"Going into a negotiation is always, at least for me, a very uncomfortable discussion," Bounouh told Business Insider. "I just want to push through and ask for what I deserve."
She and four other tech employees from Meta, Google, and Cisco shared their salary negotiation tips before joining a company or when trying to get promoted. They have used these strategies to add tens of thousands of dollars to their original offers in recent years.
Product manager at Meta
Sarra Bounouh joined Meta in 2024.
Sarra Bounouh
Avoid offering the first number. If you must, back it up with research, said Bounouh, a product manager who joined Meta earlier this year.
She suggested using resources like Levels.fyi or Glassdoor and selecting your role and geography to see recent offers and compensation that makes sense for that job.
"I personally don't like having detailed conversations about level and compensation from that first call with the recruiter because I want to meet the team, I want to meet the hiring manager, I want to get excited about the role," she said.
Bounouh prefers to negotiate her level and compensation once there's an offer on the table.
She said she often gets asked about salary expectations early in the process because recruiterssay they want to save time for both sides.
She politely declines to share a number by telling the recruiter: "I don't have a number for your right now. I will need to do some research before getting back to you. At this stage of the process, I'm more focused on meeting the hiring manager and team."
Rehearsal is key for conversations about promotions or raises, she said.
Bounouh said she practiced her pitch for every job after Accenture and increased all three jobs' initial salary offers: Microsoft by 32%, Snap by 19%, and Meta by 37%.
Product manager at Oracle
Ketaki Vaidya joined Oracle in 2017 and has grown her career at the company since.
Ketaki Vaidya
Internal transfers between teams or offices are also an opportunity to negotiate your compensation package.
Ketaki Vaidya, who moved from Oracle's India to California office in 2022, said she approached her negotiation with an "everything under the sun is negotiable" mindset.
First, Vaidya looked at Glassdoorand talked to people who'd made the move to gather salary data. She wanted to ensure she was getting a fair offer for the US' cost of living.
"I was being given this offer for the credibility that I had built in the organization. I felt like I had an upper hand in negotiating," she said. "I was much more confident in asking for the things that I deserve — so it ended up being a very smooth transition."
After negotiating her base salary up to $80,000, she discussed other compensation components, including the timing of her next review, sign-on bonuses, relocation costs, paid leave, and remote work. She negotiated a sign-on bonus of $15,000 and a relocation allowance of $15,000, which weren't part of the initial offer.
Now, her compensation is about $130,000 annually, including stock units and bonuses.
Product manager at Cisco
Varun Kulkarni transitioned to tech after a career in consulting.
Varun Kulkarni
When Varun Kulkarni switched from consulting to tech to work on more artificial intelligence projects, he was careful not to come off as aggressive during his pay negotiations.
Once he had offers from Cisco and others in hand in 2022, he was transparent with recruiters and mentioned other offers, without introducing his own counter number.
He asked recruiters how high they could go and what they thought about other offers.
"You want to kind of not be too pushy" he said.
His offer from Cisco already matched the market rate and what several competitors were offering, but he managed to negotiate it by 5%, bringing his total compensation to $180,000.
Product manager at Google
Yung-Yu Lin worked at Yahoo, Meta, Visa, PayPal, and Google.
Yung-Yu Lin
During his 2022 recruitment process at Google, Yung-Yu Lin used his employer at the time, PayPal, to land better offers from both companies.
He interviewed and landed jobs at several places — but their pay did not compare with Google's offer.
Lin decided to negotiate a retention package. PayPal countered with a 10% pay bump. He then renegotiated with Google.
Google offered a 20% raise on his original compensation at PayPal, which brought his offer to the $350,000 to $400,000 range as a senior product manager, including stock-based compensation.
Software engineer at Meta
Hemant Pandey joined Meta in 2021 after experiences at other tech firms.
Hemant Pandey
Hemant Pandey, a senior software engineer at Meta, used other offers and research in his most recent job search.
After two years at Salesforce, in 2021 he applied to Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and two other companies. He used offers from these companies to negotiate his compensation at Meta.
"Be very transparent that you have other offers. Even if you have interviews going on, mention those, because it's also leverage," he said. It signals to the recruiter that they have to move fast and work with your parameters.
Meta's recruiters matched the base salary and restricted stock units from the highest of all offers.
Aside from being transparent,Pandey said it is important to be proactive and research how compensation works in different companies. For example, candidates should compare howstocks are refreshed, he said. A refresher is when the stock option portion of an employee's compensation is updated.
"I also negotiated my sign-on bonus and said, 'Hey, at Salesforce, I'll be leaving my $30,000 to $40,000 of annual bonus if I join you. Can you help me accommodate that?'"
Pandey was offered $520,000 in annual pay, including stock options, in that 2021 move.
"The most significant thing happened in my career when I made the move from Salesforce to Meta, which was close to almost 80 to 90% hike" in pay, Pandey said.
Do you work in tech, consulting, or finance and have a story to share about your career journey? Please reach out at [email protected].
Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re looking at OpenAI’s last — and biggest — announcement from its “12 Days of OpenAI” event; Apple’s potential entrance into the foldable market; and why Databricks is choosing to wait to go public. Let’s get into it. P.S. We’re off for the holidays! Week in Review […]
In October, Meta fired around two dozen employees found to be misusing a Grubhub meal perk.
An employee perk management expert shares four ways employees may not realize they're abusing perks.
She says that abusing perks could come at a cost for the company and negatively impact employees.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sarah-Jayne Martin, a Chicago-based expert in financial operations and employee perk management at Quadient. The firm provides companies with financial automation software, including payments- and expense-related tools. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Many companies offer perks to their employees to improve their working environment or build morale, often offered on the honor system. Instead of putting hard-line policies in place, many companies hope that people will be reasonable with perk usage.
But there's a gray area around what's considered "abuse," which happens when the perks aren't being used for their intended purposes.
Many times, employees don't necessarily feel like they're doing anything wrong. If they were manipulating their expense report, they'd know that that's wrong — but grabbing a six-pack of Coke to bring home to a party they're hosting that night might not feel that bad.
In the case of Meta, the intended purpose of offering GrubHub credits to employees is so that those who are remote or working late can eat. Where I think it crossed the line into taking advantage of the perk was when employees pooled their credits and purchased things besides food.
The abuse of perks is the kind of thing where if one person's doing it, maybe it's not that big of a deal — but if it becomes the culture, it really can negatively impact the company and employees in multiple ways.
Here are 4 ways employees may not realize they could be seen as abusing perks
1. Food
I've seen cases where people in charge of ordering food for a monthly team lunch order an extra pizza so that they can take it home for their family. It doesn't seem like that big of a misuse, but they're definitely intentionally buying something with the company resources that they plan to use not for its intended purpose.
That can also happen with office snacks. Especially in the tech world, a lot of offices have snack bars and fridges where you can just help yourself to whatever's in there. The intended purpose is for people who are in-office to be able to grab a drink or a snack as needed throughout the day.
But then there are cases of people who pack up a cooler and take a bunch of those things home. Maybe they feel like it's there for them to take, but they're taking advantage of that situation.
Grabbing something to eat on your way home is, in my opinion, totally fine. But if you're taking a whole case of trail mix home with you, that's clearly not what it was intended for.
2. Parking
If you're working in a downtown office in a big city like New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, one of the company perks that some companies provide to come into the office is to provide parking passes or discounted parking so you can drive to the office. An abuse of that might be giving your parking pass to someone who's visiting from out of town, or taking a parking pass that's meant for on-site clients to use and using that for your own personal use.
3. Travel
A lot of organizations have negotiated contracts with travel companies that provide employees with a code for discounted pricing on hotels, flights, or car rentals. While it may be considered OK for an employee to use it to book personal travel, sharing that code with people outside the organization isn't using it for its intended purpose.
4. Gym memberships
Some companies might offer gym memberships in the office building because they want employees to be able to exercise, be healthy, and have a break from their work. In that case, it wouldn't be appropriate for an employee to give their gym pass to their spouse to come in and use the gym.
It's the company's responsibility to draw the line between OK and abuse
I think the organization ultimately has the responsibility for drawing the boundaries of what's OK and what's a fireable offense.
That can be something as simple as, when rolling out a perk, saying something like, "The snack bar is here for employees who are in the office for meal times or for snacks. Be reasonable with what you take; taking large amounts of those supplies home isn't condoned."
If it's not clearly stated, employees may not feel like what they're doing is off-limits.
My advice for employees is to think about the intended purpose of the perks they're offered: Why am I being given this perk? And are my actions in line with that intention? Thinking from that perspective will probably make you realize when you're nearing an abuse of a perk.
Why misusing perks matters
Abusing perks could damage the relationships that the organization has created with other vendors.
In the example of gym memberships, the organization has probably negotiated discounted rates for company employees. If that gets abused and the gym finds out, it may retract the deal or the relationship between the company and the gym owner would sour. All of the people who've been using it appropriately could be impacted.
Misuse of resources also becomes a cost for the company. For example, if you're abusing the snack bar or using the photocopier to print your wedding invitations, it's a larger cost that the company has to bear.
It probably won't be so catastrophic that it impacts things like bonuses, but if enough people are abusing resources, it could put the financial stability of the company at risk — and impact whether the company is willing to spend money on perks in the future.
If you were reprimanded for abusing company perks and would like to share your story, email Jane Zhang at [email protected].
Instagram head Adam Mosseri is teasing upcoming generative AI features for the social app that will allow creators to “change nearly any aspect” of their videos using text prompts. The editing tools will be powered by Meta’s Movie Gen AI model, and are expected to launch on the social network sometime next year, Mosseri said […]
Apple and Meta are warring in Europe over the balance between interoperability and privacy, Reuters reports. The fight focuses on the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a competition regulation that requires designated gatekeepers (including Apple and Meta) not to restrict rivals’ access to so-called core platform services. In Apple’s case, this means: iOS, iPadOS, […]
Executives at some major companies say they're sticking to hybrid work as long as workers stay productive.
Ezra Bailey
Staff at major companies have asked their leaders if there are plans to follow Amazon's full return to office.
