it clear that he intends to ignore the unanimous Supreme Court ruling telling his administration to "facilitate" the return of Abrego Garcia to the US.

The reasons for that stance depend on who's talking. Sometimes they argue that courts can't compel Trump to do anything that relates to foreign policy, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at a Monday press event in the Oval Office. Other times they'll say it's simply up to the government of El Salvador, as Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the same meeting.

In reality, if Trump wanted to comply, he'd simply tell Nayib Bukele, El Salvador's president — who sat next to Trump at the Monday event in the White House — to pull Abrego Garcia out of prison and put him on a plane to the US.

So here we are.

Again: Maybe you don't care much about what happens to Abrego Garcia, or anyone else the Trump administration wants to expel from the country. Maybe you like what Trump is doing.

But if we keep heading down this path, you're eventually going to find a place where Donald Trump wants to do something you don't like. Maybe he'll want to stop a deal you want to do. Something where you'd like Congress, or the courts, to push back, to create a counterweight — the system we set up way back in the 1700s, in place of a king. What happens if we abandon that?

• Alicia Walter and Nathan Stark have traveled to 47 countries across the globe.
• They told BI that many places are stunning, but sometimes beauty doesn't make the trip worth it.
• The pair explained why they won't return to some countries, from strikes and getting robbed to overspending.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Alicia Walter, 28, and Nathan Stark, 41, a couple who have traveled to 47 countries. Together, they run The Passport Couple, a travel blog that chronicles their adventures and offers travel tips and recommendations.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Alicia: So far, we've been to 47 countries.

We've traveled through much of Central and South America, parts of Africa, a good portion of Europe, and most of Southeast and East Asia.

People often think this lifestyle is glamorous. Although we're based in Tirana, Albania, we've been on the road for five years now and have experienced both the highest of highs and lowest of lows.

Anything can happen when you're traveling

Nathan: There's a lot of uncertainty when traveling.

Your environment is constantly changing, and when you're in that situation, you're just more prone to little mistakes — ones that can turn into huge problems, depending on when and where they happen.

Traveling on a budget can be difficult, too. Budget flights are not always on time or give you a proper heads-up when there's a delay. We've missed flights, had them canceled, or even boarded trains only to find a strike.

Alicia: We've also had our fair share of Airbnbs that looked glamorous in the photos, but when we arrived, they were nothing like what we expected.

Nathan: When we travel, we take the good with the bad, and honestly, we would return to almost every place we've visited. Still, there are some destinations where, we pause to think — Is it worth the challenges for just one vacation?

Egypt

Alicia: We visited Egypt at the end of 2021, flying in from Europe with plans to return there afterward.

When we arrived, we ran into a confusing visa situation — we're still not entirely sure what happened. Thankfully, a family friend was able to help us navigate it.

We spent about two weeks in Egypt, mostly in Cairo and Luxor. We visited some main tourist spots like the pyramids, did some sightseeing, went on a food tour, and even rode horses through the desert.

We were also staying with a family friend, so we got to experience some local activities, like attending polo matches.

We usually do a lot of DIY travel without guides or tours unless it's for something specific. But in Egypt, we had guides the whole time because it was hard to know where we were allowed to go and whether taking photos or walking in certain areas was OK.

Nathan: It's hard to say we wouldn't return to Egypt — it's such a beautiful country, and we had an incredible time with our host family. However, for us, it was one of the most difficult countries to get around.

Mexico

Mexico

Nathan: Mexico's weather is great, the food is incredible, and it's such a beautiful place. The culture is wonderful, and we've experienced some incredible things like visiting World Wonders.

Alicia: While we love Mexico, we've had things stolen from us both times we've visited.

In 2020, our Airbnb was broken into, and they stole our computers, cameras — basically everything. We had to file insurance claims and cancel the rest of our trip. It turned into a huge ordeal.

When we visited in 2023, our phone was pickpocketed while we were out in Playa del Carmen. We had Find My iPhone on, so we could see exactly where it was, but there wasn't much we could do about it.

The theft happened roughly halfway through our monthlong trip, which we eventually had to cancel.

Nathan: Every time we've had a bad experience — whether in Mexico or anywhere else — we've always been met with equal or even greater kindness.

When we were pickpocketed in Mexico, we didn't even tell our hotel what had happened — we just asked how to file a police report. Still, about 30 minutes later, they came up to us with a care package. They even sent a bottle of wine to our room and gave us both complimentary massages the next day.

China

Alicia: We've been to China twice now. Even though about a billion people live there, it's one of the quietest countries we've visited. The locals are incredibly welcoming and helpful —everyone wanted to make sure we weren't lost.

Still, it can be tough to get around or find information. We couldn't access Gmail or any Google services, even with a VPN or a SIM card from outside the country.

Nathan: Apple Maps works, but only when you're in the country. We ended up buying a Lonely Planet guide, which was pretty outdated. We'd take the coordinates from the book and plug them into Apple Maps, but sometimes, it didn't work.

It's also difficult to find recent or accurate information about restaurants, transportation, or even visa requirements in the country — things are constantly changing.

Multiple times, we tried to go to a restaurant that either wasn't where it was listed, wasn't open during the posted hours, or had permanently closed.

Alicia: On one of our trips, we got "stuck" in the country for about 24 hours because of a visa issue. We had to cancel our original flights and take a new route home. We estimate it cost us around $3,000, not including the money we lost on our original flights.

Nathan: It took us about 54 hours on six separate flights to leave the country. We were just trying to find the most affordable — though definitely the most inconvenient — way home.

Colombia

Alicia: We've traveled extensively throughout Colombia and have been there several times. It's such a beautiful country, and I always feel really welcome there.

Nathan: We've been on a road trip through the country, which was great. We always love it when a country is drivable.

Alicia: When we visited Colombia, we stayed in a mix of Airbnb and apartments. Some of them were great, but we had to move a couple of times because the Airbnb wasn't what we expected.

Like many countries, Colombia has its share of political unrest. Sometimes, we'd be walking to a restaurant, and suddenly, a protest would come down the street — 100 or 200 people waving flags and chanting.

There were also strikes. We couldn't get a taxi a few times because the drivers weren't working because they demanded fair pay or better benefits, or the grocery stores didn't have eggs because farmers were striking.

While we sympathize with the locals and want them to have better wages and a better quality of life, it can — at times — make traveling there difficult.

USA

Alicia: Now that we've traveled all over the world, traveling in the US just isn't that enjoyable — mainly because of how expensive it is.

You could easily spend $500 in a single day between a hotel room, transportation, food, and sightseeing. Meanwhile, that same $500 could last you a week in Thailand.

Nathan: Something else we've heard from our friends from other countries is that healthcare is one of the biggest concerns about traveling in the US. Medical care here is insanely expensive, so if anything happens to you, it can be financially crippling.

Alicia: Transportation in the US also isn't easy. You almost always need to rent a car, and then on top of that, you have to pay for parking and gas — it adds up quickly.

Nathan: In some countries, public transportation is so good that it makes getting around incredibly easy. However, in the US, reliable or convenient public transit can vary wildly depending on your location.

For example, when we were in Japan, it was so easy—you could go anywhere without needing a car.

• United Airlines will cut its domestic flight schedule by 4% starting in July due to soft demand.
• It will also retire 21 older aircraft ahead of schedule and cut off-peak flights on low travel days.
• United offered two scenarios for its finances this year, saying it's impossible to predict the economy.

United Airlines plans to cut about 4% of its domestic capacity starting in July as it braces for lower travel demand.

The carrier said it is "impossible to predict this year with any degree of confidence," how the year will play out as President Donald Trump's trade war wreaks havoc on markets.

It's the second major US air carrier to offer a less-than-rosy outlook as the industry grapples with a potential decline in ticket sales after Delta withdrew its annual outlook earlier this month, citing slower growth due to economic uncertainty created by the Trump administration's tariffs.

