• I tried Ina Garten's easy, summery tomato feta pasta salad recipe.
• The dish came together quickly, and I found it more flavorful than other pasta salads I've tried.
• I loved the briny taste, and my leftovers held up for several days.

As a chef, I've always loved Ina Garten's classic, riffable recipes — they're easy to recreate at home, and they're usually a hit with guests.

I've also been looking for a simple side dish to bring to summer cookouts and picnics, so when I found Garten's tomato feta pasta salad, I had to give it a try.

Here's what happened when I tested the dish out for myself. Spoiler alert: I'll be adding it to my recipe rotation.

The ingredients amp up umami more than other pasta salads I've tried.

The recipe calls for short-cut pasta, black olives, feta cheese, and two kinds of tomatoes: fresh and sun-dried. It's key to use sun-dried tomatoes packed in oil, as they're more tender and flavorful than the dry variety.

As for the pasta shape, Garten recommends fusilli, which has a corkscrew-like shape that soaks up extra dressing. After trying out the recipe, though, I'm confident any short-cut shape will work.

The olives (Garten recommends Kalamata), tomato, and feta all bring major umami to this summertime dish. The salty, briny mix-ins give the salad a distinctly Mediterranean taste that felt a little unusual, but I preferred it to the typical mayonnaise-dressed pasta salad.

The noodles and mix-ins are tossed in a dressing made with more sun-dried tomatoes, red wine vinegar, olive oil, capers, and garlic.

You'll also need some freshly grated Parmesan and parsley to top the salad off.

The preparation is quick and easy.

As is the case with every good pasta-salad recipe (in my opinion, anyway), it's not overly complicated or time-intensive to prep the ingredients.

While I boiled a big pot of salted water for the pasta, I chopped the fresh tomatoes, sliced the olives, and diced the feta and sun-dried tomatoes.

Garten calls for diced whole tomatoes, but I used cherry tomatoes and simply sliced them in half for the same effect.

The dressing calls for a food processor, but it's possible to make it without one.

The best way to make this pasta-salad dressing is with a small food processor. You could also try an immersion blender or pitcher-style blender, but expect to spend some time scraping down the sides.

By whizzing more sun-dried tomatoes, red wine vinegar, olive oil, garlic, and capers in a food processor, I was able to break down the capers and tomatoes to maximize their flavor output.

I ended up with a fairly smooth, reddish dressing that was thin enough to coat every nook and cranny of the pasta.

If you don't have any blade-loaded countertop appliances, give everything a fine chop and a good stir. The dressing won't be as smooth and creamy as Garten intended, but your pasta will still benefit from the flavor-packed ingredients.

I dressed the pasta while it was still hot from the stove.

My pasta finished cooking in the time it took to prepare the dressing.

Although Garten recommends letting the noodles cool first, my pasta-salad-making experience has taught me that tossing hot noodles in an oily, salty dressing maximizes flavor. Warm pasta readily absorbs flavors better than after it cools.

I tossed the cooked pasta, salty mix-ins, and dressing together in a large bowl. I then let the pasta cool to room temperature before finishing the dish with Garten's recommended chopped fresh parsley and a generous amount of freshly grated Parmesan.

Here, I made sure to add the cheese after the salad cooled so it wouldn't all melt into a gooey mess. Instead, the Parmesan coated the noodles to hint at the creamy, rich dressing many of us associate with pasta salad.

This version, however, is big on savory flavors and pops of briny, chewy sun-dried tomatoes along with juicy, sweet fresh ones. I loved that the dish felt lighter than a mayo-drenched salad but just as satisfying.

The oil-based dressing holds up well, too. I doubled the recipe, and my household of two enjoyed pasta for several days.

I'm glad I found this recipe right before cookout season — I'll be bringing this easy, crowd-pleasing dish to every summer occasion this year.

• Karen Abarca began her professional journey as a costume designer in California.
• Now, she's an engineer who worked on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.
• Here's how she changed careers and overcame impostor syndrome.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Karen Abarca, a 33-year-old communications engineer in Los Angeles County. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I am very fortunate to have not just one, but two highly sought-after careers.

My mom is a seamstress, so she taught me how to fix my clothes. Once she taught me how to make dresses in high school, it was game over. That's all I wanted to do.

But as a kid, I loved science. I grew up thinking that I would be a scientist or maybe a doctor. I never really saw that path for me because I didn't know anyone who worked in science.

In my early 20s, my family experienced some financial hardships. Since I had cultivated this skill of making garments, I ended up going to the Fashion Institute of Design Merchandising in Los Angeles and got connections to start working in the film industry.

I ended up interning at Maker Studios, which later got bought out by Disney. They gave me stable work in the entertainment industry, which is kind of rare. I also would do commercials on weekends or just pick up gigs on the side. I did that for about four years.

I decided to pursue a career in science after staring at the stars

December is always a hard time in the costume design industry because everything shuts down, but I still have to pay rent. I remember visiting Death Valley with friends on New Year's Eve and looking at he stars.

I thought, "I sort of stumbled into this industry. It was something that I was good at, and I could help out my family, but I no longer have to do that. Why don't I go back and do the thing that I wanted when I was a kid? I want to explore and discover."

So, I went back to community college and later transferred to California State University, Long Beach, where I got my bachelor's in chemical engineering in 2020.

It was not easy.

I had to learn how to fail and how to study. I got a D in my first Calculus II class, and it's a very humbling experience to be told no and that you have to do it again. It was also challenging being older than everyone around me and giving up a career that I was doing well in.

But I knew that this was my choice. I had already seen a different industry, and it just gave me further motivation to keep going and see myself grow. I ended up becoming a mentor to many of my classmates.

I realized that my gift is to bring people together. I'm really good at working in teams, and little did I know that is what makes great engineers. I interviewed with and later joined Northrop Grumman, an aerospace company.

I had impostor syndrome at my first job. Then, I worked on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope

I definitely had a lot of impostor syndrome when I started at Northrop Grumman in 2020. I remember getting hired thinking, "They're going to know that I don't know." I just felt overwhelmed.

At first, I worked with a small team, but it was only a four-month project, so after that, my manager was like, "Where do we put you?"

An opportunity had just opened up to work as a contamination control engineer on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. WEBB is a giant camera, so any contamination will affect the quality of the images. It's a NASA program, so of course I wanted to do it.

Every day, I put on protective gear called a bunny suit and worked on that amazing gold-plated mirror. The cool thing about contamination control is that I got to actually touch WEBB, and not everybody gets to say that.

One day, I was cleaning a black, non-reflective, matte unit delivered from Italy. I had to be very delicate handling it, and I remember thinking, "What's so special about this thing?"

I learned that the unit is how we'll communicate with WEBB when it's a million miles away. It's how it'll be able to send its images.

I thought being able to talk to things in space was amazing, and that's how I found my niche, which is communications engineering. Now, I work on a program called Hydrant. We're looking to build the next-generation space router for interconnectivity in space.

I discovered what I really wanted to do

I'm really grateful to have been a part of that program because WEBB was my teacher. I didn't know much about space when I started, but I got to see different disciplines through WEBB every day. WEBB just gave me an in-person view of what a spacecraft is and how to build one and the different subsystems.

My advice for people who want to change careers is that it's never too late. There are definitely opportunities out there. Sometimes you have to make them, but align yourself with people who may be in those careers and try to find mentors. There's also a benefit to being new to an industry. You bring a new perspective coming from a different background.

And if you don't, you'll always wonder, "What if?"

• The $5.7 trillion hedge fund industry has had an up-and-down year so far.
• Six months into 2025, managers have battled choppy markets and an uncertain geopolitical climate.
• Still, assets and performance are on the rise, and new funds are popping up.

Hedge funds have had an emotionally turbulent ride in 2025, starting the year with soaring interest from big investors and optimism for the incoming Donald Trump administration.

That optimism did not last long, however, as the President's tariff policies disrupted global trade and sent markets into a frenzy.

Big-name managers such as Bill Ackman, Dan Loeb, and Ken Griffin, each of whom voted for Trump, were critical of the tariffs, but the administration used one of the industry's own — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former macro investor who worked for George Soros — to sell the policies at the Milken conference and on TV. Tariff negotiations are still ongoing, but the administration's 90-day pause is set to end Wednesday.

Meanwhile, choppy markets and the rise of artificial intelligence renewed interest in long-short equity managers, as hedge fund backers sought investors who can pick winners and losers in the new world order. The first quarter of this year was one of the sector's best fundraising stretches in a long time.

Markets have since settled down, and June was a strong month for stocks. One hedge fund founder, BoothBay's Ari Glass, told investors after the first quarter that the portfolio managers and firms his fund backs believe "it is beginning to feel like sentiment is similar to the second quarter of 2020 and we know that while history does not repeat itself, it can rhyme."

While the pandemic slammed stocks in March 2020, many hedge funds had a stellar year by betting on a quick and significant recovery.

Still, there's the possibility of more macro tremors shaking global markets. Trump is still pursuing his tariff agenda. He will sign his "Big Beautiful Bill," which contains about $4.5 billion in tax cuts and is estimated to add billions to federal deficits, into legislation on Friday. And the potential for a broader conflict in the Middle East has investors on edge.

According to a recent report from Goldman Sachs' prime brokerage desk, the week the US bombed Iranian nuclear sites was the second-largest net selling of energy stocks by hedge funds in the last 10 years, with many American funds now shorting energy stocks.

Multistrategy giants hitting their peak?

The biggest hedge funds still dominate the conversation as managers like Millennium, Citadel, Point72, and Balyasny continue their long-running war over talent that has sent compensation costs skyrocketing. Many multistrategy funds, even smaller peers without the track record of the so-called big four, can only afford these payouts to coveted personnel thanks to pass-through fees, which leaves limited partners holding the bag for all the costs of running the business.

A Goldman Sachs survey of multi-manager firms running a combined $300 billion from earlier this year found that 61% have changed their terms by adding either pass-through fees or "more onerous" liquidity terms.

End investors have been pushing back for years and finally broke through last year, getting managers as large as Michael Gelband's ExodusPoint to agree to a cash hurdle that requires a fund to outperform Treasury bonds to earn performance fees. Another Goldman report found that close to half of allocators are now looking for managers they back to adopt hurdles.

In other words, after years of explosive asset growth, multi-strategy funds might finally be plateauing. According to Nasdaq's eVestment, the sector had net outflows of $1.2 billion in the first quarter.

Managers with tens of billions in assets like Citadel, Point72, and D.E. Shaw even returned capital to start the year. Other mega-funds, especially Millennium, have focused increasingly on allocating to external managers via separately managed accounts, which has warped the emerging manager space.