Firms like Meta, Google, and Microsoft have a hybrid setup — however, execs say they're eyeing productivity.
Research findings on the subject are varied, and the debate will likely continue in 2025.
Executives at major companies are referencing a specific term to hedge when asked by employees if they plan to follow in Amazon's footsteps and implement a return to 5 days a week in the office.
That word? Productivity.
While Amazon has been the most high-profile example this year of a full return to office policy, set to go into effect in January, telecom giant AT&T has also elected to double down on in-person work with a similar 5-day policy, Business Insider first reported.
In the wake of Amazon's announcement, executives at both Google and Microsoft, which require employees to be in the office at least 3 days a week, have fielded questions from staff wondering if the days of hybrid work are numbered.
In October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company had no plans to order employees back to the office, so long as employees remain productive during their at-home work days, BI previously reported.
Over at Meta, Mark Zuckerberg said last year that "early analysis of performance data,"indicated productivity increases for early-career engineers in the office at least 3 days a week. A few months later, the company announced it was requiring employees to return to the office 3 days a week.
Though Amazon did not explicitly name productivity as a reason for its full return to the office, CEO Andy Jassy emphasized a similar term: effectiveness.
Being back in person 5 days a week makes it "easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another," he wrote at the time.
For those committing to a full return to office, preparing campuses for the influx of employees in the new year is its own challenge. Amazon has since delayed the announced January 2 effective date of the new mandate for some employees because it doesn't have enough office space in some locations, BI reported earlier this month.
As CEOs and company leaders keep an eye on how employees in remote or hybrid setups perform, various studies since the onset of the pandemic have attempted to measure and compare the productivity of employees who work at home and in-office. Research studies have produced conflicting results, further complicated by the matter of how best to define or measure productivity.
Goldman Sachs, which has a 5-day-in-office policy, reviewed several analyses that used different ways of evaluating changes in work-from-home productivity, from call-center workers who were randomly chosen to work from home to comparing the productivity of randomly assigned remote workers with their in-office peers.
In short, it's hard to say for sure, and executives are deciding what their long-term setup will be after a year in which some of the world's biggest companies put a renewed focus on being "lean" and "efficient."
Meanwhile, some employees have returned to commuting in (sometimes "coffee-badging" in and returning home), others have relocated to comply with a policy change, and some have resigned to pursue a hybrid or fully remote opportunity. As companies tighten their belts and conduct layoffs, other workers have taken to workplace forums to wonder if some of the RTO mandates have been a possible "quiet layoffs" tactic.
As more major global companies revisit their policies and make changes, CEOs are likely to face more questions on the topic going into the new year.
For some, the answer is simple: Stay productive and we'll stay flexible.
Microsoft bought more than twice as many Nvidia Hopper chips this year than any of its biggest rivals. The tech giant bought 485,000 Nvidia Hopper chips across 2024 according to reporting from the Financial Times, which cited data from tech consultancy Omdia. To compare, Meta bought 224,000 of the same flagship Nvidia chip this year. […]
In December, Business Insider first reported that AT&T is following suit and expecting employees to be in the office 40 hours a week starting in the new year.
The two business giants are just one of the many companies calling their employees back to the office following the pandemic as COVID-19 restrictions have eased.
The Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, told employees this week they would be required to return to the office five days a week, according to a memo obtained by Business Insider.
Other major employers, including JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, have also abandoned the hybrid attendance policy they adopted during the pandemic and instead implemented full return-to-office mandates.
Several executives and leaders have said they believe productivity increases when workers are in the office together, while others hope to increase in-person collaboration. Even some CEOs who previously praised the flexibility of remote work have started backpedaling, pressuring workers to comply with RTO mandates with threats to track attendance or even fire employees who don't comply.
Here's a list, in alphabetical order, of major companies requiring employees to return to offices. Business Insider will update this list regularly.
Amazon
CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a September 16 memo that Amazon would be pulling the plug on remote work starting next year.
"We've decided that we're going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID," Jassy said. "When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant."
The CEO cited easier employee collaboration and connection and said in-person work would strengthen the company's culture, echoing his February 2023 memo, which mandated employees spend at least three days a week in the office.
Not everyone agrees. Some Amazon employees have taken to an internal Slack channel to criticize the new RTO policy, Business Insider's Ashley Stewart first reported, with one staffer writing that it is "significantly more strict and out of its mind" than pre-Covid operations.
"This is not 'going back' to how it was before," they wrote. "It's just going backwards."
The critical reaction is reminiscent of employees' response to last year's surprise return-to-office rule. Thousands of Amazon workers joined a Slack channel to share their thoughts, with some even organizing to file a petition against the change.
Apple
In August 2022, Apple's senior leaders told workers they had to return to the office at least three days a week after previously requiring two days a week. CEO Tim Cook said the decision was meant to restore "in-person collaboration." Some employees fought back and issued a petition shortly after the announcement, arguing that staffers can do "exceptional work" from home.
AT&T confirmed to Business Insider that it's requiring all office employees to work on-site five days a week starting in January.
The change follows about a year of AT&T accommodating a hybrid schedule in its widely publicized office push.