Unlike Delta, United instead offered two scenarios: one if the economy remains stable and another for a "recessionary environment." In the best case, the company expects up to $13.50 per share in profits this year, or just over half that if the US slips into a recession.

"The Company's guidance is based on consensus market macroeconomic expectations. However, a single consensus no longer exists," it said.

For the first quarter of 2025, which ended March 31, United said it earned $0.91 per share, topping analyst estimates of $0.74 compiled by Bloomberg. Shares rose as high as 6% in late trading.

In addition to the capacity cuts, the airline said it would reduce the number of off-peak flights on lower demand days and confirmed plans announced last month to retire 21 aircraft ahead of schedule, which will save $100 million this year on engine overhauls.

Both United and Delta said strong international demand, especially in premium seats, was helping to pick up some of the domestic slack.

• After college, I moved halfway around the world to teach English; then, I met the love of my life.
• We were Peace Corps volunteers who never expected to find love.
• Years later, we've created a beautiful life together with our two kids, two cats, and a dog.

When I was 23 years old, I made the surprising decision to move nearly 8,000 miles from home. I was desperate to start my post-graduate career with meaningful work, so I joined the Peace Corps to teach English in the South Pacific — the Republic of Vanuatu, to be specific. Instead of finding a career in international development, I found the love of my life.

Looking back, I realize moving to a remote island in the South Pacific was a bold choice for a kid who had never lived outside his home state of Georgia, but I was full of hope and naivete in unequal portions. I was so unprepared for what came next.

If only I had known that my future wife, Danielle, was preparing for the same adventure at the exact same time on the other side of the country.

We met on the first day of our volunteer group's orientation in Los Angeles. She was also full of hope and naivete — in more equal portions — and she had her own goals for a career in international health, not to mention a boyfriend back home.

Our first encounter wasn't exactly a meet-cute

I still remember meeting her in the hotel lobby right next to LAX the day before we flew to Vanuatu. This first meeting occurred in a crowded hotel bar full of 40 other volunteers who were all meeting for the first time. We introduced ourselves, probably shook hands in the least romantic way possible, and moved on to the next introduction.

I wish I could say it was love at first sight, but it took almost two years before we finally started dating. In contrast to modern online dating practices that hinge on fast connections and quick meet-ups, we had a very slow analog relationship.

In fact, we rarely spent time together during our first year in Vanuatu. We worked in different fields. I was an English teacher, and she was a health instructor. We were also based on different islands, which made casual hangs very uncommon. It wasn't until my birthday in September 2011 — when I was celebrating with a group of volunteers on her island — that I noticed there was something more between us.

We finally got together, and we had Malaria to thank

For the next year, we started making more of an effort to see each other. At first, we thought of ourselves as good friends, but one day, she texted me that she had decided to end her long-distance relationship with her boyfriend back home. Suddenly, the possibility of a deeper relationship was very real for us. Island hopping was still an issue though.

After a few months, I finally traveled to the capital city of Vanuatu — port Vila. Luckily, Danielle was already in town. Unluckily, she was being treated by the Peace Corps medical staff for malaria.

In between those bad days — when she was feeling more like her usual self — she would invite me on long walks or casual lunch dates. It wasn't until we finally knew she had malaria that I realized I should wise up and finally asked her to be my girlfriend. She said yes, of course.

She still claims that the long stay in town — brought on by malaria — was the only reason we ended up together. And she swears the malaria medication had nothing to do with it.

Our relationship started a few months before we returned home. I returned to the Atlanta area with my family, and Danielle returned to her hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, to be with hers. We spent the next year flying back and forth, trying to make our relationship work. Eventually, I moved to Connecticut to be closer to her while she finished graduate school. It was one of a series of decisions that led to the best decision of my life — asking her to be my wife. Once again, she said yes.

Fifteen years later, we have two kids, two cats, a dog, and a beautiful home full of plants, laughter, and hope in equal portions.

• Instagram saw a big spike in usage in the hours that TikTok went dark.
• That spike was illustrated as part of Meta's opening statement during its FTC antitrust trial.
• Here's the chart Meta shared in court.

Instagram stands to gain a lot if TikTok is banned.

A chart featured in Meta's opening statement during its FTC antitrust trial showed just how much Instagram could benefit.

The Meta-owned platform reported a spike in usage when TikTok went dark for roughly 14 hours in January.

"People went to Instagram," Meta's lawyer, Matt Hansen, said this week while pointing to the chart. "Boom almost instantly."

Specifically, Instagram saw a spike in hourly time spent when TikTok was unavailable in the US. After TikTok returned, the hourly time spent on Instagram appeared to return to normal, per the chart.

TikTok's future is still in limbo after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 4 granting TikTok an additional 75 days to land on a solution that would meet the requirements of the divest-or-ban law. TikTok's China-based owner, ByteDance, still needs to find a new owner for its US app.

If TikTok is banned, however, Instagram could very well see another flood of users to its platform. More users spending time on Meta-owned apps like Instagram and Facebook — which both have short-form video feeds — could result in more advertising revenue for the tech giant.

EMARKETER, a sister company of Business Insider, estimated in January that Meta could gain between $2.46 billion and $3.38 billion in ad revenue if TikTok were banned.

Instagram is also gearing up to launch a new editing app for its short-form video feature reels, called Edits, in the coming weeks. It would compete with ByteDance's video editing app CapCut.

• A mansion once owned by Bill Gates on Jupiter Island is for sale.
• Gates' investment entity bought it in 2009 for $5 million and sold it in 2018 for $4 million.
• Now the house is on the market for $23.5 million, an increase of $19.5 million.

A 9,458-square-foot mansion once owned by Bill Gates just hit the market, and if you have $23.5 million to spare, it could be yours.

The waterfront property is on Florida's exclusive Jupiter Island, which is home to other celebrities like Tiger Woods, and near the town of Jupiter, where public figures like Eric Trump live.

In 2009, Gates' investment entity Front Range Investment Holdings purchased the property for $5 million, per public records, adding it to Gates' large real-estate portfolio. As of 2024, he owned 275,000 acres of land across the US in states such as Washington, Colorado, California, and Florida.

Front Range sold the Jupiter Island property in 2018 for $4 million to John Textor, the former CEO of FuboTV and co-owner of multiple professional soccer teams such as Crystal Palace FC and Lyon.

Now, just seven years later, the price has skyrocketed from $4 million to $23.5 million, partly due to the upgrades made by Textor and the jump in South Florida real-estate prices in recent years. It's now listed by Susan Hemmes with ONE Sotheby's International Realty.

Take a closer look at the home, which includes state-of-the-art amenities and incredible views.

The home is located on Jupiter Island, a barrier island off the coast of Florida.

It's around 100 miles north of Miami.

The property is located along the Intracoastal Waterway and features a private boat lift that can lift 30,000 pounds.

The landscaping is pristine.

The home features crown molding and marble flooring.

Throughout the home's interior, you'll see doors leading outside to maximize indoor/outdoor living.

Right off the entryway, there's a private office and library.

The wood paneling gives this room an old-school feel.

Then we move on to the kitchen, equipped with SubZero appliances, a Thermador double wall oven, quartz countertops, and dual dishwashers.

Source: ONE Sotheby's International Realty

There's also custom cabinetry and two sinks.

Here's one of the living areas, which has picture-perfect views of the backyard.

The primary bedroom has vaulted ceilings and more floor-to-ceiling glass doors. It's one of four bedrooms.

But the real draw of the home is the indoor pool and spa with wood ceilings.

There's also an indoor hot tub, seen on the right.

The patio is equipped with a mosquito control system, so you won't have to worry about leaving the doors open.

But if you'd prefer to sit outside, there's also a large lawn to relax on.

All it takes to live like Bill Gates is $23.5 million — and a tolerance for the South Florida heat.

