• A former Rippling employee detailed his time spying on behalf of Deel in a new court filing.
• Keith O'Brien said Deel's CEO instructed him to steal Rippling's corporate secrets.
• When he was caught, Deel offered to relocate his family to Dubai, he wrote.

A man accused of being a corporate spy for a rival HR software company admitted to secretly working for Deel while he was an employee at Rippling.

The now-former employee, Keith O'Brien, wrote in an affidavit made public in an Irish court Wednesday that he was recruited as a corporate spy by Alex Bouaziz, Deel's founder and CEO.

"Alex told me he 'had an idea.' He suggested that I remain at Rippling and become a 'spy' for Deel, and I recall him specifically mentioning James Bond," O'Brien wrote in the affidavit.

"About thirty minutes later, I called Alex back over WhatsApp and told him that I was onboard with the plan," O'Brien added.

The affidavit is part of legal proceedings in Ireland, where O'Brien worked in one of Rippling's satellite offices.

The San Francisco-based workforce management software company has a long and bitter rivalry with Deel. Each company has been valued at north of $10 billion.

In March, Rippling sued Deel in San Francisco federal court, alleging Deel turned O'Brien — who was not named in the lawsuit — into a corporate spy.

Rippling said O'Brien had collected company secrets on the company's Slack, Salesforce, and Google Drive networks and then passed them on to Deel, giving the rival a competitive edge.

O'Brien said in the newly filed affidavit that he collected the information at Bouaziz's direction. His first conversations with Bouaziz are recounted in a section titled "I Begin Spying for Deel."

"Alex was particularly interested in Rippling's strategies around global payroll and expansion efforts, as well as reviewing specific sales, marketing information, and customer details," O'Brien wrote. "Alex would give me direction for what terms to search on Rippling's Slack system in order to yield the information he wanted."

O'Brien, who was hired in Rippling's Dublin office to oversee payroll issues in Europe, wrote that he first met Bouaziz after he created a payroll consulting company as a side job.

O'Brien, while offering to consult for Deel, told Bouaziz he was considering quitting his day job and consulting full time, he wrote.

O'Brien says Bouaziz suggested he continue working for Rippling and "spy" for Deel.

For his work, O'Brien received a monthly payment of $6,000, mostly in cryptocurrency, he wrote. He also communicated with Philippe Bouaziz, Alex's father and Deel's CFO, he wrote in the affidavit.

O'Brien's attorneys at the Irish law firm Fenecas Law attached 47 pages of exhibits to the affidavit, showing records of crypto transactions, notifications of deleted messages, and examples of documents O'Brien says he stole from Rippling on Deel's behalf.

Representatives for Deel didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company previously said it denies "all legal wrongdoing" and would file a counterclaim against Rippling.

'He believed it was a "trap"'

Rippling said in its lawsuit last month that O'Brien was caught after the company devised an elaborate honeypot operation that led him to search for information in a phony Slack channel called "#d-defectors," where Rippling employees purportedly discussed information Deel would find embarrassing.

In the new affidavit, O'Brien wrote his handlers at Deel realized Rippling had set the trap — but not until it was too late.

"I ran the search immediately and began to look at the results," O'Brien wrote. "Within minutes, Alex messaged me again and told me not to run the search because he believed it was a 'trap.'"

"I told Alex that by the time I got his message, I had already done the search and he said 'oh shit,'" O'Brien continued.

Rippling said in its lawsuit that it brought O'Brien's spying to the attention of an Irish court, which appointed a lawyer to Rippling's office to seize his electronic devices for preservation in potential future litigation. O'Brien's affidavit, dated April 1 and made public Wednesday, came in a court case related to those proceedings.

When O'Brien was confronted by the court-appointed lawyer, he hid in the bathroom and appeared to try to flush his phone down the toilet, Rippling alleged.

In O'Brien's affidavit, he said the lawyer's appearance made him realize "how serious this was" and he "panicked."

He performed a factory reset on his phone while in the bathroom and "flushed the toilet a couple of times," he wrote.

O'Brien left the Rippling office and contacted Alex Bouaziz, he wrote. A Deel lawyer instructed him to get rid of his phone, he wrote.

"He told me to destroy my old phone by breaking it up and throwing it in the canal," he wrote.

The next day, O'Brien "smashed my old phone with an axe and put it down the drain at my mother-in-law's house, as Deel's lawyer Asif had advised," he wrote.

Deel also offered to move O'Brien's entire family to another country, he wrote.

"Deel's lawyer Asif said they would move me and my family to Dubai, and would figure out a mechanism to cover my legal costs," O'Brien wrote.

O'Brien said he became frustrated with the people at Deel, who he said wanted to promote a false story accusing Rippling of violating Russian sanctions to "shift the narrative."

Deel's attorneys also deleted their messages and made it hard to reach them, he wrote.

After a few days, O'Brien agreed to cooperate with Rippling, he said.

"I was getting sick concealing this lie," he wrote. "I realised that I was harming myself and my family to protect Deel."

"I was concerned, and I am still concerned, about how wealthy and powerful Alex and Philippe are, but I know that what I was doing was wrong," he continued.

April 2, 2025: This story has been updated with more details from the court documents.

• TJ Patel uses the 'door-in-the-face' technique to negotiate higher salaries in software engineering.
• The strategy involves making a high initial request and then a more reasonable follow-up.
• Patel secured offers $10,000 to $30,000 above initial proposals using this method.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with TJ Patel, a 27-year-old software engineer in Austin who asked that BI not name his employers. Business Insider has verified Patel's income and employment with documentation; the negotiations are based on his recollection of conversations during each hiring process. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I was a college senior when I learned the "door-in-the-face" technique from Robert Cialdini's book, "Influence." I used the strategy when I started applying for jobs, and it's helped me secure higher salaries in each job negotiation throughout my career.

I'm a software engineer, but this strategy could work for any industry. You only need data on typical salaries for a specific industry and an idea of the specific company's salary range.

The technique is simple

"Door in the face" is when someone asks for something big or unreasonable in an initial request and then follows up with what they actually want.

I decided to leverage "door in the face" after reading Cialdini's example about organizers asking for donations, where they start by asking for something quite large, which is almost certain to be turned down — the door slamming in your face.

Then they pivot to the smaller — and truly desired — ask, which suddenly seems more reasonable by comparison.

That's when it clicked for me: I could use this same principle in salary negotiations

The "door-in-the-face" strategy has a real risk: If you ask for too much, an employer might decide to walk away altogether.

I realized if I was willing to accept that possibility — and if I asked respectfully and backed up my request with evidence like competing offers or my past performance — then most reasonable employers would at least counter.

My logic was that if they're already at the point of wanting to hire me, they've invested time and resources into the process, so they might be open to adjusting their offer rather than starting over with a new candidate.

'Door in the face' has been crucial in all of my salary negotiations

Since reading "Influence," in every job offer I've gotten, I anchored the negotiation on a number much higher than the lowest I was willing to accept. Once they declined my high number, my follow-up request seemed more moderate, and employers were more willing to meet me in the middle.

Sometimes, I asked for the lower amount on the same call; other times, I'd wait a day to "think about it" before coming back with a more "reasonable" figure.

Either way, the technique helped me secure offers ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 more in total compensation than the employers' original proposal — and more than I expected based on public salary data.

Here's how the offer negotiation process went at each company I've worked at, including two Big Tech companies.

My first job: Junior developer at a staff augmentation firm

The initial offer: $55,000/year

What I asked for: $70,000/year

What I got: $65,000/year

I went through this interview process in December 2018. I was two weeks from my college graduation, so I interviewed with many companies and got several competing offers.

I told my recruiter about a $62,000 competing offer from a consultancy services company and said I wanted $70,000 from the staff augmentation firm.

The firm said $70,000 wasn't possible, so I asked for $65,000 — still $10,000 above their original offer — and they agreed.

My 2nd job: Software engineer at a health benefits company

The initial offer: $65,000/year

What I asked for: $90,000/year

What I got: $80,000/year

In 2019, the staff augmentation firm assigned me to be part of a major health benefits company project as a third-party contractor. After nine months, the manager at the health benefits company wanted to bring me on as a full-time employee.

The manager initially offered me $65,000 to match my current pay. I aimed high and asked for $90,000, emphasizing that I was already working as a team lead and had been recognized as a top performer.

I had data on the company's salary range for that specific job title, which I got by asking full-time employees of the company. They got that information from internal job portals.

The manager said they couldn't do $90,000, but we eventually agreed on $80,000 in total yearly comp — $15,000 above their initial offer.

My 3rd job: Senior software engineer at a compliance company

The initial offer: $88,000/year

What I asked for: $100,000/year

What I got: $100,000/year

In 2021, I received a job offer from a compliance company in Austin for $88,000 a year and another offer from a different company in Cincinnati for $115,000 a year. I told the hiring manager at the compliance company that I wanted to accept their offer, but it wouldn't make sense to reject a $115,000-a-year offer.

I asked them to bump it to at least $100,000 and shared my other offer letter without being asked to ensure there was no doubt about it and save me any potential back-and-forth negotiations.

They agreed, and I took their offer since I wanted to move to Austin.

My 4th job: Senior software engineer at a Magnificent 7 company

The initial offer: $175,000/year

What I asked for: $240,000/ year

What I got: $204,000/year

When I applied at a Magnificent 7 company after a recruiter found me on LinkedIn, I asked for a compensation package of $240,000 yearly. The recruiter said they couldn't go that high since the software engineer pay band for my level didn't allow that.

I interviewed for a higher-level role to get the compensation I wanted, but the hiring manager placed me at a level below that based on my interview performance.

He wanted to hire me, so I asked for the max pay band for that level and a promotion path, which involved completing a series of projects within my first year. He agreed, and that's how I got $204,000.

My current job: Senior member of technical staff at a Big Tech firm

The initial offer: $190,000/ year

What I asked for: $250,000/year

What I got: $223,000/year

During my first communication with a Big Tech firm recruiter in 2024, I asked for $250,000 in total compensation. A few days later, the recruiter returned and said they couldn't do that, and the max was $190,000.

I said I didn't want to proceed with the interview process, and then, a few days later, the recruiter told me they could do $200,000. I accepted that.

In the meantime, I got a verbal offer from a high-growth startup for $250,000. During the final offer process at the Big Tech firm, I asked them to bump the pay to $250,000 since I had a competing offer. I waited for the recruiter to meet me at $250,000 and reiterated my competing offer.

The recruiter followed up with me every several days to see if I would go lower. I held firm. They offered me $223,000, and I accepted since the Big Tech firm was more stable than the startup.

Once you understand 'door in the face,' you can use it in many ways

I've also used this technique in my work life when being asked about project deadlines.