"The majority of our employees and leaders never stopped working on location for the full work week — including during the pandemic," a spokesperson for the telecom giant told BI.
AT&T told BI it's updating its facilities amid the policy change.
"As we continue to evolve our model, we are enhancing our facilities and workspaces, adapting our benefits programs, and incorporating best practices to ensure our employees are best equipped to serve our customers," the spokesperson added.
BlackRock
Last year, BlackRock mandated employees return to the office four days a week. The investment firm, which is headquartered in New York City, intended to bring employees into its then newly leased office space — which spans 1 million square feet across 15 floors, according to Hudson Yards.
In a May 2023 memo sent by the company's COO, Rob Goldstein, and the head of human resources, Caroline Heller, the execs wrote: "Career development happens in teaching moments between team members, and it is accelerated during market-moving moments, when we step up and get into the mix. All of this requires us to be together in the office."
Additionally, the memo notified staffers that the firm is giving them the opportunity to work remotely for two weeks during a time period that is relevant in their country, in an effort to offer "seasonal flexibility."
Chipotle
The fast-food chain announced last summer that corporate workers work in the office four days a week, Bloomberg reported. Chipotle had previously required workers to show up three days a week, according to the report.
Citigroup
Citigroup asked its 600 US workers, who were previously eligible to work remotely, to return to the office full-time, Bloomberg reported. In a memo released by the investment firm in May, the majority of staff are reportedly still able to work a hybrid schedule, with up to two days a week outside the office.
HSBC Holding Plc and Barclays Plc also followed suit, mandating workers to come into the office five days a week, according to the report.
Vaccinated Citigroup employees across the US were asked to return to the office for at least two days a week in March 2022, an internal memo obtained by Reuters said.
Dell
Dell told its sales staff to return to the office five days a week starting on September 30. Previously, the company let US employees pick between working remotely or following a hybrid schedule with about three days a week in the office.
September's sales-team mandate came with just a few days' notice, sending employees with kids into a hurry to find childcare, Business Insider reported.
Disney
In a January 2023 memo obtained by Business Insider, CEO Bob Iger told workers that starting that March, any Disney staff member working "in a hybrid fashion" would need to return to Disney's offices four days a week.
In response, over 2,300 employees signed a petition asking Iger to reconsider the mandate.
"This policy will slow, or even reverse, our post-COVID recovery and growth by creating critical resource shortages and causing irreplaceable institutional knowledge loss," signees wrote, according to The Washington Post.
Goldman Sachs
In March 2022, CEO David Solomon told Fortune that the company was asking employees to return to the office five days a week. Seven months later, he told CNBC that about 65% of staffers were working in the office.
However, some staff have failed to follow the policy a year into its implementation, causing senior managers to become frustrated and Goldman Sachs to further crack down on employees to return to the office full-time.
Google
In March 2022, Google employees in the San Francisco Bay Area and "several other US locations" were told to return to the office for at least three days a week starting the following month.
Last year, however, the company tightened RTO expectations, telling staff in an email that office attendance would factor into their performance reviews.
Google's Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told workers in the memo that requests to work remotely full time will now be considered "by exception only."
Some employees expressed feeling "frustrated" with the new policy. One staffer previously told Business Insider, "We don't like being micromanaged like school kids."
The company asked all its US managers to report to an office or client location at least three days a week, according to a January memo viewed by Bloomberg.
A source told the outlet that staff would have to live within 50 miles of an IBM office or client location. The memo reportedly told employees they had until August to complete their relocation arrangements, and those who were unable to comply with the new policy must "separate from IBM."
CEO Arvind Krishna previously told the news outlet that employees' careers could suffer if they work from home. He said that although he wasn't forcing his own staffers back to the office, he thought remote workers may struggle to get promotions.
JPMorgan
In April 2023, JPMorgan announced to employees in a memo that all managing directors must work in the office five days a week. The memo also reminded other workers of the current policy of working in-person a minimum of three days a week.
Despite some pushback from employees, CEO Jamie Dimon doubled down on the policy, saying disgruntled workers can choose to go elsewhere.
"I completely understand why someone doesn't want to commute an hour and a half every day, totally got it," he told The Economist. "Doesn't mean they have to have a job here either."
The company has also been collecting data on staff activity, including tracking attendance.
Meta
Meta updated its remote work policies in September 2023, requiring employees to head into the office three days a week.
It had also stopped offering remote work in new job listings. People familiar with the company previously told BI that hiring managers could no longer post new jobs that list the work location as "remote" or outside of an existing office.
The company doubled down on its RTO efforts in June of this year, telling workers that their attendance would be tracked daily and failure to comply could lead to termination.
However, some employees returning to the office said they were met with a lack of space and privacy, with one worker calling the mandate "a mess."
Redfin
In April last year, real estate company Redfin announced an updated return-to-office policy via a memo from CEO Glenn Kelman.
The memo noted that starting July 2023, Redfin would require "headquarters employees" who live within 20 miles of the company's Seattle, San Francisco, and Frisco offices to work from the office for a full day on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Those who live beyond the 20-mile radius are required to visit the office in-person once a quarter for a day or more of meetings, the company said.