• Scientists say they've captured the first footage of a living colossal squid in the deep sea.
• The colossal squid is the world's largest invertebrate, but the one in this video is a baby.
• The footage was captured by an underwater expedition near Antarctica.

The colossal squid, a mysterious creature lurking in the Antarctic abyss, has finally made a cameo, a cohort of scientists say.

You may have heard of the giant squid, which is famous from mariners' legends and for its epic battles with sperm whales.

The colossal squid is even bigger and more mysterious. It's so elusive, living in the deep ocean near Antarctica, that scientists didn't even know it existed until 100 years ago.

Since then, fishermen have filmed a few dying colossal squids at the ocean's surface. Scientists have found chewed-up colossal squid in whale and seabird stomachs.

Nobody had confirmed a sighting in the deep sea until now.

Behold, the colossal squid

The footage below is the first to ever show a living colossal squid in its natural habitat, according to the researchers who captured it and two squid experts who verified it.

This animal is the world's heaviest invertebrate, growing up to 23 feet long and 1,100 pounds. The one in this video, though, is just under one foot long. It's a baby.

Kat Bolstad, a squid researcher at the Auckland University of Technology, helped verify the footage. She had previously reassembled a dead colossal squid caught by a fishing vessel.

"This is honestly one of the most exciting observations that we've had across the time I've been working on deep-sea cephalopods," Bolstad said in a press briefing announcing the new footage on Tuesday.

In the video, Bolstad said, "you can see the iridescent shine off the eyeballs."

She also pointed out the rust-colored spots on the squid's body. Those color cells suggest the squid can switch back and forth between being transparent like it is in the video, to being opaque.

"It probably has fine control over whether it can do that in certain regions of the body," Bolstad said.

The video was captured on March 9 by a remotely operated subsea vehicle called SuBastian, operated by a crew aboard a research vessel called "Falkor (too)." It was at a depth of about 600 meters (1968 feet).

The researchers on the vessel were conducting a 35-day expedition near the South Sandwich Islands. It was a mission of the Ocean Census, which is an international scientific collaboration to search for new marine life.

Rare squid discovery: 'I started hyperventilating'

Aaron Evans, an expert in the glass squid family to which colossal squids belong, helped Bolstad identify the creature in the video. They knew it was a colossal squid once they saw hooks on the middle of its eight arms. That's a distinctive feature that differentiates colossal squids from other species in the glass squid family.

When they saw the arm hooks, Evans said in the briefing, "I started hyperventilating."

Another Antarctic expedition in 2023 captured footage of what scientists thought may have been a juvenile colossal squid, but researchers were uncertain.

In the new video, though, "we can see the animal's features in really great detail," Bolstad said.

Colossal squids are unique in other ways, too. They have hooks on their two tentacles, and those hooks can rotate 360 degrees to grab onto prey. They also have the largest eyes of any animal ever studied — living or extinct — probably to help them see in the depths of the ocean.

Researchers suspect those eyes are part of the reason colossal squids are so elusive. Their huge pupils help it see subsea research vehicles before the cameras see them.

"Most adult colossal squid are probably going to try and want to get out of the area," Evans said. "From their perspective, anytime something large is coming towards them, it's not a good thing."

The little squid in the new footage doesn't seem to be alarmed, Bolstad said, and appears to take a "wait and see" stance toward the approaching vehicle.

"Eventually, when we see the adults, we will get footage of very large ones. They will have impressive hooks. They'll be big and muscly. There will be lots of monster hype about them," Bolstad said. "But in this case, we get to introduce the live colossal squid to the world as this beautiful, little, delicate animal."

• More than 817,000 people moved out of California from 2021 to 2022, per most recent census data. 
• It's not just regular people: Celebrities have left Los Angeles for places like Texas and Florida.
• Here are 19 celebrities who left LA — plus where they chose to move to and why. 

California is the US state with the most people moving out, with about 817,000 leavers between 2021 and 2022, according to the most recent census data.

A higher cost of living plus the increased threat of wildfires have people choosing other places across the country.

And while regular people ditch the Golden State, several celebrities, who can typically afford to live wherever they want, have also decided California is no longer the place for them.

Singer-turned-talk show host Kelly Clarkson traded Los Angeles for New York City post-divorce for in 2022, while actor Sylvester Stallone said earlier this year that he and his family are "permanently" vacating California for South Florida.

Popular moving destinations for Californians include Arizona, Florida, and Texas. And some have chosen different countries completely.

People have told Business Insider recently that reasons for leaving LA and California include high taxes, expensive home prices, and challenging social and political conditions. Some celebrities remain tight-lipped when sharing moves of their news, simply saying they're looking for a fresh start. Other high-profile actors, however, admit that the fast-paced, stressful scene in Hollywood can be another motivation.

Los Angeles, in particular, is experiencing an exodus of wealthier people in search of places where their money goes further.

Take Gus Lira, a managing partner at a private jet charter company, who had a condo in Malibu overlooking the ocean. California taxes were wearing him down, so he decided to move to Nevada.

"For me, really the main reason, and for many of the people that I know, is just taxes," Lira told Business Insider in January. "You can't get ahead when you get $100 and they take $60."

Business Insider compiled a list of 19 celebrities — some in celebrity couples — who left California for greener pastures, presented in alphabetical order by last name. We tried to include both where they moved to and why they left LA.

Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake left LA to shield their kids from the glare of the paparazzi.

The power couple has dealt with the paparazzi for most of their professional careers. But they had enough of their kids also having to endure it.

Since 2018, Biel, Timberlake, and their two kids have lived predominantly at their properties in Tennessee and Montana.

"You get hammered on the East Coast. You kind of get hammered on the West Coast. That's why we don't really live there anymore," said Biel in a May 22 episode of SiriusXM's "Let's Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa," seemingly referring to her former home of LA. "We're just trying to create some normalcy for these kids."

Dean Cain left LA for Las Vegas because of the "incredible taxation" and "horrible regulations for business" in California.

Dean Cain, best known for playing Clark Kent/Superman in "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," was fed up with how things were run in California.

The actor split for Vegas last year.

"It's the most ridiculous large government, incredible taxation, horrible regulations for business," he told Fox News Digital in 2023. "Very anti-business."

Cain said California's personal income tax felt especially high.

"I moved to Las Vegas. I live in Nevada now," he added. "I have 10 times as nice a house. I'm not kidding. Ten times as nice a house as I had in Malibu. The house is absolutely stunningly built. Gorgeous, beautiful. Everything is brand new."

Kelly Clarkson didn't just move from LA to New York — she took her daytime talk show with her.

Kelly Clarkson felt she had a new lease on life when she moved to New York City last year.

After finalizing her divorce from ex-husband Brandon Blackstock in 2022, she didn't just take her kids east. She also brought "The Kelly Clarkson Show" — it started taping in New York in season 5.

"I was very depressed for the last three years — and maybe a little before that, if I'm being honest. I think I really needed the change," the Grammy winner told People. "I needed it for me and my family as well. My kids are thriving here. We're just doing so much better, and we needed a fresh start."

Jesse Eisenberg

Actor and director Jesse Eisenberg took the pandemic as an opportunity to leave Los Angeles. Eisenberg, his wife, and their son packed up an RV and drove to his wife's hometown of Bloomington, Indiana.

"We have driven cross-country a lot, but we thought it would be prudent to isolate in an RV instead of stopping at hotels," Eisenberg told The Hollywood Reporter.

Initially, Eisenberg moved to Indiana to help take care of his late mother-in-law after she got sick and also help out at a domestic violence shelter where she worked.

But Eisenberg was happy to be in Indiana.

"I've lived in Indiana for a decade on-and-off and that's where I feel the most comfortable," Eisenberg told CBS News in February. "I'm not somebody who wants to surround myself in an industry that just feels kind of unstable."