SMAs often allow allocators more transparency and customization into a fund's operations and trading, though the independence of these new managers from their behemoth backers is in question. JPMorgan expects 58% of new launches over the next year to be SMAs, despite, as Goldman wrote, the "lines are now more blurred between platform hedge funds vs fund of hedge funds, proprietary vs external."

The shift has meant seed investors feel they can push for even greater transparency into managers' books. According to law firm Seward & Kissel, close to half of those who backed new launches last year required the new funds to provide daily trading reports.

Despite all the ups and downs, the average hedge fund returned 2% through May this year, according to industry data tracker PivotalPath — besting the S&P 500 through the same time period.

• NATO's chief pledged a fivefold increase in air defenses.
• Ground-based air defenses are an area that Western countries scaled back after the Cold War.
• But the way Russia is fighting in Ukraine has proven its need.

NATO pledged to massively increase its air defenses as part of soaring defense spending. The aim is to rebuild a capability that the war in Ukraine has shown to be crucial but has been allowed to wither in the West since the end of the Cold War.

The heads of government for the 32 members of the decades-old security alliance committed last week to investing 5% of their GDP on defense and security by 2035. The increase, based on current GDP size, could be worth more than $1.4 trillion. NATO's secretary general, Mark Rutte, said that one use for the money will be a "five-fold increase in air defence capabilities."

He said the way Russia is fighting proved the need. "We see Russia's deadly terror from the skies over Ukraine every day, and we must be able to defend ourselves from such attacks," he said.

Western countries reduced their ground-based air defense arsenals after the end of the Cold War as they found themselves involved in conflicts with much smaller, less powerful adversaries. This war has shown that Western stocks are insufficient.

Lacking since the Cold War

Western countries have been fighting foes very much unlike Russia. Air superiority has been achieved with ease, enabling ground maneuvers. There hasn't been a pressing need for weapons to shoot down enemy aircraft and ballistic missiles, except in one-off instances.

The US and the rest of NATO scaled back their ground-based defenses "very substantially," Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel who is now a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.

During the Cold War, as tensions skyrocketed between NATO and the Soviet Union, Western countries maintained substantial defenses. But in the aftermath, he said, "it appeared that fighter aircraft could handle any air threat, and the need for ground-based air defenses was much reduced."

During Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s, the US took control of the skies, and aircraft largely had free rein in the later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the main threat being to low-flying aircraft, helicopters in particular.

Ed Arnold, a European security expert with the Royal United Services Institute, said that Europe depioritized air defense at the end of the Cold War "because the types of missions that the Europeans were doing were, for example, overseas where you only needed a small sort of section of it to be able to protect your forces in the field."

Retired Air Commodore Andrew Curtis, an air warfare expert with a 35-year career in the Royal Air Force, said that there had been "an element of complacency" in recent decades, but also an element of trying to prioritize what was needed when defense budgets shrank as countries felt safer in the post-Cold War era.

Russia's war against Ukraine, which followed earlier acts of aggression, suggests the world has changed. But, Curtis said, the West has to some extent been "asleep at the wheel."

The problem now, Justin Bronk, an air power expert at RUSI, explained, is "that NATO faces a significant shortfall in ground-based air defense systems, both in terms of number of systems, but also particularly ammunition stocks for those systems."

Russia shows they're needed

Rutte warned earlier this month that NATO needs "five times as many systems to defend ourselves," and described the speed Russia was reconsituting its military as "threatening."

Many European countries have warned Russia could attack elsewhere on the continent and are watching closely to see what weaponry and tactics it needs to be ready. The volume and variety of air attacks against Ukraine have thus made air defenses a top takeaway.

Russia can launch hundreds of drones and missiles in a single day, and NATO's air defense networks are not well designed to deal with these kinds of strike threats, like exploding Shahed-136 drones backed by ballistic and cruise missiles.

Western countries need more defenses, as there are just so many air attacks. "Even if only 10% get through, that still does a lot of damage," Cancian said.

Cancian said innovations in this war, like drones being used more than in any other conflict in history, point to evolutions in warfare that make having strong air defenses more necessary than ever before. Nations aren't just facing planes. It's aircraft, missiles, and drones, all able to bring destruction.

And the solutions need to be layered to address threats within their cost range. For instance, high-end Patriot interceptors worth millions of dollars aren't meant for cheap drones worth thousands.

Former Australian Army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan, a warfare strategist, said that countries have to find "a balance" between the expensive systems like the Patriot or the THAAD system, both made by Lockheed Martin, and lower-end systems.

Ukraine, for example, uses AI-controlled systems equipped with machine guns to stop some smaller drones, and the US military has been experimenting with air-launched rockets as drone killers.

"It's not just all about the exquisite, expensive, and highly capable systems. You also need some of those lower-end systems," the former general said, adding that the last three years have not only shown how important air defenses are, but also "that the array of threats that air defenses have to deal with has broadened."

Smaller weapons used in missile attacks, weapons like drones, can "saturate and overwhelm an air defense system" — a tactic Russia has employed.

For the West, Europe in particular, the new emphasis on bolstering critical air defenses and the push to spend more aren't optional. "It's not a choice. You absolutely have to do this," Ryan said.

It'd be impossibly expensive to protect everywhere, but the West will need to sort its priorities, balancing front-line demands with the protection of civilians in cities, something Ukraine has grappled with throughout the war.

Arnold said that "the biggest change, now as Ukraine is seeing, is you also need air defense to protect your civilians, all of your critical national infrastructure, and your forces in the field. So it's absolutely critical."

NATO's new defense spending will be huge: No member currently spends that new 5% target, and many spent just over or below 2% in 2024, according to NATO's own estimated figures. But spending doesn't automatically solve the problem.

There is a big production backlog with many systems, and increasing production capacity takes years, industrial revitalization, and workforce expertise, much of which has been diminished with time, leading to a hollowing out of the defense industrial sector.

Bronk said fixing this "is much more a question of building production capacity at every stage in the supply chain as rapidly as possible as part of a crisis response rather than just spending more money." More production capacity is needed for interceptors.

More money and big orders help, though, by giving industry confidence to invest more in facilities and processes, but there has to be sustained investment.

Rutte pledged that NATO's increased spending would also be used on "thousands more tanks and armoured vehicles" and "millions of rounds of artillery ammunition," but that many plans are classified.

• Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said customers know his company "just builds rockets and satellites."
• Rocket Lab is a primary rival of Elon Musk's SpaceX.
• Beck told BI he hadn't seen any "obvious" datapoint on how Musk and Trump's feud is impacting him.

As Elon Musk and President Donald Trump continue to butt heads, the CEO of Rocket Lab said that public and private sector customers alike are drawn to his company's stability.

"It's fair to say that folks, both government and commercial, come to us and they know that they have a very even-keeled public company that just builds rockets and satellites, and executes against that and nothing else," Peter Beck told Business Insider in June when asked whether the feud between the world's richest man and the president benefited his company. "That becomes valuable to people."

Beck added that he hasn't seen any "obvious" data point about the impact of the ongoing disagreement about Trump's spending bill. And, as of mid-June, Beck told BI that Musk hadn't come up more frequently in conversations, either. Representatives for Musk and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment from BI.

Rocket Lab is headquartered in California, though Beck is based in New Zealand. It's an end-to-end space company, meaning it offers launch services, spacecrafts, satellite parts, and on-orbit management. Despite being much smaller than SpaceX — Rocket Lab has about 2,600 employees, Beck said, compared to around 13,000 at SpaceX, according to Forbes — it has emerged as a key rival. Musk himself once called Beck "impressive."

Rocket Lab's partially reusable two-stage rocket vehicle, Electron, has completed 67 launches and deployed more than 230 satellites as of the end of June, according to the company. Beck told BI that Neutron, its reusable medium-lift rocket, is scheduled to launch later this year. SpaceX's Falcon 9 currently rules the medium-lift space, having completed almost 500 missions by the end of June.

"Right now, there is essentially a pseudo-monopoly on medium lift. I don't think anybody went out intentionally to create that. But nevertheless, that's a status," Beck said. "So we have both government and commercial customers cheering us on very loudly to get Neutron to the pad, because there needs to be some launch site diversification."

At the time of writing, Rocket Lab's stock was rising, and the company's market cap was more than $16.8 billion. While SpaceX is a private company, BI reported it was valued at $350 billion at the end of 2024. It's suffered some recent setbacks with its Starship rockets, a successor to the Falcon model — four consecutive launches have blown up, most recently in June. Musk downplayed the latest explosion as "just a scratch," and said the company learns from data collected during failed launches.

Some of Musk's companies have suffered due to his public, sometimes ugly, on-again-off-again relationship with Trump, especially Tesla. Polling indicates that Musk's favorability is still underwater, even after he left his government role.

• For the last few years, Business Insider has been spotlighting up-and-comers on Wall Street.
• We've asked the rising stars about the books that informed both their careers and personal growth.
• We've compiled their picks for anyone entering the world of finance or kick-starting their career.

Aspiring to build a career on Wall Street? One of the best ways to learn the ropes is by picking up the books that helped industry insiders get to where they are today.

Over the past few years, we've asked up-and-comers across Wall Street to share the titles that shaped their thinking, sharpened their skills, and inspired their career paths.

Their recommendations span everything from billionaire biographies to practical handbooks on leadership, time management, and decision-making.

Whether you're just starting out or looking to level up, this list of 35 books offers a curated look at what ambitious professionals on Wall Street have read—and why it matters.

"Give and Take" by Adam Grant

"It's about striving to be somebody who gives to others and then expects nothing in return," she said, "and how ironically fruitful that can be for your own life and career."

- Lacey Vigmostad Giliberto, JP Morgan

"It shows that it's not just about you. In the grand scheme of things, it's how you help others along the way. How you can grow the pie for everyone."

- Rachel Murray, Moelis

"How to Lead: Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers" by David Rubenstein

"It's kind of an anthology of various industries. A key takeaway from these stories is the importance of finding your passion. I'm obviously very passionate about finance."

- Will Boeckman, Citadel Securities

"Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis

"I am a little biased because I started my career at Citigroup, which is formerly Salomon Brothers. I also recommend 'Panic!' by Michael Lewis, and I generally like all the 'Market Wizards' series, which are helpful in knowing what fits your trading style and what doesn't."

-Tian Zeng, Nirvana Capital

"Young Money" by Kevin Roose

The book holds insights into "all the wrong reasons why you can go into finance." 

- Daniel Costanza, Yieldstreet

 

"Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams" by Matthew Walker

"This book explores sleep's impact on your body and mind."

"Before the coronavirus pandemic, I was a daily 4:30 A.M. workout warrior and advocate for holistic nutrition, but I certainly was not prioritizing sleep in my health equation. This was an eye-opening and convincing read that has helped me to get significantly more shut-eye."