In order to hold employees accountable, the memo included a "no-exceptions" section, reading that "to determine your distance from an office, we'll use Google Maps, with the distance from your home address measured in miles driven over roads by car."
Salesforce
Salesforce told employees in an internal memo seen by The San Francisco Standard that the majority of workers have to be in an office four to five days a week as of October 1.
The new policy is mandated for select staff in sales, workplace services, data center engineering, and on-site support technicians, according to the memo.
Early last year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff revised the company's annual strategic plan, including return-to-office mandates, according to a draft shared in an internal Slack message viewed by Business Insider.
The updated draft return-to-office policy required nonremote employees to work three days a week in the office and employees in "non-remote" and "customer-facing" roles to work four days a week. Engineers must work from the office 10 days per quarter, down from 20 in the initial draft, which was updated based on employee feedback.
Snap
Snap implemented a new mandate in September 2023, requiring employees to work in an office at least four days a week. The change represented a shift from the company's former "remote first" policy, which allowed employees to work from home or elsewhere.
Employees previously told BI that some managers told them the company is able to track workers' WiFi connections to see who is complying.
Starbucks
In a January 2023 memo to corporate staffers, then-CEO Howard Schultz said employees within commuting distance would be required to return to the office at least three days a week.
Schultz said some staff had failed to "meet their minimum promise of one day a week" and also pointed out that Starbucks baristas didn't have the "privilege" of working from home. The executive had previously said he "pleaded" with workers to come back to the office.
Starbucks employees responded by signing an open letter protesting the company's return-to-office mandate.
In October, the company threatened to fire staff if they did not comply with the RTO policy, Bloomberg first reported, citing an internal memo.
Beginning in January, the company plans to initiate a "standardized process" to hold workers accountable to the hybrid schedule at the team level, where consequences will cover "up to, and including, separation," according to the email obtained by Bloomberg.
Employees, however, may request exemptions due to physical or mental medical reasons.
Tesla
In June 2022, Tesla employees were notified of a mandatory return-to-office policy.
The email from Elon Musk included wording such as "If you don't show up, we will assume you have resigned," and noted that everyone at Tesla must work from the office at least 40 hours a week.
Musk, who has called remote work "morally wrong," nodded to his frequent presence at Tesla factories as the reason for the business' success. "If I had not done that, Tesla would long ago have gone bankrupt," he wrote in the email.
Ubisoft
In September, Ubisoft, the France-based maker of the popular "Assassin's Creed" and "Far Cry" video game series, ordered its staff worldwide to return to the office three days a week.
French workers at the video game maker went on strike on October 15 over the RTO mandate.
X
After buying X, formerly Twitter, in 2022, Musk told employees that not showing up to an office when they're able to was the same as a resignation.
Musk also told staffers in an email that remote work was no longer allowed and that employees were expected to be in the office for at least 40 hours a week unless given explicit approval to work elsewhere.
In 2023, X, then Twitter, National Labor Relations Board filed a formal complaint saying that X had illegally fired an employee who complained about Musk's RTO policy.
The complaint said that Yao Yue, a principal software engineer, criticized the mandate, tweeting, "don't resign, let him fire you." She also posted, "don't be fired. Seriously" in a company Slack channel.
Yue was then fired five days later and told it was due to violating an unspecified company policy.
Uber
In a memo obtained by Business Insider, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees that beginning in April 2022, Uber staffers in 35 of the company's locations were required to return to the office at least half the time. He added that on other days, staffers were allowed to work remotely and that some could be entirely remote if they got clearance from their managers.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently said remote work took away some of Uber's "most frequent customers," adding that "there is an audience who kind of stopped using us as frequently as they used to."
Staffers located in smaller offices in Dallas, Atlanta, and Toronto are additionally being directed to the company's central hubs, including its headquarters in Arkansas or New Jersey, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The retail giant will still permit hybrid schedules as long as workers come in-person most of the time, according to the outlet.
The Washington Post
William Lewis, CEO and publisher of The Washington Post, told staffers in early November that they would be required to return to the office five days a week, according to a memo obtained by BI.
"I want that great office energy for us every day," Lewis wrote, referring to the energy in the office during election week. "I am reliably informed that is how it used to be here before Covid, and it's important we get this back."
All employees were expected to return to the office by June 2, 2025, while managers were expected to return by February 3, 2025.
After starting remote work in 2020, the Post previously required employees to return to the office three days a week in early 2022.
The announcement at the Post came shortly after Amazon's return-to-office mandate. The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and executive chairman.
Zoom
Zoom, the darling of remote work, said in 2022 that less than 2% of staffers work in person full time. However, last year, the video-calling company asked employees to return to the office.
Workers living within 50 miles of one of its offices were mandated to work there at least two days a week.
"We believe that a structured hybrid approach – meaning employees that live near an office need to be onsite two days a week to interact with their teams – is most effective for Zoom," a spokesperson previously said in a statement. "As a company, we are in a better position to use our own technologies, continue to innovate, and support our global customers."
Generative AI tools have made it easier to create fake images, videos, and audio.