Walton Goggins

"The White Lotus" star Walton Goggins and his wife Nadia Conners moved to New York's Hudson Valley during the pandemic in 2021. But, he told Architectural Digest in February, the move was less about California, and more about New York.

"We weren't running away from Los Angeles," he said. "We were running toward something."

"The pandemic opened windows of self-perception and possibility," he added. "It was an opportunity to do something different, not to start over from scratch but to change, to evolve."

Goggins, who was raised in Georgia, chose to live in a 1920s home upstate that resembles a hunting lodge — with an abundance of wood paneling and wood flooring — instead of the glitzy surroundings of Los Angeles.

John Goodman left LA in the late '80s.

John Goodman figured out a long time ago that Los Angeles wasn't for him and has been living in New Orleans since the late 1980s.

Like many, the Emmy winner first visited Crescent City to party. In the late 1970s, he showed up with his fraternity pals. A few years later, as an actor, he was shooting the movie "Everybody's All-American" alongside Dennis Quaid, Jessica Lange, and Timothy Hutton when he met his future wife, Anna Beth. He's been attached to the city ever since.

"I used to come down here every time I'd get a few dimes to rub together, and it felt like I was missing something unless I was here," he told "Today" in 2023. "I consider myself very lucky to be here."

Josh Harnett has been living in the English countryside since the pandemic. He left Hollywood after dealing with a stalker.

The actor recently gained renewed attention thanks to movies like "Oppenheimer" and "Trap," but don't expect to find him hanging out on the Sunset Strip. Since the pandemic, he's ditched LA for the English countryside.

Harnett and his wife, British actor Tamsin Egerton, have lived in Hampshire since COVID hit, bringing up their four kids. He's living in the UK on a marriage visa, so he can only leave the country for work 180 days a year.

After spending his early career in the Hollywood spotlight, Harnett told The Guardian he loves the village country life where "nobody cares" who you are.

"This is all brand new to me," he said. "I never would have expected it. And time passes quickly. With four children, you have so much to do. In a way, less is happening. But more of the important stuff is happening."

Being outside Hollywood is also safer for Hartnett. He told The Guardian that when he lived in LA, he had experiences with stalkers.

"People showed up at my house. People that were stalking me," he said. "A guy showed up at one of my premieres with a gun, claiming to be my father. He ended up in prison. There were lots of things. It was a weird time. And I wasn't going to be grist for the mill."

Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban moved to Tennessee to be closer to the country music scene.

A year after Nicole Kidman tied the knot with country-music star Keith Urban, the two got the heck out of LA.

In 2007, they moved to Nashville, where the Australian Oscar winner dove headfirst into Urban's world.

"That country-music community is a very warm community," she told People in 2016. "It's very protective. Keith's been a part of it for decades now. It's his home, it's our home."

Matthew McConaughey headed to Texas to help his family.

A few years before the McConaissance led to Matthew McConaughey's best actor Oscar win, he and his wife Camila Alves fled Hollywood for his home state of Texas.

The two settled in Austin in 2012 after buying a 10,800-square-foot mansion. According to a profile in Southern Living, it was initially because of a "family crisis," as he needed to help his mother and two brothers. That led to the couple deciding to stay put to raise their three children there.

"Ritual came back," McConaughey said of being back in Texas. "Whether that was Sunday church, sports, dinner together as a family every night, or staying up after that telling stories in the kitchen, sitting at the island pouring drinks and nibbling while retelling them all in different ways than we told them before."

Glen Powell

Glen Powell left Los Angeles and returned to his home state of Texas in 2024.

Powell, who had a breakout role in "Top Gun: Maverick," has lived in Los Angeles for more than 15 years, but told The Hollywood Reporter that he's done enough in Hollywood and he feels he can now live elsewhere. "It's like I've earned the ability to go back to my family," he said.

Not only does living in Texas allow Powell to be closer to family, but he's also finishing his degree at the University of Texas.

"I think this is going to be good for my head, heart, and soul," he said.

Amanda Seyfried headed to upstate New York for a taste of the simple life.

With movies like "Mean Girls" and "Mamma Mia!" in her filmography, you would think Amanda Seyfried would want to lay her head down somewhere glamorous.

But she actually prefers life on a farm.

Seyfried spends most of her time on a farm in the Catskills, a mountain range north of New York City, told Architectural Digest reported in 2023. in 2023 that that she purchased in 2014.

"It's insane how much I can feel so accomplished and successful here without having to be in a successful movie," she told The New York Times in 2020.

Sylvester Stallone wanted a new start in Florida.

After decades of living in Los Angeles — including in his first dingy apartme.nt on Balboa Boulevard, which would become the inspiration for his iconic character Rocky Balboa — Sylvester Stallone packed up and left town in 2023.

This was first revealed in early 2024, during season two of his reality series "The Family Stallone".

"After a long, hard consideration, your mother and I have decided, time to move on and leave the state of California permanently, and we're going to go to Florida," Stallone said. "We're going to sell this house."

Stallone and his wife, Jennifer Flavin, gave multiple reasons for the relocation, including the desire for a fresh start after their children moved out of the family home.

Rod Stewart went back to his roots in England.

The legendary rocker decided that at 79 years old, it was time to stop traveling across the pond.

Last year, he put his sprawling 38,500-square-foot Beverly Hills property, which he has lived in since 1975, on the market.

Selling the home is bittersweet for Stewart: "I don't want to sell it, and the kids don't want me to sell it either," Stewart told People. "There's too many fond memories. I've lived [in LA] since 1975, and I adore the place."

But he said he's making England a more permanent home since wrapping up his latest world tour and Las Vegas residency last year.

Hilary Swank moved to a Colorado ski town.

The Oscar winner is loving her new life in the mountains of Telluride, Colorado, on 168 acres with five rescue dogs.

She and her husband, Philip Schneider, bought the land in 2016, broke ground in 2018, and finally completed the home in 2020.

A year later, she put her LA home on the market and has been living it up in the great outdoors.

"I have been looking for land since I was in my mid-20s," Swank told Architectural Digest in 2022. "I find nature to be my happiest place, and animals are my other happiest place. And to be with both of them is everything to me."

Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively left LA after just six months of dating.

When you know, you know. After less than a year of dating, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively packed up their stuff and left Hollywood for the suburbs of New York City.

In 2012, after six months of dating, the couple bought a $2.3 million home in Pound Ridge, New York.

"We don't live in LA. We live on a farm in New York," said the "Deadpool" star in a 2015 interview. "And we don't lead a wild and crazy life. It's not that hard. It's not a big deal."

Julia Roberts hasn't lived in LA for decades.

The Oscar winner realized many years ago that Los Angeles wasn't for her.

Roberts moved to a 32-acre ranch in Taos, New Mexico, in 1995.

The "Pretty Woman" star told Oprah back in 2003 that in New Mexico, everything is "clear."

"Around here, I come and go like it's nothing," she said. "Los Angeles is such a town of show business, and I'm a terrible celebrity. I find it difficult — it's the beast that must be fed."

Eric Stonestreet left Hollywood for Kansas City to get away from the "douchebaggery" of the business.

"Modern Family" star Eric Stonestreet did not mince words when he explained why he's been living in Kansas City since the acclaimed show ended after 11 seasons in 2020.

In a September interview with long-form interview journalist Graham Bensinger, he said a big reason he left LA was to get away from all the fake people in Hollywood.

"What I realized it does is it highlights everything great about our business, the entertainment business," the actor said on what it's like to no longer live in LA. "And it highlights all the douchebaggery of our business. It amplifies it. Because I'm here, I'm dealing with people from here, and I'm going into the store and having all these authentic, real moments, and then I go to Hollywood, and you're reminded of some of the types of people that you deal with."

James Van Der Beek moved his family out of LA after he and his wife renewed their vows in Austin.