- Lacey Vigmostad Giliberto, JP Morgan

"I'm a bad sleeper. This book puts in layman's terms why you need to sleep and why it's important for so many reasons."

- Julia Dworkin, Jefferies

"The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer" by Christopher Clarey

"I recently read 'The Master' the biography of Roger Federer, who some would argue is one of the best (tennis) players, if not the best player, of all time. Every time I read one of the tennis biographies, you're reminded that it's a very all-consuming commitment to be one of the greatest. At least in the case of tennis, it's a very lonely existence. You're the only person out there. You in your mind battling it out. The key is making sure you surround yourself with the right team.

"Every player, at least in the major tournaments, has a player's box. You'll have the family, the coach, and some friends in the player's box. 

"The lesson I think is who's in my player's box?  How do they help me keep going? And, similarly, at least in the investing world, am I in the player's box for others? How do I be the best person on the sidelines supporting?"

- Vinay Trivedi, General Atlantic

"Dare to Lead" by Brené Brown

"Leaders are in the arena, and there are lots of people in the stands who are there just to criticize or comment on what you're doing. But being in the arena takes courage. It gives you a lot of advice around, how do you think about having that courage?" 

- Alexis Rosenblum, Capital Group

"The Most Important Thing" by Howard Marks

"It taught me that all decision-making should be driven by the gap between expected value and market price, and expected value is calculated by weighing each outcome by its probability of occurring.

"Second-level thinking is all about finding value that others don't appreciate yet. It's risk/reward times the coefficient of likelihood for being right."

-Mark Stearns, Goldman Sachs

"Active Portfolio Management: A Quantitative Approach for Producing Superior Returns and Selecting Superior Returns and Controlling Risk" by Richard Grinold and Ronald Kahn

"It's pretty technical, but a must-read for any quant."

-Robert Lam, Man Group's Man Numeric 

"The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace" by Jeff Hobbs

"It was a really interesting dichotomy. It's about a young African-American man who grew up in a rougher neighborhood in Newark but went to Yale and ended up being really successful in his academic work. But he struggled at times to mesh the two worlds together."

"It shows that the path to equality isn't always as easy and seamless. Going to Yale on a scholarship, it can still be really hard for people. People often don't get that."

-Mir Subjally, Compass Rose Asset Management

"Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World" by Liaquat Ahamed

"It's a great book about monetary policy in the Depression era that has major implications for how monetary policy and currencies have evolved."

- Phil Salinger, former Bridgewater Associates 

 

"Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup" by John Carreyrou

"Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was a few years ahead of me at Stanford. It's one of the greatest diligence misses of all time. As you think about that as investor, there are a lot of lessons to be learned."

-Katherine Wood, TPG

"Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World" by Adam Grant

"I spend a lot of time with founder-led companies within the tech world. I like working with them because they're very focused on disrupting the status quo, not just in the businesses they're building but in anything they do, and that includes working with bankers and advisors writ large."

"They really force their advisors to think outside the box and challenge the traditional way of doing things. Part of Adam Grant's book is talking about what makes founders founders, and it's been incredible watching them ask a question that might be perceived as basic, but there's really sort of that double layer of, 'Why is it being done this way, and why can't we do it in a better, more efficient way?'" 

- Lalit Gurnani, Goldman Sachs

 

"The Happiness Equation" by Neil Pasricha

"He wrote this book that really shares some tips about how to have a happier life and ways that you can streamline things in your work; how to find a better work-life balance; and how to think about where you'd like to spend your time and how you're spending your time and the types of things you're investing in." 

"I've picked up so many helpful tips and tricks from there. I feel like it's a must-read for people — financial-related or not, I think it applies to all different industries — on really how to take a step back and identify what is meaningful to you. And are you spending the right amount of time on things that you deeply care about versus things that are just, you know, background noise?"

- Samantha Merwin, BlackRock

 

"Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us" by Daniel Pink

"I always thought a lot about what motivates people, how humans work, and what motivates them. I really appreciated his research and his take on that."

- Julia Jaskólska, HarbourVest Capital

"The Effective Executive" by Peter Drucker

"It's one of the best management books. I think what's unique about the book is when I first looked at the title, I was a little bit intimidated by it — like, this is just for executive positions.

"But he looks at everyone being an executive in their role, and he provides some extremely practical advice on how to become more effective in anything we do in our everyday life. Some are well-known — such as time management, focusing on strengths.

"Even those obvious things that he brings up, he makes it so simple to apply in your everyday life. For example, on time management, there are just two questions you need to ask yourself on a regular basis: What would happen if I don't do certain things? And can these things be done by somebody else?

"That helps you to eliminate a lot of time-wasters and use time more wisely. Super simple, but at the same time, quite practical."

- Mikhail Krayzler, Allianz Global Investors

"The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph" by Ryan Holiday

"It's a book framed through the teaching of Marcus Aurelius, who was also a Roman emperor, and it covers how to optimize situations and make the best out of everything. The book does a great job of translating philosophy into modern context."  

"As for how that translates to me: Clients expect a trusted advisor to maintain poise and equanimity in situations that are stressful to them. So this has been helpful in taking a teaching that is 2,000-plus years old and transferring it to the 21st century."

 - Christopher Oglesby, Bank of America 

"Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" by Hans Rosling

"What the author is trying to do is to help the reader look at the world and analyze global trends in a more objective way. In a very engaging and comical way, he shows you that human beings tend to think that the world is more dramatic than it really is. So people's brains are systematically misinterpreting the state of the world. 

"Something that really hits on that point is the beginning of the book. He presents the reader with a set of 13 questions. Each question has three multiple-choice answers. The bottom line is that most people actually score lower than the theoretical chimpanzee would have on these questions.

"He tries to walk you through a formula to avoid looking at the world in this overly dramatized way. I think he's not talking specifically about the financial markets, but I think it's so relevant to investing because this is part of the way you can capitalize on opportunities."

- Unoma Okolo,  Artisan Partners

"Mindset" by Carol Dweck

The book emphasizes "how a growth mindset — or the belief that talents can be developed with hard work and good strategies and input from others — can enable much better outcomes than people with a fixed mindset, which is believing that talents are just innate gifts." 

"The reason that a growth mindset matters so much is that it fosters an emphasis on learning and intellectual curiosity instead of trying to seem like the smartest person in the room, and that's something that I often reflect on for my own personal development as well, as a quality to look for as we bring on really amazing management teams." 

- Lexie Bartlett, General Atlantic 

"Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming" edited by Paul Hawken

"For me, it's a game plan of how to actually seek solutions to the biggest existential threat that we actually face as a species and as a planet. Whenever I introduce people to the book, you see people get obsessed with the kinds of things that we can be doing, whether that's regenerative agriculture, renewable energy, or reducing food waste."

- Jay Lipman, Ethic

 

"Beating the Street" by Peter Magellan

"Being a Fidelity person, I had to pick a Peter Lynch book. Beating the Street has been one of my favorites, such a classic. It's about how Peter ran Magellan day-to-day. And so I've just found it to be an excellent guide to investment processes for new fund managers."

- Jennifer Fo Cardillo, Fidelity

 

"Security Analysis" by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd

"Much has been said about 'Margin of Safety' over the years, but in my opinion nothing quite compares to the original "Security Analysis" by Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd. They epitomized the concept through their careful approach, still relevant to this day."

- Paul Kamenski, Man Group's Man Numeric 

"Shoe Dog" by Phil Knight

"I recently read 'Shoe Dog,' which is Phil Knight's autobiography and the story of how he founded Nike. I chose it because our firm is, in some respects, a startup, as we are launching new lines of business and building upon others, and I wanted to learn about an entrepreneur's success story. Nike certainly had some difficult and existential issues in its early years, and the book was a good reminder about the importance of perseverance and believing in the value of one's work."

- Jackie Klaber, Rockefeller Capital Management

"Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians" by Jane Hyun

We read it as part of an Asian-American affinity group at TPG. It's a very tactical book on how Asian Americans can advance in the workplace, and it's written in a style that gives stories of actual people but gives very tangible advice. I enjoyed it quite a bit. 

- Akash Pradhan, TPG

"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie

"Everything in the investing business is relationship-based, and Henry and George, the KKR founders, often talk about doing business with people you like and trust. This is a book I've read three or four times and is really a staple."

- Evan Kaufman, KKR

"The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned From 15 Years as a CEO" by Bob Iger

Bob Iger, a former CEO at Disney, "early on saw the need to create digital channels for his customers and understood the virtuous cycle he could create around the right types of content, which informed his M&A strategy. Some of the M&A moves that he did in the preceding 10 years were really prescient."

- Tyler Parker, EQT Group

"A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market" by Ed Thorp

"Reading the stories of great investors is both fun and informative. What's most interesting is the commonalities you see between the two investors despite radically different approaches and asset classes."

- Philip Dobrin, Bridgewater Associates

"Foundation" by Isaac Asimov

"There's a lot of game theory involved, analyzing big data to predict outcomes. The concepts in that book and trilogy are very relevant today."

- Vlad Moshinsky, Miller Buckfire

"Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" by David Epstein

"Looks at the benefits of late specialization and a diversity of experience, and how knowledge in a variety of arenas can pay off, especially when solving complex problems that require creative solutions." 

- Shaan Tehal, Morgan Stanley

"Contrarian Investment Strategy: The Psychology of Stock Market Success" by David Dreman

"Compared with what has now often become fairly complex and evolved, his works as an early adopter of the approach were simple, intuitive, and persuasive, establishing clear roots for what it means to use a systematic approach." 

- Paul Kamenski, Man Group's Man Numeric 

"Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers" by Geoffrey A. Moore

A "must-read" for any aspiring tech investors.

- John Curtius, Cedar Capital

"The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success" by William Thorndike Jr.

"The book best represents how I think about investing and also articulates the success stories and habits of the best CEOs of the 20th century."

- Sims Lansing, Lansing Management

"Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt" by Michael Lewis

"'Flash Boys' was a prime example of how technological innovation and forward-thinkers can reshape an entire industry. In 'Flash Boys,' novel computer algorithms and communications networks caused both market structure and behavioral changes to the trading industry.

"Similarly, today we're experiencing the confluence of cryptography, blockchain technology, and distributed systems, which are meaningfully challenging preconceived notions of not just the financial industry but what constitutes money."

- Michael Sonnenshein, Securitize

"Fooling Some of the People All of the Time," by David Einhorn

"It is an interesting read, and I enjoy how David Einhorn seems so relentless when he believes in something."

- Tanaka Maswoswe, Carlyle Group

"Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential" by Tiago Forte

"We have all this data and information on our laptops and on our phones, but it's not organized. So is it really serving us, is it really useful for us?

"The book talks about knowledge management systems and how to organize the data in such a way that works for the individual, and ultimately, getting to a point where we can share that with others."