That sparked concern that this busy election year would be disrupted by realistic disinformation.
The barrage of AI deepfakes didn't happen. An AI researcher explains why and what's to come.
Oren Etzioni has studied artificial intelligence and worked on the technology for well over a decade, so when he saw the huge election cycle of 2024 coming, he got ready.
India, Indonesia, and the US were just some of the populous nations sending citizens to the ballot box. Generative AI had been unleashed upon the world about a year earlier, and there were major concerns about a potential wave of AI-powered disinformation disrupting the democratic process.
"We're going into the jungle without bug spray," Etzioni recalled thinking at the time.
He responded by starting TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit that uses AI-detection technologies to help people determine whether online videos, images, and audio are real or fake.
The group launched an early beta version of its service in April, so it was ready for a barrage of realistic AI deepfakes and other misleading online content.
In the end, the barrage never came.
"It really wasn't nearly as bad as we thought," Etzioni said. "That was good news, period."
He's still slightly mystified by this, although he has theories.
First, you don't need AI to lie during elections.
"Out-and-out lies and conspiracy theories were prevalent, but they weren't always accompanied by synthetic media," Etzioni said.
Second, he suspects that generative AI technology is not quite there yet, particularly when it comes to deepfake videos.
"Some of the most egregious videos that are truly realistic — those are still pretty hard to create," Etzioni said. "There's another lap to go before people can generate what they want easily and have it look the way they want. Awareness of how to do this may not have penetrated the dark corners of the internet yet."
One thing he's sure of: High-end AI video-generation capabilities will come. This might happen during the next major election cycle or the one after that, but it's coming.
With that in mind, Etzioni shared learnings from TrueMedia's first go-round this year:
Democracies are still not prepared for the worst-case scenario when it comes to AI deepfakes.
There's no purely technical solution for this looming problem, and AI will need regulation.
Social media has an important role to play.
TrueMedia achieves roughly 90% accuracy, although people asked for more. It will be impossible to be 100% accurate, so there's room for human analysts.
It's not always scalable to have humans at the end checking every decision, so humans only get involved in edge cases, such as when users question a decision made by TrueMedia's technology.
The group plans to publish research on its AI deepfake detection efforts, and it's working on potential licensing deals.
"There's a lot of interest in our AI models that have been tuned based on the flurry of uploads and deepfakes," Etzioni said. "We hope to license those to entities that are mission-oriented."
Meta’s social network Threads is experimenting with a feature that will let you schedule posts, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said. Users who will get to test this feature won’t be able to schedule replies. “We want to balance giving people more control to plan their Threads posts while still encouraging real-time conversations,” he said. People […]
In the early days of the pandemic, Josh Kramer and his wife set up a Discord server to stay in touch with their friends. Branched off from the main group of about 20 people are different channels for topics — like AI and crypto, which took over a channel previously devoted to "Tiger King," and another called "sweethomies" to talk about their houses and apartments — that only some people might want to be notified about to avoid annoying everyone all the time. Now, more than four years later, it's become "essential" for the extended friend group, says Kramer, seeing them through the early anxiety of COVID-19 and two presidential elections.
While the chat is made up of friendly faces, it's not really an echo chamber — not everyone has the same ideology or political opinions, Kramer tells me. But it's more productive than screaming into the void on social media. Now, when he has a thought that may have turned into a tweet, he instead takes it to the group, where it can become a conversation.
"It's a way to have conversations about complicated issues, like national politics, but in context with people I actually know and care about," Kramer, who is the head of editorial at New_ Public, a nonprofit research and development lab focusing on reimagining social media, tells me. The success of the server has also informed how he thinks about ways to reform the social web. On election night, for example, using the group chat was less about scoring points with a quippy tweet and "more about checking in with each other and commiserating about our experience, rather than whatever you might take to Twitter to talk about to check in with the broader zeitgeist."
In the month or so since the 2024 election, thousands have abandoned or deactivated their X accounts, taking issue with Elon Musk's move to use the platform as a tool to reelect Donald Trump, as they seek new ways to connect and share information. Bluesky, which saw its users grow 110% in November according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, has emerged as the most promising replacement among many progressives, journalists, and Swifties, as it allows people to easily share links and doesn't rely as heavily on algorithmic delivery of posts as platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok have come to. But some are turning further inward to smaller group chats, either via text message or on platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and Signal, where they can have conversations more privately and free of algorithmic determinations.
It's all part of the larger, ongoing fracturing of our social media landscape. For a decade, Twitter proved to be the room where news broke. Other upstarts launched after Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022 and tried to compete, luring people with promises of moderation and civility, but ultimately folded, largely because they weren't very fun or lacked the momentum created by the kind of power users that propelled the old Twitter. But for many, there's still safety in the smaller group chats, which take the form of your friends who like to shit talk in an iMessage chain or topic-focused, larger chats on apps like Discord or WhatsApp.
"Group chats have been quite valued," Kate Mannell, a research fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child at Deakin University in Australia, tells me. They allow people to chat with selected friends, family members, or colleagues to have much "more context-specific kinds of conversations, which I think is much more reflective of the way that our social groups actually exist, as opposed to this kind of flattening" that happens on social media. When people accumulate large followings on social media, they run into context collapse, she says. The communication breakdown happens as the social platforms launched in the 2000s have taken on larger lives than anyone anticipated.