If management pushes an aggressive deadline, I usually counter with something that's 20% longer than I expect it to be. This makes it easier to meet in the middle and align on a deadline. It sounds pretty simple, but I don't see many people using these strategies in the corporate world.

I expect my current Big Tech company to be my last corporate stop. I plan to stay here until the business I'm building in my free time takes off. I'll use these techniques aggressively if I enter the corporate workforce again.

Buying a home is a high-stakes game, often with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line. Making a wrong decision can lead to foreclosure and bankruptcy; making the right decision can generate wealth that is passed down for generations.

When people are ready to settle down, they're confronted with all the usual dilemmas: whether to buy a home; where to buy a home; what kind of home to buy; and how much to spend. These highly emotional decisions are all more manageable using the lessons of behavioral economics, which I studied as an economist.

When I took a new tech job offer in 2017, it meant leaving San Diego for Seattle. As I set out to find a new home for myself, my husband, and my mom in my new city, I wanted to avoid getting caught up in the competitive pressure of beating out other buyers and making rash decisions that I might later regret. So I decided to divide my search into two phases. In the first, I would take my time getting to know the city and its various neighborhoods by renting a home. In the second, once I had a clear sense of my preferences, I would begin making offers on properties that met my criteria. By taking this approach, I hoped to avoid the pitfalls of hasty decision-making and make an intelligent, informed choice.

For about five months, I spent a great deal of time exploring the different neighborhoods and assessing their pros and cons. From historic homes dating back to the 19th century to midcentury modern homes from Seattle's post-World War II boom to modern new construction, there were plenty of options.

The most significant tradeoff to be made when choosing is location versus home size. I initially thought of a short commute and a large home as must-haves, but given my budget and the need to have space for three adults and three dogs, I had to sacrifice on the length of my commute. Many homebuyers make this same compromise. According to a Redfin survey, 89% of homebuyers would rather purchase a single-family home with a backyard than a unit in a triplex with a shorter commute.

Soon we focused our efforts on West Seattle, a neighborhood located on a peninsula across the sound from downtown. My commute to the office would take about 30 minutes each way by bus, where I could at least get some work done with the complimentary WiFi. This was a decent tradeoff, given that homes in West Seattle were about $100,000 less than homes closer to the downtown office.

Now in phase two, when I began viewing properties and making offers, I became hyperconscious of how my emotions might influence my decision-making. Common mistakes made by homebuyers include becoming too attached to a particular home, fixating on the list price instead of the market value, following the herd, and letting fatigue cloud judgment.

You must try to avoid falling in love too quickly with a home. Once you start picturing your future in a home, it can become challenging to walk away, and it can suck you into a fierce bidding war. Block out any and all thoughts about hosting holidays or your children playing in the backyard. Yes, it is a good idea to consider whether the home will suit you in the future, but if you become too attached to that future, you're working against yourself. People value a home more if they already feel like they own it.

Behavioral economists have a term for this: the endowment effect. The behavioral economist Jack Knetsch has found that people's willingness to sell an item they own was lower than their willingness to buy an item they did not own, even when the subjects knew ownership was assigned randomly. In one experiment, test subjects were given either a lottery ticket or cash. Most people opted to keep whatever form of compensation they had received first instead of trading it for the other option. For a variety of reasons, whether an aversion to feeling loss or a bias toward the status quo, people tend to get attached to the bird in their hand, even when there might be two in the bush.

List prices can also be misleading. In a hot market, sellers may advertise their homes for significantly less than what buyers are ready to pay in order to spark a bidding war. This amounts to a bait-and-switch.

As a buyer, don't take the bait. Don't anchor your expectations on the listed price. The anchoring effect refers to a person's tendency to focus on the first piece of information they hear while making decisions. In a famous lab experiment by the late Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, research subjects spun a wheel of fortune with numbers from 0 to 100. The participants were then asked to guess the share of African countries that were members of the UN. Participants whose spin landed on a lower number were more likely to guess a low number. Participants whose wheel spin landed on a high number were more likely to guess a high number. The number the needle of the wheel landed on was completely irrelevant, yet the research subjects still used it as an anchor for their guesses.

The list price of a home may contain some helpful information about what the seller believes its value is. But ultimately the value of the house is set by the market.

If you need to, take a break. Losing bidding war after bidding war — which happens a lot — fosters fatigue and impatience, which can lead you to give up too soon or to buy a home you later regret.

Behavioral economists have repeatedly found that the quality of decisions deteriorates when an individual is overburdened with too many options. A study published in Health Economics found that orthopedic surgeons made worse recommendations toward the end of their shifts. Doctors were less likely to recommend surgery for patients who would have benefited just as much from surgery as patients seen earlier in the surgeon's shift.

Also, avoid following the herd. If others are ready to bid high, you could be tempted to do the same and stretch your budget. Herding behavior, another behavioral economics term, can lead to bubbles in the housing market or the stock market and was one of the culprits for the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. The best way to avoid getting caught up in speculation bubbles is to not speculate in the first place and make offers appropriate only to your personal financial circumstances.

After spending a few weeks touring homes in the area, I came across a property that immediately caught my eye. It had everything my family was looking for. But there was one giant red flag: the home had been on the market for nearly a year without any offers.

Upon further inspection, I noticed that the house was located across the street from a strip mall and had a strange layout. Even though I liked the home, I wanted to avoid paying more than other buyers might think it was worth. So I kept looking.

When buying a home, you have no choice but to concern yourself with resale value. Life is unpredictable; there is always the chance you might not stay in the home long term, and you don't want to pay more than what you can resell it for.

There is tension in this advice: a homebuyer must avoid herding behavior by thinking for themself while simultaneously considering how other people might value homes in the future.

The way to walk the middle path is detached observation — recognize the behavior patterns of others without letting it unduly bias your decision-making.

About a month later, we found a home that seemed too good to be true. Ample space, close to public transit, even a view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. However, the home was 70 years old, so we would need to update the electrical, plumbing, and heating. Since we were renting elsewhere, we could delay moving to get this work done.

Things go wrong after you buy a home. Thinking that these problems won't end up costing you significant time and money is what behavioral economists call optimism bias: the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of favorable outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of unfavorable outcomes. The challenge, then, is to consider the risks and whether they are worth the reward.

As I prepared to make an offer to buy a home, I thought back to the hundreds of homeowners going through foreclosure that I interviewed while interning at the Boston Fed. They experienced bad luck on top of bad luck — deaths, divorces, medical emergencies, job loss, and a global recession. Any of those things could happen to me.

With all the repairs the house needed, I determined the maximum amount I could afford to pay was $950,000. I liked this particular home more than any other home on the market priced below $950,000, so I reasoned that this amount must be my value for the home. But I still had a nagging feeling that I was overextending myself and overpaying.

What if the roof sprang a leak? And what if, because I had already spent my savings repairing the plumbing, electrical, heating, and cooling, I didn't have any money left to repair the roof?

I could have kept going down the list of unlikely catastrophes. Instead, I focused on the unlikeliness of the scenario rather than the pain of the scenario. This helped me get out of my head and back to the task at hand. In economics, expected utility theory hypothesizes that individuals weigh uncertain outcomes according to their likelihood and the net benefit of each outcome. I shuddered at the thought of a bad scenario, like being laid off during a severe recession and housing-market downturn. However, according to expected utility theory, I should weigh that feeling against the likelihood of that scenario, which I reasoned to be a once-in-a-century event. In all likelihood, my job was safe, the economy was fine, and the value of homes would keep going up.

The home was listed at $840,000. I submitted my bid on the home for that amount. When you're deciding whether to bid above or below the asking price, look up how competitive the housing market is in the neighborhood and how the home compares to what else is on the market. If the market is cool, it's advisable to come in low. However, if the market is hot, the seller may completely ignore your offer if it's below the asking price.

Even though I offered $840,000, I was ready to go as high as $940,000. Later that day, my agent called me to deliver the good news: we won the home at list price. No one else even submitted a bid.

Daryl Fairweather is the author of "Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work" and the chief economist of Redfin.

This story is adapted from "Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work" by Daryl Fairweather, to be published by the University of Chicago Press on April 11, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Daryl Rose Fairweather. Printed by arrangement with the University of Chicago Press.

Henry Kirk, a cofounder of the software development company Studio Init, wants to hire the best engineers. That's why he asked job applicants not to use generative AI in the first technical coding part of their interviews — with the promise that they'd be able to show off their combined engineering and AI skills in a later section. "They still cheated," he tells me.

"It was so obvious," Kirk says. The coding tests took place in tandem with a video call, and some candidates frequently looked off to the side. They gave delayed answers or copied and pasted full blocks of code into the system instead of typing step-by-step. Some refused to share their screens or spouted off-topic answers to verbal questions, leading Kirk to believe they were reading large language model outputs verbatim without even thinking. "It's a waste of our time," he says. But even as AI is making a mess of technical screening tests, Kirk says he still thinks it has value. "I'm a small company. I have 400 applicants. How do I screen the people down to a manageable chunk of folks?"

Many software engineers aren't just allowed but are increasingly expected to use AI on the job. Companies like Google, Meta, and Salesforce increasingly rely on it for engineering tasks in the name of efficiency. But with gen AI now able to code as effectively as a junior engineer, bosses are wondering if the traditional coding tests — which have long been a staple of the hiring process — can still separate the good developers from the sloppy ones.

New tools keep popping up to make cheating on tests even more seamless: A since suspended Columbia University student, Chungin "Roy" Lee, recently created a tool called Interview Coder and used it to cheat on an Amazon coding test and then posted the interview to YouTube. He's selling the tool to other engineers for just $60 a month (he's claimed on X that he received and rejected an internship offer). Amazon has said candidates can be disqualified using gen AI unless explicitly permitted. The company did not comment specifically on Lee's test, but Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, tells me that the company has job candidates acknowledge they won't use gen AI during the interview process when it's not permitted, but it does have them share their history of working with the tools when relevant. Google is also considering bringing some interviews back to in-person settings, where they can have more control over the environment. A Google spokesperson told me that applicants are informed before interviews that if they use AI during them they will be disqualified.

Recruiters and hiring managers I spoke to for this story said the mainstream adoption of ChatGPT led them to suspect that more job seekers are trying to cheat their way past the code tests. Companies are scrambling to change old evaluation processes for a new era. But as they push engineers to get more efficient with AI on one hand and wag their finger at its use with the other, they're raising new ethical questions about what really counts as cheating: Is an LLM an unfair edge, or just a coding partner?

The traditional coding interview is at a crossroads. But the end of the old interview might be welcome among engineers.