In 2020, James Van Der Beek and his wife Kimberly renewed their wedding vows for their 10th anniversary in Austin, Texas.

A year later, they moved their six kids from LA to Austin, where they now live on a 36-acre property.

"We wanted to get the kids out of Los Angeles," Van Der Beek told Austin Lifestyle in 2021. "We wanted to give them space and we wanted them to live in nature."

Mark Wahlberg moved his family to Las Vegas for a "fresh start."

Boston-born Mark Wahlberg set out to LA years ago to make it as an actor. Over his career, he realized he rarely stayed there to make any of his movies. So, in 2022, he packed up and moved his family to Las Vegas.

He told The Talk in October 2022 that in Nevada his four kids can more easily pursue their hobbies, including golfing, riding horses, and playing basketball.

"We came here to just kind of give ourselves a new look, a fresh start for the kids, and there's a lot of opportunity here," Wahlberg told The Talk. "I'm really excited about the future."

• Mark Zuckerberg's failed Snapchat bid resurfaced in Meta's antitrust trial.
• And the Meta boss seems like he hasn't fully moved on.
• "I think if we would had bought them we would have accelerated their growth," Zuckerberg testified.

It's been over a decade since Snapchat turned down a multibillion-dollar acquisition offer from Mark Zuckerberg — and the tech titan still doesn't seem over it.

The failed bid was highlighted on Tuesday while Zuckerberg was on the witness stand for a second day of testimony in Meta's blockbuster antitrust trial.

Zuckerberg's Meta, then called Facebook, offered to buy the photo-messaging app Snapchat for $6 billion in 2013 just two years after its launch, according to an email from Zuckerberg revealed at the trial.

It was widely reported at the time that Snapchat rejected a $3 billion takeover attempt from Facebook.

"I delivered the offer to Evan and he seemed to take it well," Zuckerberg wrote in an October 2013 email to other company executives, referring to Snapchat cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel. "He told me he thought he could get it done and that he'd call me back quickly."

Zuckerberg continued in the email, "At this point, we should probably prepare for it to leak that we offered $6b for them and all the negative that will come from that."

While under questioning by a Federal Trade Commission attorney on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said he thought Snapchat "wasn't growing at the potential that it could" and believed he could make it better.

"For what it's worth, I think if we would had bought them we would have accelerated their growth, but that's just speculation," Zuckerberg testified in a Washington, DC, federal courtroom.

The US government introduced the email to try to bolster its argument that Zuckerberg's Meta sought to maintain its dominance in the social media market through acquisitions rather than competition.

During his testimony, Zuckerberg said Snapchat "was and is a meaningful competitor."

When asked about Zuckerberg's comments on how he says he could have improved the app, Snap spokesperson Monique Bellamy told Business Insider: "Anticompetitive behavior can often slow and thwart growth for smaller companies and startups, especially when dominant companies like Meta use their size and position to stifle competition."

"Public reports of Meta's attempt to buy Snap, and then egregiously copy its features, was an attempt to do just that," Bellamy said.

The spokesperson added, "Nonetheless, Snap has remained a popular and a viable competitor to companies like Meta because we've continued to innovate and build products and services that people find useful and fun."

In response, a Meta spokesperson told BI, "As Snap has repeatedly acknowledged, they operate in fierce competition with us and many others, and this competition drives innovation across the full ecosystem to improve features that benefit consumers."

"But the core issue of this case is not this — it's the FTC's claims we don't compete against TikTok, YouTube and many others with the same features," the spokesperson said.

The antitrust trial between Meta and the FTC opened on Monday and is expected to run up to eight weeks.

The FTC argues in its case against Meta that the tech empire "helped cement" its illegal monopoly in the social media market with its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and its $19 billion acquisition of the messaging app WhatsApp two years later.

The government says these acquisitions were part of Meta's "buy or bury" strategy to maintain market dominance and stamp out competitive threats.

Meta could be forced to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp if the judge overseeing the case rules in the FTC's favor.

The tech giant argues that there is no monopoly and that the company faces massive competition from apps like TikTok and YouTube.

• Wall Street earnings have shown early signs of how the Trump presidency is affecting banks.
• Firms like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America said the locked-up M&A market hurt IB earnings.
• Now, some corporate dealmakers who backed Trump are biting their tongues, insiders say.

Many soothsayers throughout Wall Street's C-suites had bet that a new administration, with values ostensibly more amicable to the business community, would shock the life back into a comatose market for dealmaking.

They may have spoken too soon.

Indeed, on every bank's first-quarter earnings calls in recent days, one person loomed over the proceedings, though not a single CEO mentioned him by name: President Donald Trump. Instead, they talked about uncertainty, worried clients, and a concerning economic outlook.

"While our corporate and consumer clients are resilient and in good financial health, the world is in a wait-and-see mode and is facing a more negative macro outlook than anyone had anticipated at the beginning of the year," Jane Fraser, the CEO of Citigroup, said on a Tuesday morning phone call. "We know that prolonged uncertainty generally hurts confidence."

Behind the scenes, bankers told Business Insider that they were feeling less diplomatic about the Trump administration and its tariff policies and pronouncements.

"I don't know how you couldn't be embarrassed" about the outcome, a managing director at a middle market-focused investment bank, who previously worked at one of the large-cap firms that reported earnings, told me by phone on Tuesday. "If you're an executive in finance and you talk to clients frequently and you understand how the world works, there's no way you can't be upset."

When I asked the MD what he'd been hearing from his friends throughout the industry who supported Trump's economic agenda before he took office, he didn't mince words: "They're pretty quiet."

Dashed expectations

Early clues from banks' results are painting a picture of how the confusion unleashed by the White House's policy shifts roiled investor sentiments.

Goldman said that the paralyzed merger market dragged advisory revenue of $792 million (collected from working on deals) down 22% as compared with the same period last year. "In investment banking, the volatile backdrop led to more muted activity relative to the levels we had expected coming into this year," David Solomon, the firm's CEO, said.

Bank of America said its total corporate investment banking fees were $1.523 billion for the quarter, down nearly 8% from the quarter immediately before. In advisory — the segment of the business handling debt and equity advisory and working on M&A transactions — the bank reported $384 million, down 31% from the prior quarter.

Watching the deals market sputter has surprised and deflated many insiders, particularly because of how recently they were convinced of the opposite outcome. One survey released in December found that 85% of respondents — corporate dealmakers — said they were eyeing more transactions than they had been six months earlier under the Biden administration.

Other firms like Citigroup said they were bolstering loan loss provisions, another bellwether of a weakening economy that marks the tightening of consumers' wallets. Mark Mason, the firm's CFO, said shoppers were "resilient," according to data he'd reviewed, but pointed to a tilt in how some were spending their money.

"We've seen a shift toward essentials, and away from travel and entertainment," he said.

The full impacts may be unclear for a few more months

Traders were among the only Wall Streeters to benefit from the volatility, earnings results showed. Firms like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America rode the wave to record revenues, with Morgan Stanley saying "strong client activity amid a more volatile trading environment" shot its trading revenues up by 45%.

The impact was so pronounced that compensation expert Alan Johnson predicted in an interview with me last week that traders will be the only people in finance to receive meaningful year-end bonuses. For bankers and underwriters, he said, the storm clouds were gathering.

A fuller picture of how Trump is impacting Wall Street may not emerge till the next earnings season later this summer. Many of the worst days of volatility, which left some with flashbacks of the opening salvos of the pandemic or the financial crisis, happened in April, which is in the second quarter.

Whether the White House will care, however, is another matter. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had a message for Wall Street from the briefing podium earlier this month: "Trust in President Trump."

For the time being, Wall Street may have little choice in the matter.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at ralexander@businessinsider.com or SMS/Signal at 561-247-5758. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• OpenAI plans to launch a social network, according to a media report on Tuesday.
• A move like this would give OpenAI way more user attention and fresh data for AI model training.
• Elon Musk transformed X and xAI by protecting his social network's data and using it to create new AI services.