- Richesh Shah, Oaktree

• As a veteran NYC legal reporter, I've now watched Sean 'Diddy' Combs beat the odds twice.
• Wednesday's racketeering and sex-trafficking acquittals follow a 2001 guns-and-bribery trial victory.
• The throughlines? Combs' reckless behavior and some persuasive, expensive lawyering.

Back in 2001, he was "Puffy."

For two months, Sean "Puffy" Combs strode through a dense press scrum and into his Manhattan guns and bribery trial wearing a different crisp, shiny suit each day.

I remember neckties and matching pocket squares. And one morning, before the judge took the bench, he sat at the defense table, arms outstretched, as defense attorneys Johnnie Cochrane and Ben Brafman sat on either side, affixing his cufflinks.

"If it doesn't make sense, you must find for the defense," the late Cochrane, a dapper dresser best known for his defense of OJ Simpson six years earlier, quipped for reporters.

I covered that state-level case for the New York Post, watching as Combs, then 31, won a full acquittal after his lawyers convinced a jury that he did not fire a bullet from a 9mm semiautomatic Smith & Wesson into the ceiling of a Times Square nightclub.

Jurors also acquitted him of offering his chauffeur $50,000 to take the rap for another gun found under the seat of the Lincoln Navigator he shared with then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez. Combs had faced up to 15 years in prison in that case.

"This has changed me and matured me," he promised after the happy outcome, saying he had given up nightclubbing in favor of church-going.

On Wednesday, 24 years later, I watched as a senior correspondent for Business Insider as a very different-looking Combs won surprise acquittals on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges in a federal courthouse barely a block south of where the prior trial was held. A jury found him guilty of lesser Mann Act charges related to transporting his victims for prostitution.

This Combs — now "Diddy" — remains in custody, as he has for the past 10 months. Each day of the trial, he was escorted into the courtroom by federal marshals, wearing jail-approved khakis and a rotation of five thin, blandly colored sweaters over white collared shirts.

His hair is mostly gray now, deprived by his jailers of the "Just For Men" brand dye that one of his personal assistants testified he kept in his toiletry bag.

A quarter century ago, Sean "Puffy" Combs exuded swagger in court — even something approaching menace. "I'm a human being," I remember him saying as he glowered at me in the hallway once, unhappy about his coverage.

But Sean "Diddy" Combs could be Puffy's pleasant uncle, passing out Post-it notes full of advice and encouragement from his seat at the defense table like so many half-wrapped Jolly Roger candies.

"GREAT JOB!!!" read a note I once saw him hand lead attorney Marc Agnifilo.

Each morning and again at day's end, Diddy greeted most of his nine lawyers with hugs and fist bumps.

Puffy, circa 2001, was too aloof to be a hugger of attorneys — not until the verdict, when Combs, Brafman, and Cochran leaned in for a euphoric, seated embrace.

But there are throughlines linking then and now.

For both trials, an international press corps was drawn, moth-to-flame, by the certainty of a celebrity defendant and the hope that a still-bigger celebrity might steal the show.

J-Lo had been briefly in custody soon after the nightclub shooting, after a stolen gun was found inside her and Combs' chauffeured car. She was not charged, and while she testified at Combs' grand jury, neither side called her as a trial witness.

This time around, Kanye, too, disappointed; his cameo appearance at Combs' courthouse last month was over in a blink, 30 minutes tops. He was turned away from the courtroom by federal marshals, and Combs, like many in the press, didn't even see him.

Combs' recklessness is another parallel.

His lawyers acknowledged in closing arguments last week that Combs used drugs and committed domestic violence.

Federal agents testified at trial that they seized three AR-15 rifles with defaced serial numbers when search warrants were executed at Combs' homes in March, 2024, at a time when prosecutors allege he knew he was under investigation.

Combs was not charged for the weapons, and maintained through his lawyer that the guns belonged to his security guards.

"His brazenness is unmatched," lead prosecutor Maurene Comey told US District Judge Arun Subramanian during successful arguments against bail on Wednesday.

"He's an extremely violent man with an extraordinarily dangerous temper, who has shown no remorse and no regret for his violence toward multiple victims," she said.

There was reckless behavior the last time Combs was arrested, too. An evening of clubbing with a gun-toting entourage nearly cost Combs his freedom and burgeoning career as a multimillionaire music and lifestyle entrepreneur.

New York Supreme Court Justice Charles Solomon sentenced Combs codefendant Jamal "Shyne" Barrow to 10 years in state prison. (Barrow, then 21, had the unfortunate timing of running out of the club and into the arms of two arriving cops, a recently-fired gun still warm in his waistband.)

Solomon told me Thursday that he would have sentenced Combs to three and a half years in prison and remanded him on the spot, had he been convicted of gun possession for the firearm police recovered under the front seat of the Navigator.

Combs could have received more time, the now-retired judge said, given that the car had fled up Eighth Avenue with Combs and J-Lo in the back seat and the NYPD in pursuit.

"Another gun came flying out the car from the back seat" during the chase, Solomon recalled.

Another through-line — good lawyering.

"He had Ben, one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the city, and of course Johnnie Cochrane," Solomon said of the 2001 trial.

"And it worked. They certainly had enough to find him guilty," Solomon said.

"That weapon in the car — there was a presumption of possession," Solomon said. "Maybe it was jury nullification, who knows."

"He's a lot of things to a lot of different people. He's probably helped a lot of people make a lot of very good music, helped a lot of careers, started a lot of businesses," he added.

Combs' acquittal on sex trafficking and racketeering means he no longer faces a potential life sentence. He faces anywhere from zero jail time to as much as 20 years in federal prison for the two counts he was convicted of on Wednesday: transporting two ex-girlfriends across state lines to engage in sex acts with male escorts — the so-called "freak offs" at the heart of the trial.

"It's a partial win. He didn't win this case. He still faces considerable time," Solomon said.

"Oh my god I certainly would," he said when asked if he'd give Combs' prison time if he were once again Combs' judge.

"I would give him a lot of time," he added. "Because of what he did in the past, obviously, his background, and the violence involved here now. A leopard doesn't change his spots."

• The recent NCAA settlement allows schools to directly pay athletes.
• That will be a boon for players in top-earning sports like football and men's basketball.
• Other sports, however, might see cuts, which could raise Title IX issues.

DI track and field athlete Sabrina Oostburg isn't celebrating the recent NCAA settlement, which allows colleges to pay athletes directly.

The Belmont University student said she was standing next to a volleyball player and two football players when the news came out. One of the football players reacted positively and then turned to the volleyball player to get her take.

"It's good for you because you're going to get paid, but some of your female athlete friends might get cut," Oostburg recalled the volleyball player saying.

The recent settlement, which ended multiple antitrust cases against the NCAA, sets up a system in which football players will likely get the lion's share of the money. The settlement's back-pay portion, for example, allocates 75% to football, guided by how much revenue the sport brings in.

Colleges that opt into the settlement can pay up to $20.5 million to their athletes for the year starting July 1 (with increases in subsequent years).

"It's going to be focused on football, basketball," Craig Weiner, a partner and litigator at Blank Rome, told Business Insider.

While schools are free to distribute the money to different teams as they wish, there is a clear incentive for them to want to remain competitive in football to generate revenue. That could mean some athletic programs — if we take that 75% figure as guidance — will need to cover $15 million in new expenses to pay football players.

Where is the money going to come from? Oostburg said she's worried about cuts to her team and others that don't make money for the college. She fears they could lose roster spots, places where they practice and train, or even snacks.

"I think you're going to see cuts potentially in the non-revenue sports," Weiner said. "As far as support, athletic facilities, athletic support. Money that is that is earmarked to help the non-revenue producing sports, because they're going to focus on the money makers."

The settlement ruling could create Title IX issues

The skew toward football and men's basketball in the $2.8 billion back-pay part of the settlement has already attracted a legal challenge.

Dan Ain, an attorney at Reavis, Page, Jump, noted that current and former DI female athletes had filed an appeal. They argued that 90% of the back pay going to former football and men's basketball players was a violation of Title IX, which requires schools to give male and female athletes equitable opportunities.

Ain also pointed out that Judge Claudia Wilken, who oversaw the case, said that athletes could sue if they felt there was any infringement on Title IX due to the nature of the revenue share model.

"This is new territory for schools," Ain said. "Schools, for the first time, will be deciding how to allocate tens of millions of dollars in revenue share to individual athletes. The expectation right now is that the distribution is going to be grossly unequal between men and women, and that will open schools up to Title IX litigation."

Athletes have to run their deals through a clearinghouse

Oostburg said she also had concerns about a new clearinghouse that will oversee deals athletes strike on their own with brands, called NIL deals (short for "name, image, and likeness").

Athletes with deals of over $600 will have to report them to the clearinghouse, operated by Deloitte, which will determine the athlete's value. If the deal is higher than their assessed value, it can't go through. Athletes who don't report deals or violate them by taking something of a different value could have their eligibility taken away.

For athletes like Oostburg in "non-revenue" sports, NIL deals — often driven in part by their social media footprint — are the biggest money-making opportunity.

"That does concern me," Oostburg said. "If I get a deal over $600 and they decide, no, that doesn't make sense for someone like a track athlete like me to get a $1,000 deal."

• Top CEOs have shared their book recommendations.
• Books like "Good to Great" and "The Lean Startup" offer insights on leadership and innovation.
• Business leaders emphasize deep reading as a tool for career growth.

Not a fan of fiction? Top CEOs have shared their favorite reads that help them navigate the world.

From Bill Gates' fascination with memoirs to Citadel founder Ken Griffin's suggestion that you may have chosen the wrong career if you don't enjoy reading about your own field, literature could serve as your compass, especially during an era that may be less than friendly to fresh graduates.

Business leaders from across the industry have emphasized the value of deep reading and have recommended a range of books, many aimed specifically at those just starting their careers.

Here is your summer reading guide, according to business leaders who have reached the peak of their careers.

'Good to Great' by Jim Collins

In a recent interview with S&P Global, Citadel founder Ken Griffin recommended "Good to Great," which outlines the keys to running a business, such as building a good team.

The book lays out what separates good companies from truly great ones, highlighting the importance of humility in leadership and the importance of getting the right people on board with the "First Who, Then What" concept. Collins argues that great companies prioritize building a strong team first, because who you work with matters more than having the perfect plan from the start.

'Business Adventures' by John Brooks

Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates once wrote in his personal blog that Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, sent him a copy of "Business Adventures" as his favorite book, which features a collection of 12 essays about financial and corporate life in the US.

The book dives into classic cases from Wall Street and corporate America — like the rise and fall of Xerox and the Ford Edsel disaster — showing how companies succeed or stumble based on leadership decisions, market forces, and human behavior.