"Timed coding tests were never truly realistic; AI just pulled back the curtain," says Annie Lux, the founder and CEO of the coaching firm Land That Job. The interviews create pressure and penalize people who struggle in test environments, Lux says. And many employers now expect engineers to leverage AI tools at work — tests that ban them put job candidates in a different scenario than the one they would work in. A 2020 study by North Carolina State University and Microsoft found that people were better at solving coding problems when they weren't being watched closely and told to explain their work as they went — confirmation that some engineers performed worse when under the stressful conditions of a traditional technical interview. "These interviews reward test-taking over engineering," Lux says. "They ignore how software engineers actually work."

Andrej Karpathy, an Open AI cofounder, coined the term "vibe coding," a nod to the way AI will help engineers "just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff," and have it "mostly work," as he put it. An engineer's skill for writing code may become less impressive than their capacity to understand it. But the issue hiring managers tangle with now is how to balance the benefits of vibe coding with vetting the best engineers from large pools of applicants in a tight job market where there's a huge incentive to cheat your way into an offer letter. On the job, "hopefully, they are using AI, to do the stuff AI can do," says Don Jernigan, a vice president at Experis Services, an IT staffing firm. "We need to be testing and evaluating them from the areas between what a human can do and what AI can't do."

Kirk says a "perfect storm" bolstered cheaters: The tech job market tightened just as ChatGPT went mainstream. There were more applicants for fewer jobs and more people hoping a perfect score on a coding test would help them stand out. Now, it could hurt them in the long run. Kirk says he and his team have gotten more confident about catching cheaters, and will sometimes call them out and end the interview if they're sure they've found one. One applicant even admitted to it, and others have left the interview without argument, he says. And he is keeping a blacklist of people he suspects cheat in his interviews and plans to never consider them in the future. He already has a list of dozens of people he's sure tried to cheat, with hundreds more who raised suspicion. Now, his studio has applicants follow up their first test by coming on-site for more tests. "We're potentially paying you a lot of money and we need to make sure there's a good fit all around," he says.

ChatGPT didn't invent cheating. In the past, software engineering applicants would sometimes deputize a friend to spit out code in their place (either in a take-home test or, as one recruiter told me, actually sending someone else in their place to the interview round), and job seekers would share coding tests and answers online. If you search Reddit, TikTok, or Blind, you'll find people sharing tips and tricks to con an interviewer. But AI is a knowledgeable friend who's even easier to access. More people are using it to try to land any job by mass applying or sending AI-generated cover letters. Overwhelmed recruiters then use their own AI tools to try to sift through and find the best candidates. It's all creating a massive cog, with two different AIs talking to each other and both job seekers and hiring managers feeling frustrated.

When it came to engineers, recruiters and hiring managers started to notice something was amiss by early 2023. Job applicants completed coding tests with perfect answers, but when they moved on to interviews about the test, some knew little to nothing about the work they'd submitted. "Even with ChatGPT earlier versions, it could solve a lot of coding questions," says Yang Mou, the cofounder and CEO of the AI recruiting company Fonzi. "The thing that's even more insidious now is that the AI is also better at explaining the answers as if it was a human." Fonzi interviewed 1,270 candidates for a software engineering job between January and March, and flagged 23% of them "as likely to be using external tools," Mou says. The AI tool scans answers for awkwardly long pauses and evaluates phrases used to see the likelihood that they've been written by a chatbot, and then humans can listen back to the interview to see if they catch any red flags.

Two years ago, the technical interview company Karat flagged about 2% of interviewees as potential cheaters. Now, that proportion has jumped to 10% of interviewees. "It's happening more frequently," says Jeffrey Spector, the cofounder and president of Karat. "Ultimately, our belief is that interviews have to evolve." Karat is developing a new interview process that it hopes will better evaluate job seekers when they use LLMs, Spector tells me. "The LLM is becoming a core part of how engineers do their job. Preventing them from using the tools on their job seems very unnatural."

As AI becomes a bigger part of the job, Spector says, hiring managers — and humanity at large — have to ask the question: "How do you define cheating?" He says people shouldn't disregard explicit instructions not to use AI, but if most people are using it and you're not, you might be at a disadvantage in the interview process. Many applicants use books and online tips to study for coding interviews, and some use ChatGPT to practice for job interviews. When it comes to using AI in the actual test, Spector says, a tipping point will come where it feels too disadvantageous not to, particularly among young engineers who have learned and grown up in the LLM era — and the ethical questions will get messier.

Hadi Chami, the director of solution engineering at the software company Apryse, says he began to notice ways job candidates were using LLMs as he started to use them more in his own work. So he changed the job application last year. Now, he gives applicants who pass a first "vibe check" interview a take-home assignment, with the expectation they'll use AI. But he tells them they'll have to walk him through their work. That's helpful for now, as he can still see whether they know why something works, not just that it does work. But Chaim expects the problem to get worse: He says that he's concerned about young workers coming into the field. "They may have an overreliance on the tool. They'll be able to ace all their classes," but might struggle in the workplace, he says.

Maybe this isn't the interview apocalypse scenario it seems. "This is a little of a new frontier, which is maybe why there is so much fear and stress on both sides and people are just flailing," says Victoria Gates, the cofounder of the interview training firm Expert Interviews. "If you're investing your time and your money into finding out if candidates are cheating, you're wasting your time. The way interview processes are today, they are very unfair towards candidates. Of course they're going to try to find anything they can." Instead of trying to go full bad cop and employ tech to monitor cheating, Gates says companies should train interviewers to ask incisive follow-up questions and for specific examples that LLMs can't generate. Right now, companies may be focused on catching cheaters, but Ali Ansari, the founder and CEO of the AI interview company Micro1, says that will change. "I think coding in general is already looking extremely different," he says. "That implies even without the cheating, the coding test will have to start looking different." He predicts that there will be a "new norm" for coding interviews within the next year or two.

All this coding mess is evidence of the breakdown in trust between employers and workers. Job seekers are questioning how much free labor they owe someone who may not even extend them a second interview, and more bosses are doubting the integrity and work ethic of the people reporting to them. So much of the tech meant to make job searching easier and more accessible has just added noise to the process. Killing the old coding test and using something more creative in its place may be a small step in repairing that disconnect.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

• People are replying to posts on X — asking Grok: "Is this true?"
• It's a new form of dunking on someone on X, and it's making the old Twitter an even weirder place.
• There's a limit to how useful a chatbot like Grok can be on social platforms — and we're seeing it.

Lately, I've noticed something surprising on X: People are actually using Grok. Like, a lot.

Before I describe why this is kind of weird — and making X kind of weird — I should give a disclaimer that I generally find X to be worse than it used to be in both specific and vague ways.

I don't think Grok is to blame; it's more the boring reasons you've probably heard before: a lot of the lively and funny users I used to enjoy have quit the platform, the remaining users seem to be more combative, the "For you" feed is dominated by clickbaity viral video chum, there's a lot of spam and porn.

The thing that I've noticed outside all that stuff is this new phenomenon of asking Grok questions in a reply to a post. Typically, a person is asking Grok — Elon Musk's ChatGPT competitor —to explain the context of a tweet or to verify if something in the tweet is true.

Here's a made-up example of the kind of stuff I see:

@PersonA: The moon died because it was vaccinated

@PersonB: @grok, is this true?

@grok: The moon is not alive and, therefore, cannot be vaccinated.

When I describe it like that, it sounds very normal and useful, right? Well, in practice — as with a lot of things connected to LLMs — it sort of makes things … just weird.

How Grok responds

I've spent some time browsing the "Replies" tab of @Grok, which is a fascinating firehose of all the replies to various things people are asking it. (Note: I'm talking about publicly asking @Grok as a reply to a post on X — not the private conversations you can have with Grok.)

What I tend to see a lot: people responding to a political post with some sort of fact-check. The topics tend to be the kinds of things that some people might want to stir up fights about: Trump's policies, the history of Jews, immigration, Elon Musk, and a lot of questions related to Hitler. (There's also a lot of stuff that isn't in English, so I can't say what that's about.)

One recent "fact-check" came in response to a post from Musk himself:

(For this meme, Grok said no, it wasn't factual. I asked the person who runs the @Dispropganda account if they knew in advance they were going to get that answer, and they said, "I didn't know for sure, but I suspected.")

In theory, this is good, right? Finally, people are able to get fact-checks on posts and access to unbiased opinions!

But what Grok seems to be used for more often is a rhetorical cudgel, a debate tactic. It's not being used for earnest requests for information but as a new tool in the dunk utility belt.

I've seen people use it on posts they know aren't true — and are purposely getting Grok to point that out.

Asking Grok to weigh in on someone's tweet has its own passive-aggressive vibe. Instead of engaging the original poster, you're appealing to this automated thing.

The fact that people seem to be using it during debates on heated topics where people generally have entrenched ideas suggests that people aren't using it as a helpful resource during lively discussions. They're using it to fight and argue, to insult the other person. They're using Grok as an AI dunk assistant.

And instead of elevating the level of discourse on X with more truth and utility, it's just dragging it down with more nasty arguing and petty trolling. (X didn't immediately reply to a request for comment on this story.)

AI has its limits on social media

I'm not a total AI skeptic — I believe there can be some amazing things happening quite soon. But as far as getting an AI bot to engage with you on social media? I really think we're already seeing the limits here. It might be mildly useful in some limited instances, but it's not making the overall X experience better and certainly, in some cases, is making it slightly worse.

I don't mean to be sentimental, but part of the beauty of a text-based social platform is that you CAN just reply to people and engage with them, and, yes, even argue with them! Or if you see something that needs context, you can ask for it or just keep scrolling.

I saw someone ask Grok to explain the context of some deep stan lore tweet about Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber, and I kind of felt sad in a way. Back in MY day, you needed to actually spend tons of time watching the strange motions of the Seleners to be able to understand their garbled system of beliefs — and there was some beauty to that.

Now, you can have Grok — or another chatbot — just spit it out. I'm not sure that's a totally good thing.

• Henry Lee left his corporate accounting career to open a Korean fried chicken franchise.
• Lee bounced between Big Four firms like Deloitte and Ernst & Young, seeking salary increases.
• He now owns six Bonchon fried chicken locations in Colorado and plans to open a large food hall.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Henry Lee, a 46-year-old franchise owner in Aurora, Colorado. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Academics were never my strong suit. My GPA was barely 3.0 while I attended a small school in Tennessee on a football scholarship. I majored in finance and economics.

My goal was to get to the NFL, but when I realized that was not happening, I started looking for a job related to my major.

After working as an accountant for multiple companies, including Big Fours, I left my corporate career to open a fried chicken franchise. I'm so much happier now.