OpenAI is reportedly planning to launch its own social network. To understand why, consider what Elon Musk has done with X in recent years.

After overpaying for Twitter, one of the first things he did was shut off bot access to this social network. There were howls of protest. Most explanations focused on the assumption that Musk was gutting Twitter for some sort of evil fun.

What he was actually doing was protecting Twitter's valuable data from being pillaged by other tech companies that wanted to use this information for free to create generative AI models.

Instead, Musk's new AI startup, xAI, got exclusive access to this data. This was used to train new AI models. The result is Grok, a series of models and chatbot services that compete pretty well with OpenAI's ChatGPT — while also fueling new forms of content creation and sharing on what is now known as the X social network.

Now, Sam Altman is trying to replicate this magic. The Verge reported on Tuesday that OpenAI is developing a social media platform that could integrate ChatGPT outputs, such as image generation, with a social feed. It cited sources familiar with the matter. OpenAI didn't comment to the publication.

Bill Gross, the founder of tech incubator Idealab, told me there are two main reasons OpenAI would want its own social network. OK, well, three reasons.

First, Gross said that Altman doesn't like Musk, so why not start competing head-on with X?

OpenAI is looking for attention and data

The other two reasons are more interesting. They revolve around the two most important ingredients in today's AI-powered tech industry: attention and data.

"Altman needs to have more attention to justify OpenAI's valuation," Gross said. "He's already getting half a billion to a billion monthly unique visitors, which is incredible. He wants to get that higher so he can justify a trillion-dollar valuation."

Recall the title of Google's famous research paper that kicked off the generative AI boom: "Attention Is All You Need." To be a valuable tech giant, you need to control the online attention of billions of humans every day.

OpenAI was recently valued at about $300 billion. But Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are all in the trillion-dollar club. And these companies all have billions of regular users, Gross noted.

OpenAI needs the same reach, and a social network could do the trick, he said. "They just need more attention. So why not harvest the output of their models that users will share on a new social network, and this should attract even more users and even more attention," Gross said.

Human data is good. Labeled data is better. 

What do you do with all this user attention and related activity once you get it? A decade ago, the Big Tech business model was running targeted online ads to generate billions of dollars. Now, it's siphoning off user data to train and build powerful AI models and chatbots, then charging a subscription for access to these tools.

Like other AI companies, OpenAI has spent recent years collecting all the data from the internet and using that in clever ways to create AI models and chatbots, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the new 4o image-generation tool.

The appetite for more, high-quality human-generated data is insatiable. But the supply can't keep up, so AI companies often have to pay in various ways to generate new data.

What if, instead, you could just collect mountains of free human data from your very own social network?

"If users start typing words into this new OpenAI social network, the company can use that for all kinds of AI model training," Gross said.

The company would have this new source of human vocabulary, but users would also share images and videos and add commentary. This is essentially humans identifying and labeling content on a massive scale, Gross explained.

This is crucial for successful AI model development. Raw data is good, but when humans take the time to annotate and label the information, that's way more valuable.

"How else can OpenAI acquire new training data at scale going forward?" Gross said.

I asked OpenAI all about this on Tuesday and didn't get a response.

• FX's "Dying For Sex" is about a cancer patient who aims to complete a sexual bucket list before she dies.
• The show was inspired by the podcast of the same name hosted by friends Molly Kochan and Nikki Boyer.
• Kochan died in 2019 at the age of 45 from metastatic breast cancer.

FX's "Dying For Sex" follows a woman's quest to have as much kinky sex as she can before she dies.

The eight-part series, which is streaming in full on Hulu, tells the story of Molly (Michelle Williams), a terminal cancer patient who decides to devote her remaining days to sexual exploration, leading her on an enlightening and unexpected sexual odyssey.

In the first episode, Molly learns that her cancer has not only returned but that it's terminal, and decides to leave her unhappy marriage and ask her best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate) if she can "die with her" instead of with her husband (Jay Duplass), who treats her more like a patient than a partner.

Together, Molly, Nikki, and Molly's social worker, Sonya (Esco Jouley), prioritize working through Molly's sexual bucket list, which ends up including BDSM, golden showers, and a guy who likes to be treated like a dog (collar and all).

The show is bold and defiantly joyful, while still being grounded in the reality of what it means to receive end-of-life care — and that's because it is based on a true story.

'Dying for Sex' is based on a podcast by a real cancer patient named Molly Kochan

"Dying For Sex" is based on a Wondery podcast of the same name, which was hosted by Nikki Boyer and Molly Kochan, who died in 2019 at the age of 45 from metastatic breast cancer.

Speaking to Business Insider, Boyer, who serves as an executive producer on the television adaptation, said that she always felt that the way Kochan was spending her final months had to be shared with the world.

"I had picked her up one day, and she'd already gone on two dates that day and was making out with guys before I'd even taken my pajamas off," she recalled. "It was so fascinating that she had such a drive while she was so sick."

As Kochan recounted her latest hook-ups to Boyer that day, the two began joking that it would make a great TV show. From there, they pitched it around, eventually scoring a podcast deal with Wondery.

The podcast, which debuted in early 2020 after Kochan's death, amassed a loyal fan base, thanks in part to her no-holds-barred approach to her sexual encounters.

"What are you going to do to me? Kill me? I'm dying," Kochan joked on one episode of the six-part podcast in response to concern about going home with strangers.

The series makes changes to the real Molly's story, but stays true to its heart

While the series is mostly faithful to Kochan's real story, creators Elizabeth Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock made a few changes to adapt it for television. For instance, Kochan's husband's name and profession have been changed out of respect for his privacy, according to Boyer.

The series also condensed several men that Kochan dated into one character, simply known as "Neighbor Guy" (Rob Delaney), with whom the character explores a variety of kinks and fetishes and ends up having a mutually fulfilling sexual relationship.

However, the real Kochan didn't end up breaking her femur while acquiescing his request to kick him in the groin, as the show depicts.

Boyer added that there were also some timeline changes, which helped to raise the stakes dramatically. For instance, in real life, Boyer was well into her relationship with her boyfriend before Molly got sick, so her love life wasn't nearly as tumultuous as what's depicted on screen.

"The changes to me felt very in line with this version of the story," Boyer said. "At the end of the day, Molly and I very much feel like the center, so the changes don't really bother me."

Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate said they made the characters their own instead of copies of the real Molly Kochan and Nikki Boyer

Amid an increasingly popular trend of adapting narrative and non-fiction podcasts for television, Williams and Slate spoke to Business Insider about how they developed their characters and their on-screen relationship.

Williams told BI that when she signed on to the project, only one episode had been written, which instantly made her want to delve deeper into Kochan's story by consuming the "Dying For Sex" podcast.

"I had fallen head over heels in love with the characters and the relationship between them," she recalled, adding that the script was a "beautiful piece of material."

Williams and Slate had their own ways of developing their unique versions of their characters.

For Williams, the "Dying for Sex" podcast was a useful connection back to the real Molly.

"The podcast served as a map and was something that I always returned to," Williams said. "But I knew that we were going to make something with liberties and changes. The podcast laid out the path for us."

For Slate, the process was slightly different, since she was fortunate enough to take notes from the real Boyer. "Am I supposed to be doing an accurate portrayal of Nikki from the podcast? Do they want me to be like her?" she remembers asking.

In the end, Slate decided to do things differently than Williams, and held off on listening to the podcast until well into filming.

"I felt a little bit conscious of not wanting to psych myself out, I guess," Slate told BI. "I waited until we were almost done filming to start listening to the podcast. I wanted to let myself move with the story as it moved."

Boyer thinks Williams and Slate nailed their roles.