The candid nature of group chats gives them value and tethers people with looser connections together, but that can also make them unwieldy.
By contrast, some more exclusive chats are seen as cozy, safe spaces. Most of Discord's servers are made up of fewer than 10 people, Savannah Badalich, the senior director of policy at Discord, tells me. The company has 200 million active users, up from 100 million in 2020. What started as a place to hang with friends while playing video games still incentivizes interacting over lurking or building up big followings. "We don't have that endless doomscrolling," Badalich says. "We don't have that place where you're passively consuming content. Discord is about real-time interaction." And interacting among smaller groups may be more natural. Research by the psychologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s found that humans could cognitively maintain about 150 meaningful relationships. More recent research has questioned that determination, but any person overburdened by our digital age can surely tell you that you can only show up authentically and substantially in person for a small subset of the people you follow online. A 2024 study, conducted by Dunbar and the telecommunications company Vodafone, found that the average person in the UK was part of 83 group chats across all platforms, with a quarter of people using group chats more often than one-to-one messages.
In addition to hosting group chats, WhatsApp has tried more recently to position itself as a place for news, giving publishers the ability to send headlines directly to followers. News organizations like MSNBC, Reuters, and Telemundo have channels. CNN has nearly 15 million followers, while The New York Times has about 13 million. Several publishers recently told the Times that they were seeing growth and traffic come from WhatsApp, but the channels have yet to rival sources like Google or Facebook. While it gives them the power to connect to readers, WhatsApp is owned by Meta, which has a fraught history of hooking media companies and making them dependent on traffic on its social platforms only to later de-emphasize their content.
Victoria Usher, the founder and CEO of Gingermay, a B2B tech communications firm, says she's in several large, business-focused group chats on WhatsApp. Usher, who lives in the UK, even found these chats were a way to get news about the US election "immediately." In a way, the group chats are her way of optimizing news and analysis of it, and it works because there's a deep sense of trust between those in the chat that doesn't exist when scrolling X. "I prefer it to an algorithm," she says. "It's going to be stories that I will find interesting." She thinks they deliver information better than LinkedIn, where people have taken to writing posts in classic LinkedIn style to please the algorithm — which can be both self-serving and cringe. "It doesn't feel like it's a truthful channel," Usher says. "They're trying to create a picture of how they want to be seen personally. Within WhatsApp groups or Signal, people are much more likely to post what they actually feel about something."
The candid nature of group chats — which some have called the last safe spaces in society today — gives them value and tethers people with looser connections together, but that can also make them unwieldy. Some of the larger group chats, like those on Discord, have moderation and rules. But when it comes to just chatting with your friends or family, there's largely no established group-chat etiquette. Group chats can languish for years; there's no playbook for leaving or kicking out someone who's no longer close to the core group. If a couple breaks up, who gets the group chat? How many memes is a person allowed to send a day? What happens when the group texts get leaked? There's often "no external moderator to come in and say, 'That's not how we do things,'" Mannell says.
Kramer, while he likes his Discord chat, is optimistic about the future of groups and new social networks. He says he's also taken over a community Facebook group for his neighborhood that was inactive and made more connections with his neighbors. We're in a moment where massive change could come to our chats and our social networks. "There's been a social internet for 30 years," says Kramer. But there's "so much room for innovation and new exciting and alternative options." But his group chat might still have the best vibes of all. Messaging there "has less to do with being right and scoring points" than on social media, he says. "It has so much value to me on a personal level, as a place of real support."
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
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President-elect Donald Trump's 2017 inauguration raised about $107 million, setting the record for the most money raised.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Big Tech companies and CEOs are already lining up six-figure donations to Donald Trump's inauguration.
Amazon, Sam Altman, and Meta are each prepared to donate $1 million.
There are virtually no limits on inaugural donations, meaning Big Tech companies can cut massive checks.
Big Tech companies and the moguls behind them are preparing to make six-figure donations to President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural committee.
Jeff Bezos' Amazon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta have all been reported to have made or will make $1 million to the outfit tasked with planning and organizing Trump's triumphant return to power.
"The financing of inaugurations is really a cesspool when it comes to campaign financing," Craig Holman, a lobbyist for government watchdog Public Citizen, told Business Insider.
Holman said there are few, if any, limits to inaugural donations, and what makes them particularly appealing is that megadonors and CEOs don't have to worry about picking the loser.
"Unlike financing a campaign, when you don't know for sure who is going to win, here in the inauguration, you've got the winner," he said. "So corporations and other special interests just throw money at them at the feet of the president with the hope of currying favor."
Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a public interest group, said donations to the inaugural committee are less likely to irk the opposition.
"They are frequently a mechanism for entities that sit out elections to get good with the incoming administration," he said.
Trump's 2017 inaugural set a record, raking in roughly $107 million. Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson donated $5 million, the largest single donation. AT&T gave just over $2 million. For many in Washington, it was a time to make nice with an incoming president that few thought would win the 2016 race.