Once I got to my first Big Four, I jumped around

My first job was for PRG-Schultz, a debt recovery company specializing in sales tax recovery. I found the position and applied through a job site.

After that, I worked as a sales tax accountant at International Rectifier. My manager told me I should try to get a job at a Big Four. I didn't have an impressive résumé, but I applied, interviewed, and got hired as a senior tax associate at Deloitte. Working in sales tax is incredibly niche, and I think that helped me get the job.

Working at Deloitte opened up many doors

Everyone majoring in accounting hopes to one day work at a Big Four. Once you have one of these companies on your résumé, it doesn't matter where you attended college.

I didn't consider the work difficult — I rarely get stressed out and don't take things too seriously. You're expected to bill lots of hours and work overtime. There's also a lot of office politics.

Over the next 10 years, I hopped around to work at different companies, staying only about a year each time. Back then, people would leave to work at other companies for salary increases, which is how I ended up at Ernst & Young.

I chased the highest possible salary bumps

A former colleague referred me to EY. We got referral bonuses, so everyone tried to refer as many people as possible. After that, another position opened up with Deloitte in San Diego, and I left for another salary bump.

My salary increased by two to three percent annually, so it was more profitable to move to another company and get a 20% to 25% salary increase plus a signing bonus.

I was laid off from my second role at Deloitte in 2008 during the recession. After working at Burger King as a senior tax specialist, I was referred to Accenture in 2011 as a senior consultant by a former colleague.

My experiences at the Big Four companies were similar

My performance reviews were usually good to average. I didn't consider myself a superstar or a high-performing employee. The working environment was similar in all three of them. Only the people were different.

Deloitte was fun because the people in my department weren't uptight. EY was more strict overall.

PwC, where I started working in 2014, was my favorite company. I formed a relationship there with a former Microsoft employee who referred me to Microsoft in 2013. Microsoft had the best work-life balance of all the companies.

Eventually, I was tired of the internal politics at these companies and the endless Zoom meetings, which were a waste of time. I thought, 'I couldn't just be born to do taxes,' and the work was not groundbreaking, rewarding, or challenging. I was unproductive and uninterested in the job. They call it quiet quitting nowadays.

I was considering what to do next. Growing up, my family owned a Chinese restaurant. I missed Korean fried chicken in Colorado, which was so good in Los Angeles but terrible here.

I decided to open a Korean fried chicken franchise myself

I decided to franchise with Bonchon because I missed it from living in Los Angeles. I invested my life savings into opening the first location and the initial franchise fee by cashing out my 401(k) of around $100,000.

I underwent three weeks of kitchen training, during which I learned how to fry chicken, cook the dishes, and prep the veggies. Training also included front-of-house training.

While opening the restaurant, I still worked at Microsoft but quit eight months in. As a senior tax manager, the salary I left behind was just under $160,000.

After opening the first location in Denver in 2018, the business took off

I bought all the franchise rights in Colorado and now have six locations. I also own a boba tea shop, and my next venture is opening a 15,000-square-foot food hall with seven restaurants.

The most significant difference is that in corporate, you're expected to be in the office for 40-50 hours regardless of if you have work or projects to do. When you own a business, you work when needed.

When I first opened Bonchon, I cooked and ran day-to-day operations in the kitchen. I worked around 60-80 hours a week, seven days a week. It was a grind for the first year because of the steep learning curve.

By the time I opened my third location, I was hands-off on the day-to-day operations and relied on my managers. I'm much happier now.

I have a wife and two kids and can spend much more time with them now.

I would never, ever go back to corporate

Working in corporate is like being stuck in the matrix; after you find your way out, it's like night and day. You can't go back once you experience the freedom to do whatever you want.

When you leave corporate, you realize you're capable of so much, but leaving the security, steady paycheck, and benefits was scary. I have an increased net worth, and getting capital to expand or fund others is much easier. I wish I left much earlier in my career.

Occupy Wall Street, Notorious RBG, cottagecore. These and several other lasting internet trends and IRL movements of the 2010s were born not on Twitter, on Facebook, or in the mainstream media but on Tumblr. You might remember it as the blogging platform that became one of the most hyped startups in the world before fading into obsolescence — bought by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013 (back when a billion still felt like a billion), then acquired by Verizon, and later offloaded for fractions of pennies on the dollar in a distressed sale. That same Tumblr, a relic of many millennials' formative years, has been having a moment among Gen Z.

Zoomers have gravitated toward the pseudonymous platform, viewing it as a safe space as the rest of the social internet has become increasingly commodified, polarized, and dominated by lifestyle influencers. As in its heyday, Tumblr is still more about sharing art, culture, and fandom than individual status. More posts about anime and punk rock than bridal trends and politics. In 2025, 50% of Tumblr's active monthly users are Gen Zers, as are 60% of new users signing up, according to data Tumblr shared with Business Insider. And several of Zoomers' icons, from the "Fault in Our Stars" author John Green to the pop superstar Halsey, have come back to the platform.

"Gen Z has this romanticism of the early-2000s internet," says Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who worked at Tumblr for seven years, leaving her role as head of content in 2021. She still uses her own Tumblr regularly as the internet's resident meme librarian. "It allows for experimentation that's not tied to your face."

Part of the reason young people are hanging out on old social platforms is that there's nowhere new to go. The tech industry is evolving at a slower pace than it was in the 2000s, and there's less room for disruption. Big Tech has a stranglehold on how we socialize. That leaves Gen Z to pick up the scraps left by the early online millennials and attempt to craft them into something relevant. They love Pinterest (founded in 2010) and Snapchat (2011), and they're trying out digital point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones for an early-2000s aesthetic — and learning the valuable lesson that sometimes we look better when blurrier. More Gen Zers and millennials are signing up for Yahoo. Napster, surprising many people with its continued existence, just sold for $207 million. The trend is fueled by nostalgia for Y2K aesthetics and a longing for a time when people could make mistakes on the internet and move past them.

The pandemic also brought more Gen Z users to Tumblr. The blogging site was an online oasis in the barrage of horrifying news and conspiracy theories, thanks to its acute focus on art and pop culture. And when other platforms take hits, Tumblr benefits: User numbers spiked to coincide with the near-banning of TikTok in January and the temporary ban of X in Brazil last year. Tumblr seems to be a refuge for people searching for new social sites. In January, people launched communities on Tumblr to post and preserve their favorite TikTok videos. Meanwhile, progressives mad at Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk for going full MAGA and are ditching Facebook and X as punishment.

"Our menu has been full. There's been no more space to add something else," says Andrew Roth, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of the Gen Z-focused research and consulting firm DCDX. In a poll of more than 600 Zoomers that DCDX conducted in 2024, two-thirds of respondents said they wanted their social media presence to become more private. Tumblr might be just what many young people are looking for. "Now the time feels more ripe for that to happen for Tumblr, even if Tumblr is doing the same thing or staying in the same spot."

Ari Levine, the head of brand partnerships at Tumblr, tells me the platform is both "more peaceful" and more resolutely itself than its competitors. While Meta runs around aping its competitors' features (reels from TikTok, stories from Snapchat), it hasn't been able to mimic what Tumblr does (though Meta, then called Facebook, was in talks to buy Tumblr before Yahoo did). "How many times am I in an app and I no longer know what app I'm in?" Levine says.

And Tumblr still works much like an older internet, where people have more control over what they see and rely less on algorithms. "You curate your own stuff; it takes a little bit of work to put everything in place, but when it's working, you see the content you want to see," Fjodor Everaerts, a 26-year-old in Belgium who has made some 250,000 posts since he joined Tumblr when he was 14. He says he sees his blog as a "flow of consciousness" and a "diary," one that's mostly made up of reblogging things he finds interesting rather than original posts. In a way, that's a core part of what Tumblr has always done: It's far more focused on fandom and art than it is around single blogs becoming cults of personality.

Being an iconic and beloved cultural corner doesn't always lead to cash flows, however, and the site has had a troubled decade. Yahoo bought Tumblr when Tumblr was one of the world's fastest-growing social networks, and it promised not to "screw it up." But Tumblr's embedded anti-advertising and anti-influencer stances had driven a wedge between the site and monetization. The pseudonymous nature of Tumblr was a direct opposition to Facebook's insistence on users using their real names and faces, and the free-flowing adult content on the site scared advertisers off. Yahoo got left behind in the mobile revolution, and Tumblr, too, suffered, with Verizon scooping up both at discount. In 2018, Tumblr notoriously banned porn and pissed off users, which led 30% of them to quit. The next year, Verizon offloaded Tumblr to WordPress' owner, Automattic, for $3 million, 0.3% of what Yahoo had paid for it.

Under Automattic, Tumblr is finally in the home that serves it, Levine says. "We've had ups and downs along the way, but we're in the most interesting position and place that we've been in 18 years," he says. The site is trying to keep what its users love while unveiling features that do rival some of its competitors'. It's a shift after years of staying distinctly itself. In December, Tumblr launched its Communities feature, a sort of Facebook Groups meets subreddits in which people can join groups based on specific interests, like making art of "silly bugs" or emo kids from the Midwest. In January, Tumblr also launched a TikTok competitor called Tumblr TV, which works like a search engine for GIFs and supports videos. And following media companies (including BI) and social platforms like Reddit, Automattic in 2024 was making a deal with OpenAI and Midjourney to allow the systems to train on Tumblr posts.

But Tumblr is the 10th-most-popular social media site in the US, dwarfed by Facebook, Instagram, and X, according to data from the analytics firm Similarweb. (Tumblr declined to provide total user numbers to BI, but Levine says it has seen steady growth.) Its users see that as a pro rather than a con; it's more exclusive and intentional. But its history of extreme waves in valuation and struggles to make money may dictate its fate more than those who blog there. "I want Tumblr to flourish," Brennan says. "I want it to exist forever. I want to use it forever. I think that it is one of the most beautiful spaces on the internet for someone to figure out who they are." But some of Tumblr's model is a "blessing for it as a user is a curse for it as a business."

The platform could benefit if it capitalized on the "shift from attention to intention," Roth tells me. "How do we actually monetize people's intentions on social media versus the attention of them being around?" That would mean a focus on "people's desires" and how to "help them reach them." Tumblr recently put out a lengthy report for marketers trying to reach Gen Z, advising them to engage with communities around their brands and to search for relevant interest among users over the reach of mainstream influencers. Levine tells me that when Automattic acquired Tumblr, it was a chance for the company to take "stock of where we are" and "reintroduce ourselves" to users and "brands and advertisers who help us pay the bills."