"I knew it was going to be good, but I never dreamt we would go there," Boyer said, praising "Dying for Sex" casting director Jeanie Bacharach. "Jenny is the perfect Nikki for Michelle's Molly."

• The US Coast Guard seized over 24 tons of narcotics in the Eastern Pacific in January.
• About 22 tons of cocaine and 2 tons of marijuana, worth about $510 million, were offloaded.
• Coast Guard law enforcement officers detained 34 suspected drug traffickers over 11 interdictions.

More than 24 tons of illegal narcotics worth about $510 million was seized by the US Coast Guard earlier this year, the maritime law enforcement agency said in a statement last Wednesday.

The crew of US Coast Guard Cutter James offloaded more than 44,550 pounds of cocaine and 3,880 pounds of marijuana in Port Everglades, Florida, on April 9, an operation that culminated as the Trump administration focused more military assets on stemming the flow of drugs and migrants across the US's southern border.

Photos of the drug busts showed Coast Guard officers boarding suspected drug smuggling vessels, including a narco-sub, to arrest suspects and seize the illegal narcotics on board.

Ships, aircraft, and drones

The Legend-class National Security Cutter James led the 112-day patrol and returned to its homeport in North Charleston, North Carolina, on April 14. The 418-foot vessel is one of the Coast Guard's most advanced ships, equipped with advanced radar, a 57mm deck gun, and a close-in weapons system.

With a 50-by-80-foot flight deck and aircraft hangar, National Security Cutters like the James are used for missions like drug interdiction, search and rescue, and maritime law enforcement.

USCGC James is built for long-range patrols in both domestic and international waters, making it a frontline asset in intercepting go-fast boats and narco-subs, seizing illegal narcotics, and detaining suspected smugglers.

Crews aboard the Legend-class cutter Stone and the Famous-class cutter Mohawk also assisted in some of the interdictions earlier this year, as well as a fleet of helicopters and aerial drones for airborne surveillance at sea.

Drug busts in the Pacific

The Coast Guard ran 11 interdictions over two months, detaining 34 suspected drug smugglers and seizing over 48,000 pounds of cocaine and marijuana from go-fast vessels off the coast of Peru, Ecuador, and the Galapagos Islands.

Helicopters embarked on the Stone and the James intercepted multiple suspected drug-smuggling boats. The boarding team on the James used aerial drones to detect several boats, resulting in the seizure of nearly 5.5 tons of cocaine from late January to early February.

On January 18, a go-fast vessel about 185 miles off the coast of Ecuador jettisoned the drug bales into the water in an attempt to flee law enforcement. Cutter James chased the boat for 60 miles while the crew aboard the Mohawk collected the floating narcotics, recovering nearly 6,000 pounds of cocaine in the bust.

'Extraordinary seizure' in 72 hours

In the most "remarkable" drug bust of the patrol, maritime law enforcement intercepted six go-fast boats and one narco-sub off the coast of Ecuador in just 72 hours. Capt. Thomas Rodzewicz, commanding officer of James, said in a statement the operation culminated in the "extraordinary seizure of over 24,000 pounds of cocaine and 15 suspected narco-traffickers."

From January 5 to January 7, maritime patrol aircraft and drones spotted the suspicious vessels and intercepted them with the help of the Coast Guard's Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron (HITRON) aircrew.

The boarding crew apprehended three suspects and seized over 8,000 pounds of cocaine aboard the so-called "narco-submarine." The operation was part of a broader mission in which the Coast Guard interdicted several other vessels in just 72 hours.

Narco-subs are semi-submersible boats designed to evade radar and aerial searches in the vastness of the eastern Pacific. They carry most of their illicit cargo below the vessel's waterline.

After maritime patrol aircraft spotted a low-profile go-fast vessel about 330 miles off the coast of the Galapagos Islands on January 7, the James' embarked helicopter aircrew disabled the "non-compliant" vessel to stop.

"We delivered a substantial blow to narco-terrorism organizations, sending those attempting to bring drugs to our border to face federal prosecution, halting the profits criminals use to fuel the fentanyl trade, and most importantly, preventing deadly contraband from reaching American communities and families," Rodzewicz said.

Destroying the vessels and narcotics

After documenting the drug-smuggling vessels for evidence, the boats are declared "stateless" and destroyed under international maritime law.

The Coast Guard strips the boat of illegal narcotics and any environmentally hazardous materials and scuttles the vessel using controlled charges or gunfire from cutter-mounted weapons or helicopters.

The seized narcotics are securely stored aboard a US vessel before being offloaded at a port and handed over to federal authorities, who weigh, test, and document the drugs as evidence.

The Drug Enforcement Agency handles the destruction of the narcotics once they are no longer needed in legal proceedings.

Connected to cartel drug networks

Nearly three dozen suspects were apprehended and transferred ashore for federal prosecution. Eleven people have been indicted so far.

Investigators have linked the suspected drug traffickers to cartel networks in Mexico and Colombia — Clan del Golfo, Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, and Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most powerful and well-known criminal groups in Mexico once led by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.

The US designated the Sinaloa Cartel and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación as foreign terrorist organizations. President Donald Trump has made stemming the flow of opioids into the US a top priority.

"This administration has labeled them foreign terrorist organizations because that's what they are," FBI Director Kash Patel said during a press conference last Wednesday.

Trump's cartel crackdown

Traditionally used for groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda that use attacks against civilians to pursue political goals, the FTO designation allows US authorities to employ counterterrorism tools, such as freezing assets, imposing sanctions, and other criminal penalties.

However, critics argued that such a designation on the cartels could strain US-Mexico relations and militarize what is largely a law enforcement issue, potentially affecting migrants and asylum seekers with only tangential cartel links or who were coerced or unknowingly connected to the crime groups.

The Trump administration has already implemented several aggressive measures to combat drug trafficking, including imposing tariffs to pressure neighboring countries to take stronger actions and deploying US military assets to the southern US border.

• Melinda French Gates said she tends to focus on one task at a time to avoid mistakes.
• She said multitasking is a myth and led to errors in her career.
• During her career at Microsoft, multitasking was a big deal.

Melinda French Gates believes in taking on tasks one at a time.

During a Monday appearance for her new book, "The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward," French Gates responded to a question about the challenge of focusing in the era of emails, social media, and other distractions.

"I think multitasking is a myth, honestly," French Gates told CNN's Abby Phillip.

She added, "I made some of my biggest mistakes when I was multitasking."

The 60-year-old billionaire philanthropist started her tech career at Microsoft in 1987 when it was a budding company making a name for itself. Even in the pre-smartphone era, French Gates said, there was a lot of urgency in the corporate world.

Once she realized multitasking wasn't for her, she had to do things her way. She discovered that she was "much better off" when she could tell herself to slow down and focus on one thing at a time.

"I might not complete the whole task, but focus on it. Put it aside, even if it's only 60% done, and then focus on the next thing," French Gates said.

Microsoft has a reputation for having a fast-paced culture where the smartest and most productive employees thrived under her ex-husband and former boss, Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder took on loads of information daily as the CEO, managing multiple teams at once, a former employee told BI in 2023.

In French Gates' case, she said taking a different approach "really helped me."

• Nexad, a new startup that wants to put ads in AI apps, raised $6 million in seed funding.
• The startup is both matching ads with audiences and creating them itself.
• Check out the 10-page pitch deck Nexad used to raise investment.

Get ready for ads in your conversations with AI chatbots.

Nexad, an adtech startup building a native advertising solution for AI apps, has raised $6 million in seed funding. The round was led by A16z Speedrun (an accelerator under the Andreessen Horowitz umbrella) and Prosus Ventures, and included participation from firms like Point72 Ventures and Sequoia Capital's Scout Fund.

"Our long-term bet is that the AI application field will be more fragmented and decentralized than the traditional internet platforms," Nexad CEO Jason Hu told Business Insider. In that case, there would be value in a service that can provide advertising across various platforms.