'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman appeared on Eric Ries' podcast to recommend "The Lean Startup," a book about entrepreneurship and building a resilient business.

The book teaches lessons on real-world experimentation, rapid iteration, and launching quickly with a "minimum viable product" instead of starting out with a very elaborate product.

'Chasing Hope' by Nicholas Kristof

In a personal blog called Gates Notes, cofounder and former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates called "Chasing Hope" a "terrific memoir" and credited veteran journalist Nicholas Kristof for inspiring his philanthropic work.

Blending personal storytelling with a deep sense of purpose and resilience, Kristoff shares his experiences as a journalist covering global crises and injustices. The book teaches valuable lessons on how ordinary people can make an extraordinary impact in the face of overwhelming circumstances, and how to maintain a sense of hope in difficult moments.

'Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World' By Adam Grant

Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd recommended "Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World" during her appearance on "The Tim Ferriss Show" podcast in June  2018. The book focuses on how people can drive change without conforming to the status quo.

For someone starting out, the book provides practical advice on how to express new ideas, challenge the existing standards without burning bridges, and build influence among peers who are similarly new to the field.

'High Output Management' by Andy Grove

Recommended by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky in September 2024 during his keynote at a Y Combinator event in San Francisco, "High Output Management" is where Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, shares his experiences on how to build and run a successful company.

The book breaks down the fundamentals of effective management in clear, actionable terms and provides a practical toolkit for those new to leadership roles. Grove's approach emphasizes output over effort, which could be crucial for young entrepreneurs aiming to grow fast without losing focus or quality.

• Several lawmakers told BI that they still don't use AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Grok.
• Some cite the risk of "hallucination," while others worry about retaining their thinking skills.
• "I still like to compose original thoughts," one House Democrat told BI.

AI has become a big topic on Capitol Hill, and some lawmakers are finding ways to use it in their daily lives.

But while some are using Grok to come up with one-liners, asking ChatGPT to punch up speeches, or deploying AI to scrutinize their own records, plenty of their colleagues still haven't gotten into it.

"I haven't had the chance to really explore the tools," Democratic Rep. Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico told BI. "I'm a little behind the times in that sense."

There's no single reason why. Some remain skeptical about the technology's ability to provide reliable information. Others fear that if they use it, they'll erode their own faculties. At least one has publicly fought with an AI chatbot on X. And often, it simply comes down to a lack of interest.

For Sen. Tim Kaine, it's a combination of several of those things.

"I feel like I'm so comfortable with my ability to access information that I don't really need it," the Virginia Democrat said, explaining that he's never used AI chatbots "voluntarily."

He does, however, encounter artificial intelligence involuntarily: Recently, his email client began furnishing him with AI-generated summaries of his email.

"It's like, first, I didn't ask for it. Second, it's got a high error rate," Kaine said. "Third, to do an AI summary of emails I can read myself is a use of energy, somewhere, that I have to feel like is kind of an excess."

'I still like to compose original thoughts'

BI spoke to roughly a dozen lawmakers in June about their use, or lack thereof, of AI chatbots like Grok and ChatGPT. Polling has shown that a growing number of Americans are using AI in the workplace, with a recent Gallup poll finding that 40% of employees use it a few times per year and 27% use it frequently or daily.

Republican Rep. Greg Murphy of North Carolina, who remains a practicing urologist in additional to his congressional duties, says he's "dabbled" with AI, primarily for medical questions.

He says he doesn't use it for his official work, and he doesn't want his staff to do so either.

"I don't want people writing speeches for me, or doing letters to constituents with that," Murphy said, adding that if his constituents "wanted something from ChatGPT, they could have Googled it themselves."

Sen. Josh Hawley, a fellow Republican, takes an even harder line against AI — he doesn't use AI chatbots out of principle.

"I don't trust it, I don't like it, I don't want it being trained on any of the information I might give it," the Missouri senator, a frequent critic of Big Tech, told BI.

Some lawmakers' reservations are rooted in their hesitance to rely on technology for something they already do themselves.

"I've just never felt the need, and I like being creative," Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told BI. "Writing is a use-it-or-lose-it skill, and I don't want to lose it."

"I still like to compose original thoughts, and not rely on technology to help state what I feel," Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts said.

Large language models are also known to confidently deliver faulty information — known as "hallucination." For Sen. Elizabeth Warren, that's enough to discourage her from using it.

"I might as well go out on the street and ask a random person a question and see what words they come up with," the Massachusetts Democrat told BI. "Maybe they're right, but then again, maybe they're not, and the only way to know that is to do the research yourself."

• Mary Jane Surette, 65, faces job market challenges after a layoff from Kohl's.
• Surette feels her age may be affecting her job search, despite her extensive marketing experience.
• She remains determined to work but will retire in August if she can't find a new role.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mary Jane Surette, a 65-year-old former senior marketing manager based in Boston, about reentering the job market as an older woman and retirement plans. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I've never cried over a layoff because I save tears for human beings, not for corporate America. I never love a job. I like a job, I love people.

I've been really fortunate to have had 40 years in the same marketing career. It's just a fabulous career, and I've enjoyed every experience. During my time in retail marketing, I've worked at many well-known national companies for over 25 years, including Bose, Gap, and Kohl's.

When I was laid off this past winter from my job at Kohl's, I wasn't prepared to consider retirement. I never even thought of it until I saw how bad the market was.

I'm 65, and I'm having trouble believing my age doesn't play a factor in why I'm not getting work. I've set August as the date I'll make a decision on retirement. I don't know how much more of this job market I can handle.

During other unemployment periods, it really felt like just a blip

I was working at Bose when the housing market crashed the economy, and sales of high-end consumer electronics basically stopped. There was a massive layoff that I was affected by.

Many people were out of work at that time. I was out of work for over a year. But my financial life was barely affected because the government leaders at that time extended unemployment benefits and required companies to pay COBRA benefits.

After I bounced back from the Bose layoff, my career continued to accelerate. The following 10 years were amazing for me professionally because I worked on some great teams. We were all learning, making mistakes, and having successes.

I went to Kohl's in 2022, where I stayed for three years, until I got laid off in February.

When I was laid off at Bose, we were given the heads-up at a big companywide meeting. At Kohl's, we didn't have that type of meeting. I was not surprised, but I was taken aback.

Sometimes I feel my age is negatively affecting my current job search

LinkedIn has always been a social networking site for working people and professionals; it was never meant to be a job board, but it has morphed into that. I found several potential jobs by cold applying on LinkedIn and had a few bad interview experiences in which I felt questions bordered on ageism.

After these experiences, I was kicking myself because I felt very defensive. I learned how to just say thank you and leave. If it's a rejection email, go eat a piece of cake or get a cup of tea. When it happens now, I don't dwell on it.

If it is my age affecting my search, I don't need to know anymore. At the beginning, I needed to know. I don't anymore because I know my value and my worth.

My age actually makes me a good job candidate

My list of strategies has to grow as I confront situations where I have to convince someone that I'm still a good candidate.

I agreed to take a salary cut. I'm not looking to take my manager's or anybody else's job on the team, and I can bring more to employers at a better price. I'm not young, and I'm not having kids. I don't need maternity leave. I'm stable. I actually bring more to the table than a younger worker would because of all of that.

I'm still hunting, I also have a career coach, and she said that eventually, if I keep doing this, I'll find something.

I am of retirement age, but I'm not ready to retire

As I look on LinkedIn, I don't see many women my age posting or looking for jobs. I think we're invisible, and we've chosen to remain invisible.

I want to keep working because I really like my job. When I'm actively managing, I think of the people I'm mentoring and managing as the future of this business, this company, or some other company.

But right now, I think about how I could actually do something to help people, rather than selling pencils, toothpaste, and underpants. I could actually go up and do something with all this talent and knowledge I have.

That's when I think, "I have to keep working because I can't be invisible. I have to speak to these young women in the workplace." That keeps me going, but the answer isn't clear yet. By August, either it's going to happen or it's not going to happen.

My possible retirement feels forced

One well-meaning friend said, "Maybe you should color your hair. It could get you a job." And I said, "But I wouldn't want to work for a company that's going to hire me based on the color of my hair."

I wear this as a crown. This is my pride and joy. I earned every one of these gray hairs. I love it. Nope, it's staying with me. It's who I am.

My retirement wouldn't be voluntary. I had no plans to retire, never even considered it. My goal was to hit 70 when I'd max out my Social Security.

If you have a retirement or layoff story that you would like to share, please email the reporter, Agnes Applegate, at [email protected].

• Handwrytten uses robots, and sometimes AI, to create notes that appear as if a person wrote them.
• Founder David Wachs told BI the company aims to help customers stand out in a digital world.
• Most of the company's clients are businesses, though consumers use the service, too, he said.

Writing thank you notes might be one job plenty of people would be willing to let AI and robots take over.

Turns out, they already are.

The company Handwrytten deploys artificial intelligence to help customers whip up notes and then uses an army of robot scribes, gripping ballpoint pens, to write them.

"The vast, vast, vast majority of the time, you'd never have an idea that it's written by a machine," David Wachs, founder and CEO of the Tempe, Arizona, company, told Business Insider.

After all, we're in a moment in which tech boosters say our digital counterparts will soon free us from work, scrub clean our to-do lists, and wade deeper into our personal lives.

Using technology to recreate the intimacy of a handwritten note also raises questions about authenticity, etiquette, and breaking through the everyday onslaught of emails, DMs, and text messages.

"Everybody's getting so much electronic communication. What really stands out as old-fashioned communication," Wachs said.

He founded Handwrytten in 2014 after leaving a text-messaging startup he'd launched a decade earlier. As he was departing that company, he wanted an easier way to send the handwritten goodbye notes he was drafting for employees and key clients because they would carry more weight than a digital message.

Avoiding the 'uncanny valley'

In order to make sure the letters don't look too perfect, Wachs said the robots vary letter shapes, line spacing, the left margin, and the strokes that join letters together.

"We do all this stuff to try to create the most accurate human writing, without falling into that uncanny valley," Wachs said.

Using robots that can write in nearly three dozen styles of penmanship — some of which carry alliterative names like Enthusiastic Erin and Slanty Steve — the company sends about 20,000 cards a day to customers or, more often, directly to the recipient.

Most of Handwrytten's customers are businesses, though about 20% to 30% are individual consumers, Wachs said. Clients include companies hoping to engage with customers, recruiters looking to soften up executive prospects, and nonprofits that want to stay close to donors. Sales grew about 30% in 2024, Wachs said.

In recent years, the company gave users the option of having AI write all or part of the messages.

"Our slogan has always been 'Your words in pen and ink,' but half the time now it's not your words, it's ChatGPT," he said.

What matters, Wachs said, is that the resulting note looks real to the recipient. He said that many people assume custom digital messages like emails and texts have been written with AI, which, Wachs said, then discounts their effectiveness.