Tumblr loyalists tell me they haven't spent much time with the new features — they like the site the way it is. TJ Smith, a 25-year-old from Texas, says it provided a safe haven for them when they were 13. Diagnosed as autistic at 11, Smith found Tumblr an easier place to connect with and talk about their favorite fandoms, like the Percy Jackson series. Eventually, it helped them work through their sexuality and gender identity (they identify as pansexual and gender fluid). "Tumblr was the first place where I saw those terms being used," Smith tells me.

Most Tumblr blogs aren't about the people who make them, yet they're deeply personal places. Under their pseudonyms and art, people find communities and explore identities without scrutiny from IRL friends and family. Ashmita Shanthakumar, a 25-year-old from Utah who has been on Tumblr since 2013, sees it as "anti-social media," she tells me, and has used it to connect with people who like the same CW superhero shows as she did. She can focus on how the shows make her feel rather than personal updates on Facebook, which can feel comparative.

The social internet is fractured. Millennials are running Reddit. Gen Xers and Baby Boomers have a home on Facebook. Bluesky, one of the new X alternatives, has a tangible elder-millennial/Gen X vibe. Gen Zers have created social apps like BeReal and the Myspace-inspired Noplace, but they've so far generated more hype than influence. People of different ages migrate in numbers to various platforms and seize them, creating the vibes and culture there. Platforms lean more left or right politically. And while some (mostly on the right) have cried "echo chamber" with derision, there are benefits to carving out smaller communities with like-minded people to see and talk about the things you like. Megaplatforms can flatten our online experiences and reward content that fits a mold; smaller communities can enrich them.

I recently unearthed the Tumblr blog I made in high school (don't go looking — I deleted it and my teenage musings immediately). When I scrolled through Tumblr for the first time in at least a decade, I realized it still had something that no other social network did: the sense of timelessness. I saw a post of a simple, soothing color gradient followed by a recent reblog of a GIF posted in 2020 but taken from the 2002 original "Spider-Man" movie. There's still little video on the feed, and it's more of a silent, visual retreat, with cuts of movie scenes overlaid with dialogue on a loop. When I open TikTok and Instagram, I'm bombarded by filtered faces and music, or someone yelling into the camera to sell me a pair of magnetic eyelashes every few videos. Tumblr was the place I went in 2011 to see and reblog flash photography and '90s movie GIFs, so it's no surprise that it's no longer a place where decades of images are juxtaposed together, but one that has itself become a piece of nostalgia for a simpler time online. Unlike some of its 2000s peers, Tumblr doesn't need to fight to get its cool back, but it does have to find ways to keep its cool and move forward.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

• YouTube is big. Really big. Really, really big.
• How big? Try this: It's about to become the biggest media company in the world. Bigger than Disney.
• Reminder: This company is only two decades old.

You're still not paying enough attention to YouTube.

I know, I know: Some of you know that YouTube is not just a big force in media, but one of the biggest. But most folks — even people who make their living in media — don't fully get how big YouTube is. Even though we keep pointing it out, over and over.

So let's try it again, this time courtesy of MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson: Measured by revenue, YouTube was the second-biggest media company in the world last year. It brought in $54.2 billion in 2024 — just $5.5 billion behind Disney.

And in 2025, Nathanson predicts, YouTube should eclipse Disney, and become the biggest media company in the world.

Reminder: YouTube started a mere 20 years ago. Google bought the company for $1.65 billion in 2006.

If you wanted to, you could quibble with Nathanson's groupings. You could argue that Google itself is actually the biggest media company in the world since it generates close to $350 billion in annual revenue, the majority of which comes from ads. And that Meta, which generated $160 billion in ad sales last year, is also much bigger. You could also point out in his comparison, Nathanson has pulled out Disney's $30+ billion-a-year parks business, which is a huge part of Bob Iger's empire and one that's directly connected to its media properties.

But like I said, quibbles. The point is that YouTube commands an extraordinary amount of time and interest from its users, who are no longer just kids but everyone. (Reminder: When you hear about politicians trying to reach audiences via podcasts, that also means they're trying to reach them via YouTube.) And that advertisers, who took some time to figure that out — but get it now — are pouring money in to reach that audience.

More evidence for YouTube's hugeness? OK. Nathanson also predicts that the company's YouTube TV subscription business is set to become the biggest pay-TV provider in the country by 2026, as it keeps adding subscribers while rivals Comcast and Charter shed theirs.

He also guesstimates that as a stand-alone company, YouTube might be worth $475 billion to $550 billion — between Meta and Netflix's valuations.

The point is: Any you slice it, numerically, YouTube is ginormous.

That scale also makes it harder to get your head around. Unlike, say, a conventional media company, or a streamer, there's no flagship network, or program, or movie that works as a shorthand for YouTube's dominance: YouTube doesn't have a "Stranger Things" or a "Barbie" or the Marvel MCU.

The closest analog would be MrBeast, but that really doesn't get at it — MrBeast is huge, but if you're not a young boy, you're probably not watching his stuff. And lots of people who consume YouTube don't really think that they're "watching YouTube" — they're just watching the thing they want to watch, which is on YouTube.

So maybe it's more helpful to think of YouTube as a utility — even if you don't think about it that much, you're using it all the time. A utility worth half a trillion dollars.

• Rachel, 25, is a TikToker and strategy analyst in New York City.
• She takes six to seven fitness classes a week, plus ice baths three to four times a week.
• She shares how much she spends on her health in this installment of BI's Fitness Money Diaries.

Fill out this form if you would you like to share how much money you spend on health, fitness, and wellness with Business Insider's Fitness Money Diaries.

Rachel, a 25-year-old strategy analyst and TikToker in New York City, works out six to seven times a week. That's on top of her 9-to-5 job at a tech company, her TikTok side hustle, and socializing.

In total, she spends about 15% of her monthly take-home income on health and fitness.

"It is the largest sector I spend money on each month that is not a necessity," she told Business Insider.

Rachel, who didn't want to share her last name for privacy reasons, said she first got into fitness while working in finance. She has 74,700 followers on TikTok, where she posts under the username @RachelInARealWay.

"I really started to get into working out when I was in finance so that I could point to something I did that was for myself every single day," she said. In a job that took up most of her day, looking after her health was something her seniors had to respect, she said.

She started working out in her office's gym four times a week, running on the treadmill or doing Peloton workouts on an exercise bike.

She made six figures in that role, but left in February 2024 to take a lower-paying job that she enjoys more. The new job is "actually 9-to-5," she said. She uses some of her newfound free time to exercise.

She ran a half-marathon in the spring of 2024 and has since moved on to fitness classes, which she does six or seven times a week.

"I don't really have a fitness goal. I just think that when I work out, I'm a much happier person. It makes me feel like I've already done something for myself that day," she said.

Rachel also films content, like during fitness classes or while holding a plank.

"A workout used to just be a workout, but it's now a workout plus a way to create content for TikTok, which then gets me opportunities to go and do cool things," she said. "It's truly crazy."

She shared what she spends on staying fit each month with Business Insider for this installment of Fitness Money Diaries.

Fitness classes

From the summer of 2023 to January 2025, Rachel used ClassPass, a subscription service that where users buy credits to pay for sessions in a variety of gyms and fitness studios. She spent between $27 and $90 a month on the subscription, depending on how many classes she took.

Now, she has chosen to commit to one Pilates studio and pays $250 a month for unlimited classes there. The studio offers Pilates, yoga, and "sculpt" classes, all in heated rooms.

"There were many many days this week alone where the $20 cancellation fee on the Pilates class was quite literally the only thing that got me out of bed in the morning," she said.

She runs, too, which is free. "I really don't believe in paying for a workout that you could do on your own," she said.

She also does the odd fitness class with her friends as a social event at places other than her Pilates studio, which tends to cost between $30 and $40.

Monthly total: $250 or more

Ice bath membership

Rachel also has a monthly membership to a sauna studio, where she takes ice baths three or four times a week. It costs $190 for unlimited monthly visits.

Ice baths can help ease muscle soreness and help recovery after exercise.

Monthly total: $190

Clothes

"A large part of why I started posting on TikTok was because I would just see people getting free workout clothes, deodorant, crazy things for free on TikTok," she said.

Rachel said brands now send her gym wear and sneakers for free, so she no longer has to buy them for herself.

Monthly total: $0

Smoothies

Rachel doesn't see the $13 smoothies she drinks as integral to her health, but she buys them four times a week because she loves them.

Monthly total: $208

Average monthly spend on health and fitness: $648

You know that sensation when something feels off, but you can't quite put your finger on it? That sensation of "I don't feel so good about this," even though the "this" is a little fuzzy. That's the state of work for many people right now. So if you're a little uneasy about the job market, you're not alone.

The economy's felt like the other shoe is about to drop for quite some time now. There was the euphoria of the Great Resignation, the post-pandemic era where workers had a lot of temporary power and did some job-hopping. That gave way to the confusing negativity of the vibecession, when Americans said the economy was terrible even though, on paper, it was good — and, despite their negativity, consumers kept spending like it was good, too. Then we got to the Big Stay, where workers decided to stick to what they were doing, whether they were happy about it or not. Sentiment picked up a bit after the 2024 election when people thought a Trump 2.0 economy would look as rosy as they remembered Trump 1.0. But now, the bad vibes are back. Workers are not feeling great about the labor market or their own jobs. The Big Stay has transformed into the Big Cling to Your Desk, Suck Up to Your Boss, Be Seen in the Office.

Consumer sentiment has been on the downswing recently, in part because people are feeling queasy about work. The Conference Board's consumer confidence index fell in March, driven largely by declines in people's outlooks on income, business, and the labor market. The concerns about the future pushed the Conference Board's expectations index to its lowest point in 12 years, below the level that tends to signal a recession. While people feel OK about the current labor market, they're worried about their future employment prospects and their future incomes.

"That's a sign that people are getting worried about their own situation," said Stephanie Guichard, a senior economist at The Conference Board, in an interview. She added that people are beginning to say they're more worried about their family financial situations, too. "We are at the point where they may start changing their behavior."

Surveys from the University of Michigan reflect a similar doom-and-gloom mood toward the labor market. Consumers' expectations for unemployment over the next year are at their worst level since the Great Recession — two-thirds of them think unemployment will go up. According to the University of Michigan's most recent reading, consumer sentiment has declined across the economy, cutting across age, income, and politics, as people are feeling increasingly anxious about a wide variety of measures, including their own personal finances and the labor market. Even high-income consumers are worried about their situations.

As with the Conference Board's findings, the University of Michigan's survey shows people aren't just worried about the broader labor market, they're worried about themselves.