Advertising on AI platforms is still nascent, though some of the largest AI companies are already testing or considering bringing ads into their products. For instance, OpenAI told the Financial Times in December that it was open to exploring advertising. Meanwhile, AI search startup Perplexity began testing ads in November.

Nexad wants to position itself as an AppLovin equivalent for AI apps. AppLovin made its mark by providing advertising within a large network of gaming apps before branching out into e-commerce.

Hu said that Nexad, which was founded in 2024, has onboarded seven AI companies to its network. Those include apps like iAsk (an AI search engine) and Dippy AI (an AI companion app). Hu said there are roughly 30 million consumers that ads across these AI apps can reach.

Hu said Nexad's business has two main arms: one that matches ads with the right audiences, and another that creates the ads themselves.

Nexad runs its application with a "flywheel" model. It starts with a user search query or message sent to a chatbot. Along with the AI app's response, Nexad serves an ad relevant to the original search. Then, it takes the engagement data from interacting with the user and uses it to refine its future ads.

"Ads need to be as smart or even smarter in order to keep up with the content," Hu said.

The startup is focused slightly more on its ad generation offerings, which create text and image ads (Nexad doesn't have video ads yet).

Nexad's network runs through relationships with advertisers, affiliates, and third parties, such as e-commerce affiliate network Sovrn. The startup takes a commission of ad revenue from its publishers. It also offers different models for advertisers, including pay-per-click, per-view, per-install, and per-purchase.

For its ad-generation tech, Hu said Nexad uses open-source large language models like Llama, as well as proprietary models like Gemini, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

Although it's a young space, some other startups, such as ProRata and OpenAds, are making plays in AI advertising.

Nexad's seed investment will be used to hire more staff — it's currently a team of six — and build out more partnerships, Hu said.

Read the 10-page pitch deck Nexad used to raise $6 million.

Note: The company redacted some details in the deck.

Nexad is creating a 'native ads system for the AI era'

The deck starts with an overview of the search market share

"Consumers now discover brands via AI apps," the slide says.

The slide also includes a graph comparing Google and AI chat market share.

Nexad claims traditional search engines are 'dead' and AI chatbots are the new way people search

The slide compares side-by-side the traditional Google search query and using ChatGPT.

Then the deck dives into Nexad's product

"We're building the first AI-native ads system," the slide says.

The company is trying to merge ads into AI apps and increase brand visibility.

It outlines how many AI app users Nexad's ads could reach

The slide says that Nexad has more than 30 million AI app users in its network.

Some publishers include iAsk, Dippy AI, and Bounce (a basketball-themed AI app).

It then includes an example of how a Nexad ad would appear

In this example, the user typed to iAsk "Michael Jordan is so cool, I'm such a huge fan!" and Nexad served an ad for Air Jordan sneakers.

Nexad then explains its generative ad engine

Nexad's generative ad engine is built for contextual awareness and real-time adaptation, the slide says.

The flywheel indicates how the Nexad system works

Here's what Nexad lists as its flywheel:

1. User query
2. Nexad engine
3. Useful ad
4. Engagement data
5. Continuous refinement

The deck concludes by introducing Nexad's team

Here's what the slide says:

Jason Hu, CEO

• ML engineer at Martian; first author of RouterBench
• Monetization at TikTok
• NLP Research @UChicago.

Harry Zhou, COO

• Grew an AI video generator to 1 million users
• $20 billion USD IPO & M&A @Skadden & Cooley, Stanford Law School

Advisors

• Sr. Director @Unity ads
• Director of BD @Uber Ads

Founding Team Members

• Senior architect at Comcast
• Researcher at top AGI lab

It ends with a slide inviting the reader to reach out

• Claim passes some of a brand's ad budget onto consumers, giving them money to redeem each week.
• The CEO told me he wants to eat into the ad dollars brands spend at Big Tech companies like Meta.
• He said Claim targets Gen Z and urges users to get out into the world.

Last weekend, my roommate begged me to download a new app, Claim, which gives you money to spend at popular restaurants. She promised it wasn't a scam — and showed me the Venmo payments to prove it.

I was skeptical, so I investigated.

Claim seems pretty simple: link your credit or debit card and get presented with potential rewards at participating brands — $8 off at Sweetgreen, for example, or $10 off at Chipotle. Then, select your reward, make a purchase, and get paid back the allocated amount via Venmo. There's a "Drop" every Thursday when you choose a new reward from personalized options.

The morning after joining, I went to the Starbucks beneath Business Insider's New York office to test whether my $10 claim would work. A few hours after paying with my linked card, I got a Venmo notification: "Claim paid you to shop at Starbucks."

But I still had questions. Was I about to have my credit card data stolen? Does Starbucks now know even more about me and my coffee order? I decided to talk to Sam Obletz, CEO and cofounder of Claim, to find out what the deal was.

Disrupting the advertising sector

Obletz, 33, started Claim with Tap Stephenson, his college roommate, when the two were at Harvard Business School. They launched in Harvard Square in early 2023. The app started at colleges but expanded to 10 US cities in early February.

With Claim, brands pass their marketing budgets to consumers instead of paying for an ad, Obletz said. It's potentially a huge market: according to EMARKETER, a sister company to BI, digital advertising spending in the US surpassed $300 billion in 2024.

Obletz says Claim can help brands that struggle to understand if their ad dollars are having a tangible impact. But he said Claim needs to expand to make a dent in the digital advertising world.

"We need to be large enough at scale to eventually take on the budgets that are currently being deployed at Meta and TikTok," he said.

Claim's job is to get users to try new restaurants they might like based on prior spending, with the hopes of turning them into loyal customers, Obletz said. Though Obletz said the app is often compared to loyalty programs, he described it as a "customer acquisition and retention tool."

Claim currently partners with just under 50 companies, primarily in the food and beverage industry. Obletz said the app passes 80% of money to the consumer and keeps 20%. If a user doesn't redeem their "Drop," he doesn't get paid.

Less time scrolling

Obletz said that Gen Z has a "love-hate relationship" with social media. The experience of being on our phones is getting worse, he said, and people are bombarded with ads.

Unlike some social shopping apps, he said, Claim doesn't focus on how much time users spend scrolling. "We want you to come onto the app once a week, go make plans with your friends, and go do something."

Claim doesn't work with third-party delivery systems, like GrubHub, but users can make online purchases and pick them up in person. Delivery only works if the brand partner has their own delivery service.

Claim won't sell your data

The app has access to where users spend money but not their login information or card numbers. It partners with the fintech company Plaid to manage payments.

"We will never sell data. It's not the company any of us want to build," Obletz told me. He said that Claim tracks consumers' spending history and uses AI models to personalize their "Drops" — I, for example, got to select my weekly reward from different options than my friends.

Obletz said the data are also helpful for brand partners. His team can show their partners aggregated data about how they compare to competitors.

"We're often able to go into a conversation with a brand and tell them more about their customer base than they know," he said.

Claim plans to expand

Obletz spent nearly five years at Goldman Sachs before starting Claim and said he's "laser-focused" on profitability, just not yet. Claim isn't making money as of now and is instead prioritizing scaling up.

At the beginning of April, Claim had more than 200,000 downloads and was growing at 35% a month, Obletz said. He's excited about customer retention numbers: 56% of customers are still on the app 12 weeks after downloading it. According to an AppsFlyer report based on 2024 data from iOS users, shopping apps had an average 30-day retention rate of 4.6%, and social media apps of 3%

"This is something new and different in the same way that Facebook was new and different in the early 2000s," he said. Claim has raised $20 million from venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital.

Obletz wants to expand to more cities in the next 12 to 18 months. If he's successful, he said much of the challenge won't be getting users to scroll endlessly — the opposite.

"The much harder job to be done for us to get you to literally walk somewhere."