This time, Trump's inaugural offers one final major opportunity for CEOs to curry influence with the president-elect at his peak.
Since he'll be term-limited, the next major fundraising opportunity likely won't come until Trump begins preparations for a presidential library (should that even occur). At that point, companies will have missed their window to make a final impression before mergers and acquisitions.
2017 Trump inaugural donors benefited greatly
Playing ball can have major benefits. OpenSecrets found in 2018 that "of the 63 federal contractors that donated to the inauguration, more than half won multimillion-dollar bids" from the federal government later on.
Foreign donors can't contribute to a president-elect's inaugural committee, and the committee must publicly disclose details about donations over $200 within 90 days of Inauguration Day. Otherwise, there are few limits on what individuals or corporations can give, and inaugural committees are not required to explain how they spend the money.
Some presidents, especially Obama in 2009, have imposed voluntary restrictions on donations. Obama refused to accept corporate donations or individual contributions over $50,000 for his historic first inauguration, though he later lifted those limits for his reelection celebration.
Hauser said donations will allow corporations to prepare for an especially transactional period.
"I think that corporations with an agenda in Trump's Washington, be it offense, like getting new contracts, or defense, like avoiding negative federal scrutiny, are going to spend millions of dollars in Washington to either make or protect billions in the real economy," Hauser said.
Tech companies are under the microscope.
Amazon, Google, and Meta have all faced antitrust concerns. Republican lawmakers have frequently grilled Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook's decision to limit sharing the New York Post's initial report on Hunter Biden's laptop ahead of the 2020 election. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated to help election officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, enraging some on the right, while Trump repeatedly lit into Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for The Washington Post's coverage of his first administration. Amazon sued the Trump administration after Microsoft was awarded a $10 billion cloud computing contract over them, alleging that Trump's animus for Bezos sunk their chances.
Bezos and Zuckerberg have since taken steps to repair their relationships with the Trump world. Zuckerberg has expressed regret over Facebook's decision to censor some posts about COVID-19. He also pledged not to donate to help election officials. Bezos intervened when The Post's editorial board was ready to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.
Bezos also recently said Trump seemed "calmer than he was the first time and more settled."
"You've probably grown in the last eight years," Bezos said at The New York Times DealBook Summit in December. "He has, too."
Altman has been entangled in a legal battle with his OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk, who is set to be an influential figure in the Trump administration.
In a statement about his donation, Altman said, "President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead."
Representatives for Amazon, Meta, and Trump's inaugural did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
To get a taste of what may be in store, one only needs to look at what happened at President Joe Biden's inauguration.
A leaked fundraising memo showed that large donations netted individuals and organizations various perks, including opportunities to meet Biden, receive private briefings from top campaign officials, and "preferred viewing" for the virtual inauguration.
All of those benefits came amid pandemic precautions. Trump's party will have no such limits.
Facebook’s parent company Meta is supporting Elon Musk’s effort to block OpenAI’s conversion from a non-profit company into a for-profit one. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Meta sent a letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta arguing that allowing the shift would have “seismic implications for Silicon Valley.” And while the company asked […]
Expect more tech titans to follow. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was reportedly flying to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump this week. I wouldn't be shocked to see a $1 million pledge coming shortly after. (Google declined to comment about any of the above.)
You can see it playing out in real time. Zuckerberg's initial donation was news; each subsequent one just confirms it as the cost of doing business. At some point, the news will be when you hear that some tech giant is not forking over $1 million to help fund Trump's multiday party next month.
Quick context: It is not unusual for big companies and very rich people to donate lots of money to presidential inaugurations, whether via cash, in-kind contributions, or both.
While US elections themselves have (some) rules about the amount of money people and companies can spend on candidates, there's no cap on what they can spend on inaugural committees. The only restrictions are that the money can't come from foreign nationals and that the donations eventually have to be disclosed.
It's also worth noting that the sums we are talking about here don't even qualify as rounding errors for companies this size. Zuckerberg's Meta makes about $174 million in profit every day. Amazon does about $110 million. A million bucks just doesn't register. (The Amazon and Meta donations are coming directly from the companies, not their founders; Altman, who has a reported net worth of $1.1 billion, has said he's making his donation personally.)
So what makes this round of donations newsworthy?
Yes, in some cases, Trump has tangled with the companies or the leaders in question — he famously threatened to jail Zuckerberg earlier this year for theoretical election interference, and he's long railed about Amazon's founder, Bezos, as well as the Bezos-owned Washington Post.
There's also the fact that while Trump and his allies continue to insist that they want to cut regulations, they also insist that they'll be cracking down on Big Tech. That context makes the donations seem even more transactional than other rich person/corporate donations.
But the main reason this is news is … because it's news. News that's out in public, that is.
In the past, these donations would eventually be disclosed in filings, but this time around, the contributors seem eager to let the world know they're doing it.
That's the telling part. The part that tells you that this time around, more tech leaders have decided that the best way to deal with Donald Trump is to say nice things about him in public, and to do nice things for him — in public. And then, they hope, they can get things from him privately.