"If labor markets truly weaken or people believe that labor markets are going to weaken, and now they're expecting their incomes to be less stable than they were before, they're not going to be willing to go out on a limb and spend at the same high level, take financial risks, make more investments, start new businesses," said Joanne Hsu, the director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan. "People are not going to be comfortable doing that if they're perceiving weaknesses throughout the economy."

On paper, the labor market remains quite solid. The unemployment rate is healthy relative to history, though it's a bit elevated from recent historic lows, and layoffs remain steady. The quit rate is a little below where it was pre-pandemic, which reflects the "stay where you are" attitude, but overall, signs from "hard" data are flashing yellow.

Daniel Zhao, the lead economist at Glassdoor, told me that mentions of layoffs in the platform's employee reviews are up by 5% compared to last year and are steadily climbing. "Even if workers are still employed, that doesn't necessarily mean they are happy in their jobs," he said. Some of the commentary is from people talking about the ongoing effects of previous layoffs, expressing feelings of burnout because their workplaces are understaffed. Or, they're worried that they'll get swept up in the next round of cuts. "Employees might not see any reason why there wouldn't be another round of layoffs if they feel like the business and the economy are in a similar position," he said.

People see the headlines about a white-collar recession, and they're unnerved, whether they're knowledge workers or not. They see the news that businesses may be rethinking hiring plans and wonder if they'd be able to find a new gig if necessary.

The word of the day is "uncertainty" — the US Economic Policy Uncertain Index is higher than it was during the pandemic. There's a constant sense of whiplash across many parts of the economy and politics. What's happening with tariffs seems to change daily. Announcements of mass government firings and confusing reinstatements are happening constantly. Many businesses and workers expected Donald Trump's second term to look like his first one, with tax cuts and relatively unserious tariff threats and a general business-friendly stance. Instead, they're faced with a new version of Trump whose tariff gyrations are making business planning impossible and who doesn't seem to care if the stock market falls because of his actions.

"Everybody hates uncertainty, whether you're talking about executives down to front-line workers," Zhao said.

"A lot of people only are like, 'Wow, the mix of policies is worse than I thought, but I'm not exactly sure what policies are being implemented and what I should prepare for," said Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, a labor-analytics firm.

There's a level of paralysis amid the chaos. With so much instability, many workers and businesses feel like they have no choice but to stay put. That means employees are sticking with their jobs, and businesses are easing off the gas on hiring plans until there's a better sense of what's going on.

"People are hesitant to really even expand sizably or leave their job and find other ones that are a better fit," Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Indeed, said. "Everybody's just kind of frozen, waiting and seeing."

Some of the worker sentiments and anxieties are not that different from, say, 2023 or 2024. There's long been a subtle recognition that nothing lasts forever, including an extra-worker-friendly jobs market. The vibes have been off for a few years now. But the economists I spoke with said that something distinct is happening that may make things different. Instead of gesturing broadly at the state of things, workers are specifically negative about their personal outlooks. The level of uncertainty in the economy is palpable. That means they may be likelier to decide to really batten down the hatches, try really hard to hold onto their jobs, and, in turn, start reigning in their spending. (Though that last one is TBD — throughout this inflationary and vibecessionary period, consumer spending has been remarkably resilient.)

"Employees do feel pretty uncertain about the future," Zhao said.

Berger emphasized that just because workers feel worse doesn't mean they're right that things actually are worse. As mentioned, on paper, the labor market and economy look pretty good. Stocks are down, yes, but as the saying goes, the stock market is not the economy.

"So far, everything we've seen in terms of data is pretty small scale," he said. "There's nothing here that so far suggests that we've fallen into this doom loop where we're going to tip into a downturn where things are going to get worse. If I had to guess, it's going to be an incremental worsening."

For workers who are on edge, the idea of incremental worsening isn't especially heartening. That means many people may be making the calculation that it's better to stay where they are, avoid asking for too much, and hope to stay in the boss' good graces. The next time you run into the CEO, tell them you like their shoes or something.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• Black federal workers have historically benefited from stability, good benefits, and less discrimination.
• Trump's job cuts and DEI scrutiny, helmed by Elon Musk's DOGE office, threaten that security.
• Five former and current Black federal workers say the upheaval has hurt their finances and optimism for the future.

When BreAntra Jackson started working at the Internal Revenue Service last October, she was excited to have secured a coveted position in the federal government.

"Working at the IRS was one of the best jobs I've ever had," said the 24-year-old IRS administrator. The full-time, hybrid work schedule allowed the single mother to find stability and afford day care.

She had planned to build a lifelong career in civil service, like her predecessor, who she said had processed requests for IRS agents for three decades before retiring.

Those aspirations were interrupted on February 20 when Jackson became one of roughly 25,000 probationary workers fired by the Trump administration.

While a federal judge in mid-March deemed the firings illegal and ordered the Trump administration to reinstate workers, including Jackson, the financial uncertainty over several weeks took a toll on her savings. While she and thousands of her colleagues have returned on paid administrative leave, it may not last long. The White House's DOGE office has ordered federal agencies to devise plans to reduce staff in the coming months through less legally dubious means.

Federal jobs, with their stability and comparatively good benefits, were once a pathway to the American dream for many workers, especially for Black professionals like Jackson. Black Americans make up nearly 1 in 5 federal workers, compared to their 14% share of the US population.

Now, DOGE's hiring freezes and slashing of government jobs threaten that legacy of security for Black Americans in the federal workforce. Plus, the administration's heightened focus on DEI could make the path forward more difficult for Black workers.

"Protecting the civil rights and expanding opportunities for all Americans is a key priority of the Trump Administration," Harrison Fields, White House principal deputy press secretary, wrote in an email to BI when asked about federal jobs providing a stable path to the middle class for Black Americans, which is why Trump "took decisive actions to terminate unlawful DEI preferences in the federal government."

"I was laid off and just thrown to the wolves," Jackson said. In February, Jackson was living off the money she had set aside for a down payment on a future home. She told BI it was "the first time that I've ever not had a job, not had income coming in to cover my bills," since she was 16 years old.

A pathway to middle-class security is now uncertain

Some former federal workers BI spoke with decided to take matters into their own hands, rather than subject themselves to the career rollercoaster their peers have endured in recent months.

Alphonso McCree Jr., a veteran and former visual information specialist in Veterans Affairs, started working on Capitol Hill last April. In September, he bought a house in Charles County, Maryland, where he lives with his wife and two young children. He left his job in January when he saw the budget cuts on the horizon.

"Nobody can tell what they're going to do next. It's just really unpredictable," McCree said of the Trump administration.

As the main breadwinner, McCree decided it was riskier to stay at his job than to pursue his freelance videographer business full-time.

"I needed to do what I needed to do to separate myself from their decision-making that was affecting me and my life and my family," he said.

McCree grew up in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC. His parents worked for the federal government, and he recalls having his hair cut by a barber in the basement of their government building. He said almost everyone in his family spent their careers in civil service.

"I've never seen Black people really thriving anywhere like we do in Maryland," said the 30-year-old, adding that while "departments are being abolished and blown up, I don't know what's going to happen."

It's too soon to have data on the demographics of this year's federal government attrition; however, the Office of Personnel Management provided data on the ethnic and racial background of federal workers as of last September. This data seems to have been removed from its website in the last month; OPM did not respond to comment when BI inquired.

Joseph Dean, a research specialist who studies race and economics at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said it's clear that historically, federal jobs have played a large role in building Black wealth in the DC area — particularly in McCree's hometown of Prince George's County.

In 1970, white residents made up 84% of Prince George's County, while Black people were only 15%. In three decades, the Black population had grown to 64%. Today, Prince George's County is still known as one of the wealthiest, Black-majority counties in the nation.

"The opportunities from the federal government drew Black people, especially throughout the country, to DC to work," said Dean. Today, nearly 18% of all wages earned in Prince George's County come from federal jobs.

Black employment in the public sector dates back to the Reconstruction Era when the United States Postal Service offered some of the first jobs to formerly enslaved people, said Eric Yellin, a history professor at the University of Richmond.

In his book, "Racism in the Nation's Service," Yellin detailed how Black employment ebbed and flowed under various administrations.

"It's never certain in American society that African Americans or minorities in general will be given a fair shot," said Yellin. "It was a 50-year struggle." The civil rights movement led to the fastest progress in closing the racial wealth gap.

It was in the 1960s, when the federal government got serious about preventing discrimination in the workplace, that Black professionals began to flourish — particularly in the federal government.

Black employees face larger wage gaps in the private sector compared to their peers in the public sector due to standardized pay across identical titles and roles in the federal workforce.

"The federal government is the fairest employer in the country as a whole," said Yellin of the standardized merit tests and safeguards in federal jobs meant to prevent bias.

Ashley Shannon chose a career in public service for that reason. In the fall of 2023, Shannon was accepted into the Attorney General's Honors Program — a prestigious program that admits only a handful of entry-level attorneys each year. When she started her position at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, she felt inspired seeing other Black lawyers in leadership who had successfully matriculated to general counsel and deputy attorneys.

"In private practice, there was not as much mobility, or expectation of mobility for people in our community," said Shannon. "Black women, specifically when you look at private firms or large firms, make up less than 1% of those in partnership." In 2020, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that Black women made up 11.7% of the civilian federal workforce, nearly twice their participation in the general labor market.

Shannon moved to DC with the expectation that she would build a life-long career in civil service. She was even looking to purchase a home in the area by the end of 2025.

But seeing the layoffs for probationary employees like herself around the corner, Shannon decided to hand in a resignation letter.

"I'm going to have to move back in with my parents at 28 years old, almost 29, and that is a very defeating feeling as a very new attorney," said Shannon. "I feel like I just got done building a life out here."

Former federal workers are facing a tough job market and more scrutiny on diverse hiring

Not everyone has a safety net in the event of a job loss, and federal workers who leave their jobs are entering a tough hiring market.

Shaye, a contractor for Veterans Affairs, has spent her entire career working in the federal government from the time she was 19 years old to her early 30s. As a current federal employee fearing retaliation, she asked to only be identified by her middle name.

"Many of my co-workers have said, 'We don't even have a backup plan,'" said Shaye. "A lot of us have always worked for the government, and we don't know anything else."

Andrea Slater, director of UCLA's Center for the Advancement of Racial Equity at Work, said that those who've dedicated a large part of their careers to public service face bigger challenges to finding work again after these layoffs.

"A lot of these jobs are very focused and so if they've been in these jobs for decades, there's a high probability that their skill set might not match up with a lot of positions and needs in the private sector," said Slater.

Then there's the added layer that Black employees and other people of color may have been singled out as part of the scrutiny leveled against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, said Yellin. This moment rings eerily of the past that he's studied.

Entering office, Trump signed an executive order "ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing."