Does it count?

As a tactile throwback, a letter written by a robot is real enough for many Handwrytten customers, Wachs said.

While the intent of a letter meant to look handwritten might be genuine, Lizzie Post, great-great-granddaughter of protocol maven Emily Post and coauthor of the book "Emily Post's Business Etiquette," told BI she believes something is lost by using a robot.

Post said a note that someone actually writes by hand is special, not because it shows effort on the part of the sender, but because a person's penmanship — even if it's imperfect — is unique to them and to a moment.

"It makes that handwritten version that much more precious and amazing and special," Post said.

Wachs said that critics have a point when they say part of writing a letter is to demonstrate that someone took the time to do it. Yet, he said, many people are simply too busy.

"Often, the choice is not Handwrytten note or actual handwritten note. The choice is Handwrytten note or nothing," he said.

Wachs, whose business relies on 55 workers and 185 robots, said that the results are convincing enough to help job seekers, business owners, marketers, and others distinguish themselves.

"My wife will receive notes from her friends that use our service," Wachs said. "And she'll be like, 'Wow, they have beautiful handwriting."

• Robinhood boomed during the pandemic as budding day traders signed up to trade meme stocks.
• CEO Vlad Tenev said on a podcast that many have since embraced passive investing.
• Tenev described two main types of Robinhood users as "motorheads" and "folks that buy minivans."

The meme-stock craze helped make trading app Robinhood a household name, but its CEO said some users have shifted from YOLO-style bets on SPACs and crypto toward long-term, passive investing.

Passive investing in broad index funds has been in vogue for years and heralded by the likes of Warren Buffett as a way of avoiding the costs and risks of active trading, like transaction fees and picking the wrong stock.

Robinhood became synonymous with speculative day traders during the COVID-19 pandemic, pioneering the commission-free stock-trading model while drawing fire for gamifying investing with digital confetti and other visual cues.

The fintech company "kind of turned back the clock" on the shift toward simply owning the index, its CEO, Vlad Tenev, said. But traders on its platform have warmed to passive investing, he said on an episode of Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast released this week.

"A lot of people trade more actively at first and then eventually end up doing more passive investing — mostly because they don't want to put in the time, they have other things to do, so they prefer all of their investments to be hands-off," he said.

'Motorheads' and minivan buyers

While some traders on the platform are active traders with the latest tech, others are casual retirement savers, Tenev added.

He likened the first group to "motorheads" who care about performance, high speeds, and harnessing the latest tech. "These are the folks that are strapped into their battle stations, and they have nine screens," he joked, adding that some are "incredibly sophisticated and wealthy, and they even have Bloomberg terminals."

The other group is "the mass market" and consists of "folks that buy minivans," he said. "They want a relatively hands-free and low-friction way of investing and saving for the long term, and we have products that serve both of those," he added.

Tenev pointed to the growth of Robinhood users using products such as retirement accounts. Robinhood's assets under custody in traditional Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and Roth IRAs soared by about 600% last year to over $13 billion, according to its latest full-year earnings.

On a February earnings call, Tenev said people were now "comfortable moving in hundreds of thousands of dollars into Robinhood."

Robinhood's net revenue grew by 58% last year to nearly $3 billion, helping it swing from a pre-tax loss of about $500 million in 2023 to a nearly $1.1 billion profit in 2024. The improving financials have fueled a roughly four-fold rise in Robinhood's stock price over the past 12 months, lifting its market value to north of $80 billion.

Bullish retail investors and new products have also helped drive the rise. Robinhood's stock spiked earlier this week after it announced it was rolling out tokenized investing in Europe.

• Waymo is Alphabet's robotaxi service, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project.
• Waymo is available to the public in several US cities and has plans to expand.
• The robotaxi company faces other competitors, including Tesla and Zoox.

Waymo is a robotaxi service owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet. Since opening its service to the public in 2020, Waymo has said it has provided millions of paid, fully autonomous rides.

The company continues to expand its service, in part by partnering with other ride-hailing platforms, and has begun testing its robotaxis outside the US.

Waymo's beginnings

Waymo was initially formed by Google and was known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project. After seven years of research and development, it eventually spun out into its own company in 2016. Alphabet remains the majority owner of the company.

Google started developing Waymo and its self-driving technology in 2009 at the Google X lab, which was led by Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Sebastian Thrun, a pioneer in the self-driving industry, was chosen to lead the project.

After almost two years of testing the technology, Google and The New York Times revealed its existence in late 2010.

US lawmakers raised concerns at the time about the lack of regulations for this new technological frontier. Google was a prominent supporter, lobbying for regulation. By 2012, Nevada's Department of Motor Vehicles had licensed a self-driving Prius running Google's software, marking the first time that a self-driving vehicle had been licensed in the United States.

In 2022, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai distanced Waymo and Alphabet's other subsidiaries from Google by granting them more autonomy to design job structures and compensation outside Google's job architecture.

Waymo was affected by Google layoffs in 2023, when the company cut roughly 8% of staff.

Despite the restructuring, Waymo's offices are still located in Mountain View, California, just a short drive from the Googleplex, Google's global headquarters.

What does Waymo do?

As of 2025, Waymo provides driverless taxi services throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta. In Austin and Atlanta, Waymo offers its service through Uber's ride-hailing app.

In 2014, Google was granted a patent for a transportation service involving automated vehicles that would be funded by advertising fees. That May, Google unveiled a prototype autonomous vehicle that did not contain a gas pedal, brake pedal, or steering wheel.

In 2015, they gave their first fully autonomous ride to a legally blind friend of principal engineer Nathaniel Fairfield; unlike earlier tests, there was no police escort, no test driver, and it was not on a closed course.

In 2016, the self-driving car project was spun out of Google and made a subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc. At this time, the company also ordered 100 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans to test the technology.

Waymo announced a partnership with Jaguar in 2018 to build up its fleet of robotaxis, using the legacy automaker's all-electric I-PACE SUV. The company also partnered with Hyundai and the Chinese EV company Zeekr to expand its robotaxi models.

Waymo started its public operations in Phoenix in 2020. By May 2025, Waymo said it had surpassed 10 million paid rides across its operating cities.

To increase its robotaxi fleet, Waymo built a 239,000-square-foot factory in Mesa. With the new facility, Waymo said it will retrofit more than 2,000 I-PACE vehicles with autonomous capabilities throughout 2026.

The company also has shared ambitions to license its autonomous technology to automakers. In April 2025, the company said it was in early talks with legacy automaker Toyota, with plans to bring autonomous driving to personally owned vehicles.

Who can take a Waymo?

So far, Waymo operates in Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta. The robotaxis can only operate within geo-fenced areas, meaning they cannot freely travel in every part of the city, including highways and some airports. Waymo says it will expand its service to highways, but it has not provided a timeline.

Prospective riders within operating areas can download the Waymo One app and hail a robotaxi. In Austin and Atlanta, riders have to toggle through the Uber app to request a robotaxi. Like major competitors, riders are quoted the fare while booking.

Waymo ride prices are based on the distance and time of a trip, and a minimum price is charged for all trips. In April 2023, when a Business Insider reporter tested the technology in Phoenix, a five-mile, 20-minute Waymo ride cost $11, the same price as an Uber trip to the same location.

Waymo doesn't disclose pricing data, but a third-party study published in June 2025 showed that Waymo's robotaxis are more expensive than Uber and Lyft, costing around $5 more than the average ride from its competitors.

Is Waymo safe?

Waymo says its driverless vehicles are safer than human drivers, but as with any technology that remains a work in progress, autonomous taxis are not perfect.

Data from Waymo provided to the California Public Utilities Commission showed that the company's robotaxis were involved in at least 419 collisions between March 2022 and March 2025.

Still, an analysis by Business Insider found that Waymo significantly reduced the rate of collisions during those three years. Between March and May 2022, the rate of collisions was about 147 per 100,000 rides. Between January and March 2025, the rate reduced to about 7 collisions per 100,000 rides.

When comparing human drivers over the same distance within the company's operating cities, Waymo says its autonomous driver experiences 93% fewer pedestrian crashes with injuries and 79% fewer crashes with airbag deployments.

Waymo's robotaxis have been documented experiencing some technical issues, however. One rider told Business Insider that his Waymo ride was stuck driving in circles. A San Francisco resident recorded footage of the robotaxis honking at each other at a Waymo depot.

Who are Waymo's competitors?

Waymo faces competition from several companies, including Tesla's robotaxi, Amazon's Zoox, and a few other software-focused companies that have autonomous technologies.

In June 2025, Tesla began offering driverless rides with 10 to 20 cars operating within a geo-fenced area of Austin. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company can quickly expand its service and took multiple shots at Waymo, saying that the Alphabet company's robotaxis cost more to expand.

Amazon-backed Zoox is building a purpose-built robotaxi — meaning the vehicle will have no steering wheels and will only be used as a taxi — and is testing in several US cities as of July 2025. The company announced in June 2025 the opening of its 220,000 square-foot production facility in California.

There are also software-oriented companies such as Wayve and May Mobility that develop autonomous technologies and are seeking to provide robotaxi services by partnering with ride-hailing platforms.

For example, May Mobility, an Ann Arbor-based company founded in 2017, has partnered with Lyft to deploy an autonomous fleet in Atlanta in the summer of 2025.

Robotaxis also operate outside the US. In China, driverless taxis are quickly expanding with companies like Baidu's Apollo Go and WeRide.

In March 2025, Waymo deployed 25 Jaguar I-PACE SUVs to Japan to begin mapping out parts of Tokyo.

• Soda company Olipop mandates a week of PTO this summer to prevent burnout and boost performance.
• Its 'Summer Recharge' program includes a $1,000 vacation stipend for four employees each month.
• Olipop offers remote work, unlimited PTO, and plans to expand perks.

Need a reason to take a vacation? At Olipop, employees don't have a choice.

The prebiotic soda brand valued at $1.85 billion recently launched a program requiring its staff of roughly 220 to take at least one full week of PTO. It's also raffling off a $1,000 stipend to four employees each month from June to September to spend on their vacation.

"I have no concern that our employees, writ large, should be able to afford a vacation, but things are expensive, right?" Olipop CEO Ben Goodwin told Business Insider, adding that he wants to send an "ultra clear" message about Olipop's workplace.

The company said the "Summer Recharge" initiative is intended to prevent burnout, boost performance, and model a healthier relationship with PTO.

Olipop CEO Ben Goodwin said the idea came about after the company launched a summer program for customers to win a soda-inspired hotel suites or one of 5,000 influencer-style PR Boxes for just five cents.

After seeing data about US workers not using all their allotted PTO, Goodwin decided to create a similar program for Olipop's employees.