"That was the argument that segregationists made, that when you found someone Black in a position of power or participating as equals, something had gone wrong," Yellin said. He compared the executive order to the actions of President Woodrow Wilson who purged Black workers in the federal government in the early 20th century. "There's something similar in the attacks on DEI."

On Wednesday, a group of federal employees across government agencies, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a class action lawsuit against the White House, claiming they were unlawfully fired for their participation in DEI initiatives and targeted on the basis of their race in violation of their civil rights.

"Every man and woman in this great country should have the opportunity to go as far as their hard work, individual initiative, and competence can take them. In America, grit, excellence, and perseverance are our strengths," the White House's Fields wrote.

All the upheaval has taken a heavy mental toll on Shaye, who loves her work procuring supplies for hospitals that serve veterans. She's frustrated by the insinuation that she was only hired because of her race.

"To be reduced down to that is infuriating and honestly disrespectful to the many hardworking Black federal employees," said Shaye. "I got my job because I showed that I had potential, I showed that I had drive, I showed that I wanted to be there and I was willing to learn."

The stability of Shaye's job in the federal government provided her with the opportunity to pursue the American dream: get married and buy her dream home.

"I have been able to essentially break out of the cycle of struggle," said Shaye, who was raised by a single mother who had to work several jobs to make ends meet.

Now, with the uncertainty around her employment, she feels a cloud of anxiety hanging over her head. She's been trying to alleviate her stress by blasting Lady Gaga while swinging a kettlebell at the gym and journaling about her feelings.

"I am a plan-for-the-worst type of person," said Shaye. She's cut down spending, canceling subscriptions, and is already looking for an exit plan if she is laid off. "I am operating like I am going to lose my job within the next couple of months, if not sooner."

Have a tip or story to share? Contact this reporter via Signal at @jdeng.20 or email at [email protected]. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Fintech entrepreneur Charlie Javice was convicted Friday of four counts of defrauding JPMorgan Chase.
• Federal prosecutors asked that she be required to wear an ankle monitor prior to sentencing.
• Her lawyer objected, saying it would make her job as a pilates instructor "impossible."

Lawyers for Charlie Javice say she can't possibly wear an ankle bracelet between now and her July 26 sentencing for defrauding JPMorgan — because it would get in the way of her job as a pilates instructor.

Moments after a Manhattan federal jury's guilty-on-all-counts verdict on Friday, government prosecutors asked the judge to order that the newly convicted fintech fraudster be ordered to submit to electronic monitoring over the next four months.

Javice, 32, of Miami, and her co-defendant Olivier Amar, 50, are both flight risks after being convicted of four counts each of conspiracy and fraud, argued Assistant US Attorney Georgia V. Kostopoulos.

The jury found that the pair conspired in 2021 to trick the country's largest bank out of $175 million, the sale price for her financial aid startup, Frank.

Amar is a French citizen, and Javice holds dual French-US citizenship, the prosecutor argued. France, she noted, does not have an extradition agreement with the US.

"We would just ask that the same electronic monitoring be set as they were subjected to on their arrest," she told US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who had just wrapped up the six-month trial and dismissed the five-woman, seven-man jury.

Javice's attorney quickly objected — because pilates.

"We believe this is unnecessary," said defense lawyer Ron Sullivan, explaining that since losing her Frank financial aid website and getting fired by JPMorgan three years ago, Javice now makes her living as a pilates instructor.

"She cannot do it with the ankle bracelet on," Sullivan told the judge. And she teaches "almost every day," he said.

Hellerstein appeared incredulous.

"So the problem is that she cannot wear an ankle bracelet because she teaches pilates?" he asked. "The hindrance is teaching pilates?"

"My understanding is that it's more than a hindrance — it renders it impossible," her lawyer said.

Javice had been ordered to wear an ankle monitor in April 2023. Hellerstein allowed her to remain out of jail ahead of the trial so long as she wore the bracelet and gave up her passports, among other conditions.

Then, in November, Javice's attorney Samuel Nitze asked Hellerstein to modify the conditions of her release and remove the "heavy, cumbersome GPS unit affixed to her ankle." The device, Nitze wrote, "impeded her work as a fitness instructor."

"The GPS unit causes Ms. Javice physical pain, has impeded her work as a fitness instructor, and has resulted in delays and complications at TSA screening when she travels and as she enters the courthouse to attend hearings," he wrote.

At the time, prosecutors didn't object, and Hellerstein approved the change a few days later.

But on Friday — as Javice remained free on a $2 million bond secured by her Miami house and co-signed by her parents — prosecutors toughened their stance.

"I've never heard of a situation where an exercise class is an obstacle to wearing a monitor," Kostopoulos told the judge.

When Hellerstein suggested that maybe the ankle bracelet could be removed during the four or five hours of teaching, and then put back on, the prosecutor said that would not be an option.

"My understanding is that's not something probation can do," she told the judge.

Hellerstein said he will rule on the ankle bracelet matter for both defendants on Tuesday, their next court date.

Convicted scammers don't always have a problem with ankle monitors. Anna Sorokin — AKA Anna Delvey — bedazzled hers with rhinestones during her brief time as a contestant on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars," and flaunted it while strutting across runways for New York Fashion Week.

Sorokin was convicted by a New York state jury in a scam where she bilked banks by pretending to be a wealthy European heiress.

She now wears an ankle monitor while on release from ICE detention while she fights attempts to deport her to Germany.

• Movies like Netflix's "The Life List" and Prime Video's "Holland" are new to streaming.
• ABC's "The Conners" returned for its final season, while Grant's of "The Bachelor" had a shocking ending.
• Luca Guadagnino's 2024 movie "Queer" starring Daniel Craig is now streaming on Max.

This weekend, you can watch the conclusion to Grant Ellis' journey to find love on season 29 of "The Bachelor," a queer romance movie directed by Luca Guadagnino, and Nicole Kidman's latest thriller film "Holland."

Two films released in theaters late last year, Guadagnino's "Queer" starring Daniel Craig and the Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown," are now on streamers. This week also marked the return of Netflix's comedy series "Survival of the Thickest" and ABC's hit sitcom "The Conners."

Here's a complete rundown of all the best movies, shows, and documentaries to stream this weekend, broken down by what kind of entertainment you're looking for.

Season 29 of "The Bachelor" came to an end this week.

After eight weeks, "The Bachelor" star Grant Ellis finally had to choose between his final two contestants: Juliana Pasquarosa and Litia Garr. Catch up on the finale on Hulu before reading Business Insider's interview with Grant and his new fiancé.

Streaming on: Hulu

For a more complicated romance, watch "Queer."

In director Luca Guadagnino's "Queer," Daniel Craig stars as William Lee, an American expat who falls in love with a much younger man named Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) in Mexico City in the 1950s. The film is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1985 novella of the same name.

Streaming on: Max

For a heartfelt movie about family, love, and self-discovery, check out "The Life List."

Netflix darling Sofia Carson ("Purple Hearts," "Carry-On") stars in the new movie "The Life List,'" about Alex, a young woman who, after the death of her mom, decides to complete a bucket list she wrote at 13 years old.

Streaming on: Netflix

Chelsea Handler returns to Netflix for her third comedy special, "Chelsea Handler: The Feeling."

In the special, the comedian jokes about her birth and upbringing, shares her adventures in babysitting, and calls out pickleball enthusiasts.

Streaming on: Netflix

The seventh and final season of "The Conners" premiered this week.

"The Conners," a spin-off of "Roseanne," follows Dan (John Goodman), Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), and Darlene (Sara Gilbert) as they navigate family, work, and relationships. The show will conclude with six episodes, the first of which is now available to stream on Hulu after premiering on ABC on Wednesday night.

Streaming on: Hulu

"Survival of the Thickest" is back for season two.

The Netflix romantic dramedy is based on comedian Michelle Buteau's autobiographical book of essays, "Survival of the Thickest." The show revolves around Mavis Beaumont (Buteau), a woman trying to rebuild her life after a breakup.

In season two, Mavis embraces turning 39, visits Rome, continues to preach body positivity, and is faced with a major life decision.

Streaming on: Netflix

Seth Rogen's new comedy series "The Studio" skewers the film industry.

The series stars Seth Rogen as Matt Remick, a cinephile who lands his dream job as the newly appointed head of the fictional film studio Continental Studios.

Once he gets the gig, he learns that his passion for quality films contradicts the realities of the cutthroat business of the movie-making industry.

The first two episodes premiered this week, with eight more to follow, all of which are jam-packed with celebrity cameos.

Streaming on: Apple TV+

Nicole Kidman stars in the new thriller "Holland."

Nicole Kidman plays Nancy Vandergroot, a teacher, wife, and mother whose perfect life in the picturesque, tulip-filled town of Holland, Michigan, gets uprooted by strange happenings.

Streaming on: Prime Video

You can watch Timothée Chalamet's Oscar-nominated performance in "A Complete Unknown" from the comfort of your home.

"A Complete Unknown" follows young Bob Dylan's (Timothée Chalamet) arrival in New York in the 1960s and his road to becoming one of the most revered singer-songwriters.

The biopic, released in December, earned eight nominations at the 2025 Academy Awards, including best picture and best actor for Chalamet.

Streaming on: Hulu

Pierce Brosnan plays the head of an organized crime family in "MobLand."

In "MobLand," the James Bond actor plays Conrad Harrigan, a family man and ruthless mob boss who hires fixer Harry Da Souza (Tom Hardy) as the Harrigans clash with another power-hungry London crime family. The series also stars Helen Mirren as Maeve Harrigan, Conrad's wife and the brains of the operation.

Streaming on: Paramount+

Magician David Blaine has a new National Geographic docuseries, "David Blaine: Do Not Attempt."

In this six-episode docuseries, David Blaine travels the world in search of more people with unique, death-defying skills that he can learn from.

Streaming on: Hulu, Disney+

• Washington, DC's tech scene is surging under the Trump administration.
• Local startups are gaining ground, with defense tech leading the charge.
• DMV investors think the district has all the makings of a new tech hub.

DC investors have long hoped to make the capital a tech startup hub. In Trump's second term, those ambitions are finally taking hold.

The new presidential administration has brought a number of Silicon Valley heavyweights to DC. Big names in tech and venture capital like Tesla's Elon Musk and Andreessen Horowitz's Scott Kupor now hold positions in the federal government, while other Big Tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg are spending more time in Washington, hoping to exert their influence on new tech policies.

DC is already seeing rising VC interest — top-tier venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst have opened offices in the area in the past year, and hot defense tech startups with significant DC footprints like Anduril are landing more checks and contracts. Just last week, A16z hosted an "American Dynamism" conference in DC, opened by Vice President JD Vance.