A survey published by Eagle Hill Consulting last November found that 48% of US employees anticipated having unused vacation days by the end of the year, and over one-third of respondents said they hadn't taken a vacation at all in the past year. 85% of the 1,387 survey respondents said they would support a requirement to use a minimum number of vacation days a year.

Olipop offers unlimited time off. Goodwin said that while unlimited PTO can give employees a sense of freedom, these sorts of policies can lead to employees taking less time off. That notion "was unacceptable," he said and he didn't want it happening at his company.

Goodwin said it's "really important" that the company effectively facilitates employees' work-life balance. He says that Olipop's employees are hard workers and that, since its founding in 2018, he can count on one hand the number of employees who haven't pulled their weight.

Goodwin described the Olipop work environment as "intense" and said the staff is competitive and mission-oriented. Last year alone, the company had nearly 400,000 applicants, he said.

While Goodwin invests heavily in employee wellness, he said he is still working on his own ability to disconnect from his job.

"I have to take somewhat extreme measures to really, like, take a breather," Goodwin said, adding that he needs to leave the country to detach himself.

Goodwin said that Olipop has experienced triple-digit growth nearly every year since its inception, and he has to maintain his performance by following routines like exercise and therapy.

Mandatory summer vacation isn't the only perk Olipop offers. Rather than investing in office facilities, Olipop runs remotely and pays significant costs in employee benefits and perks.

The company pays for employees to have a gold PPO plan and covers 95% of insurance costs, Goodwin said. Olipop also offers department off-sites, a party at the end of the year with a DJ and a hotel stay, new hire orientations, and a program for leadership called Olipop Leadership University.

As a relatively small company in a high-growth phase, Goodwin said he has no plans to pull back these perks. In fact, he said he's in active discussions with Olipop's new head of people about expanding some initiatives. Goodwin said he's exploring the launch of a "company rainy day fund for employee emergencies."

To Goodwin, it's all part of the company's mission to benefit others. He also said it creates incentive for employees to perform better.

"How much time do you want to spend using punitive measures to keep your employees in line, and how much do you want to use incentivization and meaning to inspire them in the same direction?" Goodwin said.

The CEO added that you can "tell which model we prefer."

• Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub, said the "smartest" companies will hire more developers in the face of AI.
• Thomas Dohmke said in a podcast interview that AI makes engineers more efficient, not irrelevant.
• AI isn't yet capable of completely eliminating engineering workloads, he added.

The companies that best take advantage of AI won't be using it to replace human labor, said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. Instead, they'll be upping their hiring of increasingly efficient engineers.

"The companies that are the smartest are going to hire more developers," Dohmke said on an episode of "The Silicon Valley Girl Podcast."

"Because if you 10x a single developer, then 10 developers can do 100x," he said.

Dohmke said that AI has made it that much easier to learn how to program, and simplified the process for those who are already professionals. As the technology continues to evolve, he added, so will the capabilities of engineers.

"The most frustrating thing when you're learning something is, you're stuck somewhere, and then you have nobody at home or in your family or friends that can help you with that, because they're all nontechnical," Dohmke said. "So, when we're saying AI is democratizing access, that's what we mean. Everyone who wants to learn it can learn it."

That doesn't mean there won't be a market for professionals, either, Dohmke said. Though people may be better equipped to leverage coding for personal ends, in the business sphere, a deeper knowledge of the craft will still be required to best utilize AI, the GitHub CEO said.

"I think the idea that AI without any coding skills lets you just build a billion-dollar business is mistaken," he said. "Because if that would be the case, everyone would do it."

Though some companies — particularly in the tech industry — are pumping the brakes on hiring or conducting layoffs while leaning into AI, Dohmke believes it's only a matter of time before they realize there's greater value in hiring more engineers.

"I think it's a temporary effect right now. This is the natural conclusion for the short term — we keep things stable and we're trying to figure out how the market develops," Dohmke said. "But very quickly, I think we're going to see people that say, 'Well, wait a second, if I have one more productive developer, why wouldn't I hire another one, and another one?'"

Dohmke said he still hasn't seen a company completely eliminate developer workloads, even as programmers use AI to move through projects with greater speed.

"AI has already added more work to the backlogs. I haven't seen companies saying, 'Well, we're draining all our backlog and we have almost nothing left,'" he said.

Dohmke also said it's the "most exciting time" to be a developer — and that the process of programming has ultimately been changed for the better.

"The dream of software development was always that I can take the idea that I have in my head on a Sunday morning, and by the evening, I have the app up and running on my phone," he said.

• Congress passed Trump's "big beautiful bill" on July 3.
• It includes major changes to student-loan repayment and caps on borrowing.
• It eliminates existing income-driven repayment plans, including SAVE, replacing them with just two options.

It could soon get harder for student-loan borrowers to get affordable monthly payments.

Congress passed President Donald Trump's "big beautiful bill" — a major spending package — on July 3, meaning a slew of proposals to change the way student-loan borrowers take out and pay off their debt is becoming law.

The bill eliminates existing income-driven repayment plans and replaces them with two less generous options, along with adding new restrictions on the types of loans parents and graduate students can take out. It also limits borrowers' abilities to place their loans on deferment if they're facing financial hardship.

Linda McMahon, Trump's education secretary, lauded the bill's passage in a post on X, saying that it "simplifies the overly complex student loan repayment system" and "reduces federal student loan borrowing amounts to help curb rising tuition costs."

"A truly beautiful bill for the American people," she said.

Borrower advocates and Democratic lawmakers said the bill will hurt Americans repaying their student loans. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a statement that student-loan payments will go up as a result of the legislation, and Natalia Abrams, president of the advocacy group Student Debt Crisis Center, said that "this dangerous bill abandons millions of borrowers, leaving them with few, often inaccessible repayment options and deepening their financial insecurity.

Here's how the bill will impact millions of federal student-loan borrowers.

A student-loan repayment overhaul

New student-loan borrowers will face fewer available repayment options as a result of the spending bill. The bill will eliminate existing income-driven repayment plans and replace them with two repayment options.

The first option is called the Repayment Assistance Plan. It would set borrowers' payments at 1-10% of their income, depending on their income levels, with a minimum monthly payment of $10. Unpaid interest is waived under this plan, and any remaining balance will be forgiven after 30 years.

It's less generous than former President Joe Biden's SAVE plan, which the bill eliminates. SAVE would have allowed borrowers with original balances of $12,000 or less to receive loan forgiveness after 10 years of payments, and it reduced payments on undergraduate loans from 10% to 5% of a borrower's discretionary income.

The SAVE plan is blocked in court pending a final legal decision, and with the bill's passage, the 8 million borrowers enrolled in SAVE have between July 2026 and July 2028 to enroll in a new plan.

The second option is a new standard repayment plan, which sets fixed payments for 10-25 years based on the borrowers' original balance. While existing standard plans typically have a fixed repayment period, this new plan's repayment period would vary based on the original amount borrowed.

Along with fewer repayment plans, the bill eliminates borrowers' ability to defer their student-loan payments in the event of economic hardship and unemployment, leaving standard forbearance as the only option to delay payments.

It also eliminates the graduate PLUS program, which allowed borrowers at graduate and professional schools to borrow up to the full cost of attendance for their education. The bill retains the parent PLUS program, which allows parents to take on student loans for their kids' educations, but places a $65,000 lifetime cap.

In addition to repayment changes, the bill takes on college accountability: It ensures that programs in which graduates don't earn more than the median high school graduate in their state will lose federal student-loan eligibility. The legislation also extends the Pell Grant to shorter-term programs, which McMahon has previously pushed for.

• CEOs need an AI strategy now to avoid falling behind competitors, PwC's Dan Priest said.
• Generative AI is reshaping industries, challenging leaders to adapt and innovate quickly.
• Priest emphasized investing in AI tools, reskilling employees, and maintaining human oversight.

Many corporate leaders are embracing artificial intelligence in theory but falling short when it comes to execution, according to Dan Priest, who was named PricewaterhouseCoopers' first chief AI officer a year ago.

With generative AI radically reshaping how everything from accounting and human resources to sales and marketing gets done, CEOs' leadership skills are being put to the test. How they go about their AI strategy today, warned Priest, will likely mean the difference between achieving greater cost savings and faster growth in the next few years versus falling behind the curve.

"It is a disruptive journey that needs to be managed," he told Business Insider.

Consider, for example, a PwC survey of approximately 4,700 CEOs last year found that four out of 10 expect their business models to no longer be viable in the next decade if AI continues to develop at its current rate. Priest said this suggests companies will need to come up with new — and likely AI-powered ways — of generating revenue, which can be difficult.

Given how fast generative AI has been evolving, Priest stressed the importance of CEOs investing in AI tools and strategic planning around them now, if they haven't already, to set their businesses up for success. But he conceded that the task is challenging.

For one, leaders need to find ways to distinguish their companies from others using AI if they want to stand out from competitors, said Priest. Most use cases today are merely setting a new standard for table stakes.

"If AI is ubiquitous and everybody's got it, it can't be your differentiator alone," he said.

Leaders also need to figure out which job functions will be aided by AI and to what extent, and which ones will become obsolete, said Priest. Further, they should determine where new skills are needed, invest in helping employees develop them, and assess where talent may need to shift to other areas of the business.

"If you believe that people are an important part of your success in the future, you should invest in their reskilling," he said.

Workers aren't all using AI tools in the same way, added Priest.

"Early-career-stage team members are more likely to turn over the thinking too much to AI," he said. "Late-stage-career team members are probably too reticent to use it consistently."

One tip Priest has for anyone using AI to write memos or other text is to only rely on the technology for a second draft. People should produce a first and last version on their own, he said.

"You want the thinking to be yours. That's why the first draft is so important," Priest said. "You want the benefit of the edit and you want the final draft to be in your voice."

This is also an example of why he believes humans should be at the center of companies' AI-related initiatives.

"The shiny new object is AI, but I don't know a single AI agent that is changing a business," he said. "It's the humans combined with those AI agents that change the business."

For a decade, Indiana businessman Bob Hamilton has operated six fireworks pop-ups in the weeks leading up to July 4. Most years, it's a great business — he says he brings in about $200,000 for a few weeks of work.

But the trade war with China has meant that this year has been anything but normal. And anyone hoping to buy fireworks at the last minute — whether from Hamilton or from pop-ups scattered across the country — is likely to see higher prices and, in some cases, empty shelves.

In the first half of the year, Hamilton watched as the tariffs on Chinese goods went from 10% to 145% and then back down to 30%. Around 95% of fireworks are made in China, so there wasn't another major market to turn to.

Hamilton played it safe. He bought the bulk of his inventory in April — just before the 145% tariffs took effect — to lock in a better price. He borrowed space from one of his other businesses, a commercial flooring company, to store his merchandise. Assuming that higher prices would mean fewer sales, he leased just four storefronts. "By the time we figured out how to navigate this tariff thing for this year, it was a little bit too late in the game," he says.

But the chaos seems to have wiped out some of Hamilton's competition. This week, when he placed another order to restock his shelves, the cost factored in the 30% tariff. "How much of that do we eat to keep our customers happy?" he says. Hamilton ultimately decided to split the difference with his customers.

From fireworks to backyard barbeques, President Donald Trump's America First tariffs are getting in the way of America's birthday bash. While the biggest impact has fallen on the fireworks industry, the higher tariffs — coupled with stubbornly high consumer prices and a historic low in the American cattle supply — have jacked up the cost of beef, ice cream and other Independence Day staples.

This year's price hikes and shortages could preview an even bigger impact on next year's celebrations, when Americans will mark the nation's 250th birthday. Industry watchers say there's a real risk of product shortages and significantly higher prices in 2026.

"Trump has called them the America First tariffs," says Julie Heckman, the Executive Director of the American Pyrotechnics Association. "The bitter irony is that the tariffs are raining on the most iconic celebration of America."

The question leading into 2026 is largely one of capacity: Will orders come in soon enough, and will there be enough time for producers in China to meet the American demand for pyrotechnics?

Chinese manufacturers are making up lost time from last year, and — in advance of America's 250th — the APA expects next year's demand for fireworks from American consumers to surge by 40 to 50%.

Uncertainty in the US market after high tariffs took effect meant that Chinese manufacturers "lost several months of vital production time," says Heckman. "That's what's really going to impact 2026."

Fireworks are constructed by hand and take up to two days to make, so delays have a meaningful impact. "It's a very laborious and dangerous process," says Heckman. "Think of papier mache layers over a sphere, like wrapping a basketball, gazillions of times." Before the firework is finished, it's placed in the sun to dry.

Stacy Schneitter Blake, president of the National Fireworks Association and co-owner of Schneitter Fireworks & Importing in St Joseph, Missouri, echoes Heckman's concerns.

The brief window of 145% tariffs this spring "severely disrupted" the supply chain, she says. "Thousands of containers were canceled or delayed, municipal displays were downsized or cut entirely, and companies across the country are absorbing unrecoverable losses."

Industry watchers say China's strong domestic market for fireworks and a strong European market also mean that Chinese manufacturers aren't dependent on American buyers.

"There's only so long that companies can kind of dance around these tariffs and figure out clever ways to adjust for them, to prevent the price increases from flowing through to consumers," says Martha Gimbel of the Budget Lab at Yale, a non-partisan policy research center. "To paraphrase the classic Christmas song, 'Have yourself a merry little Fourth of July,' because it may be your last without price increases."

Hamilton, who says he supported Trump for president, says he's OK with all the uncertainty — for now — especially if it means Americans will get a better deal in the long run. "Do we all wish we weren't paying these extra tariffs? Absolutely," he says. "But I'm willing to sacrifice if I need to, for the greater good."

"The question I'm looking at is, what does this look like next year, the year after?" he says. "Is this going to correct itself?"

Fireworks are the symbol of Independence Day celebrations. But most popular way to mark Americans' second favorite holiday, after Christmas, is with a cookout, according to Northwestern University's Medill Spiegel Research Center, which tracks consumer behavior.

This year, those researchers predict a 5% drop in Independence Day celebrations, largely due to higher prices.

Andrew Lokenauth is among those who are cutting back.

For 15 years, Lokenauth has gone all-out for the Fourth of July. The barbecues that he and his wife host in their Tampa, Florida backyard include fireworks, a professional sound system, and mountains of food for 150 guests.

"My signature move was always smoking these massive briskets — started them at 3 a.m. to get them perfect by party time," says Lokenauth, who's 38 and works as a financial educator. "And the spread, man, the spread. We'd have everything from pulled pork to grilled chicken. Plus, all these sides my wife makes that everyone fights over."

The party was reliably "the highlight of summer for our friends and family," he says.

But a few weeks ago, Lokenauth discovered that the price of everything from fireworks to that brisket was way up, and he calculated he was $2,000 over his usual budget.

Lokenauth and his wife now plan to host a much smaller party, and make it a potluck. "After 15 years of going all out, it wasn't an easy decision," he says. "It felt like cutting off my right arm."

Natalie Flynn, who lives in Washington, DC, can relate.

Every year, she squeezes around 30 guests into her 600-square-foot Washington, DC, apartment. Her bathtub becomes the cooler for beer and cocktails, while she grills hot dogs and hamburgers from her building's roof. She makes almost everything from scratch — her homemade ice cream sandwiches are a reliable favorite. At around 8, she hands out sparklers and leads her guests on a walk to the National Mall, where they watch fireworks go off over the Lincoln Memorial. "It's this moment of just joy and jubilance," he says.

But a couple of weeks ago, Flynn was taken aback when she noticed that the 5.5 pound bag of Belgian chocolate chips she uses for her ice cream sandwiches are $76 this year, up from $53. Flynn, who's 36 and works two jobs, realized that her particular salute to Uncle Sam was suddenly outside her budget.

Flynn's party will now also be a potluck, and there will be fewer sparklers to pass around. "Stuff's not going to get cheaper, so I have to be more mindful of how I spend," she says. "The feast has gotten too expensive."

Both Lokenauth and Flynn say they hope this year counts as a blip and that they'll get back to hosting massive Fourth of July parties again soon.

"I've always believed the beauty of America is how we can disagree but still fire up the grill together," says Lokenauth. "I've got friends who voted Trump sitting next to folks who voted Harris — and they're both reaching for the same plate of brisket."

"These tariffs that were supposed to put America first are making it harder for Americans to celebrate America," he says.

Cari Shane is a freelance writer.

Dominick Reuter is a senior retail reporter for Business Insider.

• "Jurassic World Rebirth" is now out in theaters.
• Here we look back on the entire "Jurassic" franchise to rank its entries from worst to best.
• See where "Rebirth," "Jurassic World," and (of course) the original "Jurassic Park" all land.

Audiences seemingly can't get enough of the "Jurassic" franchise.

Five years after the close of the "Jurassic World" trilogy with 2022's "Jurassic World: Dominion," moviegoers are now given "Jurassic World Rebirth," which is set decades after "Dominion."

1993's "Jurassic Park," based on the book by Michael Crichton, revolutionized visual effects as Steven Spielberg's stunning dinosaurs looked so lifelike. It launched the craze for VFX blockbusters that we watch today (legend has it, George Lucas was so taken by the effects in "Jurassic" it convinced him he could make his "Star Wars" prequels).

Six sequels since, grossing over $6 billion worldwide (not counting the revenue from amusement park rides, video games, and animated spinoffs), it's not slowing down.

Here we rank all the movies from worst to best.

7. "Jurassic Park: Dominion" (2022)

With dinosaurs and humans now living together following the events of "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom," the climax to the "World" trilogy brings back the cast from the previous "Jurassic" movies to set everything straight.

Despite the fun nostalgia that Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum bring to the story, the movie itself is a mindless journey from one action sequence to the next. And don't even get us started on the giant locust subplot.

6. "Jurassic World" (2015)

The "Jurassic Park" franchise is essentially about humans not being able to let go of the past, and the horrifying consequences of what happens when that gets out of control. Let's call it weaponized nostalgia.

In "Jurassic World," that concept gets very meta, but not in a cool, self-aware kind of way: 22 years after the events of the first movie, humans have created a dino theme park. Both Jurassic World the park and "Jurassic World" the movie are cash-grabbing, nostalgia-exploiting efforts that made millions of dollars off of humanity's failure to not learn from our past.

Chris Pratt's half-commitment to an accent is more genuine than this movie, but we'll admit we were entertained throughout.

5. "Jurassic Park III" (2001)

"Jurassic Park III," directed by "Captain America: The First Avenger" director Joe Johnston, has some memorable, redeeming qualities. The Spinosaurus is a menacing alternative to the overused T. rex and the entire "bird cage" sequence is actually riveting.

But it can never escape the fact that it probably shouldn't exist in the first place: Sam Neill's Alan Grant is coerced into returning to a dinosaur island and, shockingly, nothing goes according to plan.

The ending is rushed — as if everyone involved in this movie wanted to escape it faster than the characters wanted to get off the island — and the disappointing, terribly CGI'd Spinosaurus vs. T. rex fight was not worth the Rock 'em Sock 'em-style toy we owned growing up.

Also, there was a missed opportunity to explore what PTSD could look like for someone who almost got eaten by dinosaurs, but the movie would rather just show Grant hallucinating a velociraptor that calls his name.

4. "Jurassic World Rebirth" (2025)

It had all the elements to be great. Producers brought back screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the first two movies, and they hired "Rogue One" director Gareth Edwards. But by the time the end credits roll on "Rebirth," you have the feeling of what could have been.

From the "Jaws"-like boat scenes to all the nostalgic hat tips to "Jurassic Park," the movie felt like it was following the usual blockbuster formula, though it gets points for at least telling a stand-alone movie.

You just have to think: If this movie had come out a decade from now instead of three years after "Dominion," would it have worked better?

3. "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" (1997)

The first "Jurassic" sequel, "The Lost World," gets a bump for once again being directed by Steven Spielberg — some critics even argue that while it's nowhere near as good as the first movie, it's actually better directed.

That direction keeps the tension mounting throughout the movie, until the infamous San Diego-set ending. Bringing back Jeff Goldblum and adding Julianne Moore to the mix helps things, as well, and by all accounts, this movie should have been a masterpiece. But a terrible script ensured our disappointment before the cameras even began to roll. 

2. "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" (2018)

The problem with the "Jurassic" sequels is that none of them can quite justify their existence. It's easy to regurgitate the same concept over and over again, but it's actually hard to make it worthwhile.

But "Fallen Kingdom" is the most self-aware of all of the "Jurassic" sequels: people are really dumb, we keep getting ourselves into the same situations, and that's the point. The movie brings that to its natural conclusion and is probably the only sequel that actually raises the stakes by the end of the movie.

That makes it not only better than its predecessor but the best sequel in the franchise (even if that's not saying much).

While the movie thinks it's way smarter than it actually is (dinosaurs are a metaphor for global warming and civil rights and other social issues!), it at least tries to tap into some of those ideas. The logical question arises from that: do these movies need to be that cognizant? But we'd rather they were somewhat mindful of the world they inhabit than mindless.

1. "Jurassic Park" (1993)

Do we even have to explain ourselves?

Spielberg's original film is classic blockbuster entertainment with the heart and smarts to match. 

The movie didn't just push the envelope in what was possible on the big screen but opened the door for how the blockbuster movie would be made for decades to come.

Travis Clark contributed to a previous version of this post.