"It's time to align the interests of our technology firms with the interests of the United States of America writ large," Vance said at the summit.

Now, DC is welcoming a wave of tech elites, many with backgrounds in startups and VC, that are "startup-curious," said James Barlia, executive director of the startup incubator Station DC.

"There's a new power base that's forming in DC, and it's creating a real opportunity for founders," he said.

Paige Soya, a managing partner at local VC firm and angel syndicate K St Capital, said the arrival of the tech aristocracy, along with other affluent officials in Trump's administration, is driving a real estate rush for luxury, multimillion-dollar properties in the district — and bringing the potential for those elites to angel invest in local startups.

"A lot of these people would have never thought of DC as a place to find good deals. But because they're here, they're organically starting to see it. I think that's going to impact funding on its own," she said.

Barlia is optimistic that tech's elevated presence in the district will do more than bring money to the DC startup community: it could inject DC with a dose of Silicon Valley's culture of disruption.

"I feel like there's now deeper connectivity between Silicon Valley and DC, including ideologically and philosophically," he said.

Capital flows to the capital city

In the past year, as AI took over Silicon Valley and Trump effused a pro-tech, anti-AI-regulation stance during his presidential campaign, several powerful VCs emerged to support Trump's administration. Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Founder's Fund, posted on X after Trump chose Vance as his running mate, '"IT'S JD VANCE. WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE. GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY."

Their exuberance brings new momentum to DC's tech ecosystem, which has been steadily growing as startups seek government contracts and influence on Capitol Hill.

The district now boasts the fifth-most developed VC ecosystem in the US, according to PitchBook, despite being the country's 23rd-largest city, per 2022 Census data.

Tech giants like Palantir, which runs an office in Georgetown, and Microsoft, which has offices in DC's Mt. Vernon Square and across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, have helped draw in tech and investment talent over time.

Now, VC firms like A16z and General Catalyst aren't the only ones interested in the DMV's startup scene — the district itself is now betting on area startups.

Mayor Muriel Bowser launched DC's first Venture Capital Program in December, with $26 million to invest in early-stage DC startups. Soya's K St Capital was picked to manage the funds. Every dollar of public funding has to be matched by private funding, Soya noted, so DC startups could receive up to $52 million through the program.

K St Capital has been building its DC firm for over a decade, alongside other early-stage investors such as Saas Ventures, founded in 2017. Newer projects such as District Angels launched last year to pool local angel investors to back DC startups.

However, while the Trump administration has forged a newfound alliance with the tech industry, the Department of Government Efficiency's slew of cuts to federal agencies could threaten the industry's growth in DC. The district's chief financial officer has estimated that the layoffs could cost DC more than 40,000 jobs over the next four years.

But Barlia said he thinks Elon Musk's much-criticized push to "trim the fat" in the federal government will make DC stronger.

"Elon's approach may make some people uncomfortable, but the underlying problem is undeniable. Yes, there's near-term disruption — RIFs and potential economic contraction — but in the long run, it should push DC to build a more resilient, opportunity-rich economy," he said.

"That won't come from more government or big corporate jobs, but by embracing new ideas, startups, and innovation."

Defense tech at the forefront

DC is, first and foremost, a government town, with an inherent federal bureaucracy that's at odds with many startups' "move fast and break things" ethos, said John Doyle, a former Palantir executive and founder of defense startup Cape.

Still, Doyle and Barlia said they're seeing interest from federal agencies, particularly the Department of Defense, to work with startups and move fast — faster than is typical of the government, at least. Point72 Ventures defense tech partner Chris Morales, who's based in DC, pointed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's March memo about the DoD's plans to modernize how it acquires software and contracts with companies. Morales said the memo is one of multiple signs his firm is seeing that the agency is getting more serious about tech innovation.

While Soya and Barlia said they're seeing startups across various industries gain traction in DC, defense tech easily remains the hottest among them.

Cape landed its first contract with the Department of Defense in 2023, a deal to provide its cybersecurity-focused mobile carrier services to Naval forces in Guam after a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group targeted the base's tech infrastructure.

Cape has since raised $61 million in financing rounds led by Andreessen Horowitz and A*, announced in April 2024.

Part of the reason Cape picked DC as its headquarters was to rub shoulders with the federal agencies it hoped to partner with, said Doyle. As he noted, "proximity matters."

It's no surprise then that a number of defense tech startups have opened offices in DC, including Anduril, which recently raised $1.5 billion at a $14 billion valuation in August 2024, and Shield AI, which raised $240 million this month in a funding round that valued the autonomous drone maker at $5.3 billion.

Startups in the DMV can also tap into the area's hard tech talent, which could help continue to boost the area's presence as a tech hub.

Northern Virginia hosts one of the world's largest concentrations of data centers. Amazon opened its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, in 2023. Other tech giants, including Microsoft and Google, have outposts in the area. And many of the country's largest aerospace and defense companies, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing, are headquartered in the DMV.

Doyle said the DMV's deep bench of technical expertise has helped Cape find numerous backend engineers in the area. He admitted, though, that DC has a smaller candidate pool than traditional tech hubs like San Francisco and New York City. Cape also has a New York office, for which Doyle said it's generally easier to source talent, especially front-end engineers and designers.

Opposing pressures

As some VCs flock to the DC area, others are fleeing. Sequoia Capital plans to shutter its DC office at the end of March and cut its policy team there, despite other major VC firms moving in.

A Sequoia spokesperson told BI that the firm built its policy team in DC to strengthen its connections, and its portfolio companies' connections, with policymakers and other experts. The policy team set Sequoia up favorably to carry those relationships forward in the US and Europe, the spokesperson said.

Khosla Ventures managing director Keith Rabois said at a conference in February that DC "definitely still is not where early-stage venture capitalists should be spending too much time," despite saying he'd recently run into Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in the city.

DC's venture scene may not yet rival San Francisco's, but it's feeling fresh momentum nonetheless. A16z's American Dynamism Summit largely set out to connect San Francisco's VC ecosystem with DC policymakers, but DC-based investors were also in attendance this year, said Jonathan Lacoste, a general partner at Austin, Texas-based Space VC, who attended the conference.

"There were plenty of investors at the event, not just from the West Coast, but increasingly from DC's venture landscape too," he told BI.

As DC's tech community grows, so does its appetite for more networking opportunities. Catherine McMillan, an analyst at tech-focused consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, founded the DC chapter of the GenAI Collective, a generative AI networking nonprofit started in San Francisco in 2023. McMillan also helps run two other tech communities in the district: DC Tech Parties and She's In Tech.

McMillan's DC chapter of the GenAI collective now has 700 members, with each event bringing in fresh faces.

"It's an undervalued tech market because it doesn't have the same level of visibility that SF or New York have. That's part of what I'm trying to do, shed a light on the cool entrepreneurial things that are happening in the DMV," she said. "We have a Big Tech presence, but we also have an ecosystem in its own right."

Marlon Brando was having a little trouble on the set of his movie "The Missouri Breaks." The year was 1975 and the legendary actor asked his costar Jack Nicholson and anyone who could hear him, "Does anybody here know how to play the mandolin?"

A 21-year-old aspiring actor named Dennis Quaid, who was on set that day but wasn't part of the cast, raised his hand. "I know how to play," he said.

Quaid had only been in Hollywood for a couple of months when his brother, Randy, who was cast in "Missouri Breaks," asked him to drive his Audi to the Western-themed set in Montana so he'd have a car to drive around when he wasn't working.

It was the younger Quaid's first time on a movie set. Now he was going to teach Marlon Brando how to play the mandolin for a scene in a movie. There was just one problem.

"I didn't know how to play," Quaid told Business Insider 50 years later with his trademark grin.

"But I played guitar, so I quickly got a book of mandolin chords, and next thing you know, I got to spend an hour with him in the trailer teaching him how to play the mandolin," Quaid continued. "I could barely say anything. I just looked at my shoes the entire time."

Quaid soon became a fixture on set, even sitting in on the dailies, where he watched take after take of Brando and Nicholson. It was an education on the craft of acting that no teacher could ever provide, and Quaid was hooked. He was going to make acting his profession.

And did he ever. Over the next five decades, Quaid has turned in countless memorable performances, often as real-life people like the charismatic musician Jerry Lee Lewis in 1989's "Great Balls of Fire!" the unlikely middle-aged MLB pitcher Jim Morris in 2002's "The Rookie," and the 40th President of the United States Ronald Reagan in the 2024 biopic "Reagan" (he also played Bill Clinton in the 2010 HBO movie "The Special Relationship").

For his latest role in the Paramount+ series "Happy Face," Quaid, 70, is once again embodying a real person, this time Keith Hunter Jesperson, who's better known as the Happy Face Killer and is currently serving a life sentence at Oregon State Penitentiary. While Quaid often prefers to seek out the living people he plays, with Jesperson, he opted out.

"He's in a hole in prison in Portland exactly where he should be, and I don't want to give him any satisfaction or entertainment or feeling like he's a big deal because he's not," Quaid said of Jesperson, who got his nickname from his habit of drawing a happy face on the letters he'd send to media and authorities.

Instead, Quaid leaned on the show's source material, an autobiography written by Jesperson's daughter, Melissa Moore, who realized when she was a teen that her father was the infamous killer.

While getting inside the mind of the man who killed at least eight women in the early 1990s seems like a difficult task, Quaid quickly cracked the code.

"Surprisingly, it's very easy to play, because he doesn't really have emotions, human emotions," Quaid said of Jesperson. "Very shallow emotions. There's no real self-examination with him."

In the latest interview in BI's Role Play series, Quaid spoke about the legendary TV show he passed on early in his career, how cocaine helped him play Jerry Lee Lewis, and regretting turning down a golf movie opposite Kevin Costner.

On almost starring in 'The Dukes of Hazzard' and using cocaine to play Jerry Lee Lewis

Business Insider: The movie that made you a star was the 1979 coming-of-age drama "Breaking Away," but is it true that you had already been considered to star in "The Dukes of Hazzard" when you took a meeting for "Breaking Away"?

Dennis Quaid: I actually got the part of Bo Duke, the John Snyder role. I also had this movie with Lee Majors about construction crews building high rises. So I went into this general audition with Peter Yates, the director of "Breaking Away," and he saw me as Mike and I said, "I'm sorry but I'm already doing this other movie."

He blocked the doorway and said, "Listen to me, young man, you have to do this movie!" And he was right. Peter Yates taught all us guys film acting and I could never thank him enough.

By 1983 you had become a big star and had three movies that came out that year: "Tough Enough," "Jaws 3D," and "The Right Stuff." But it was also your first taste as an actor of experiencing public perception versus reality, right? Because not all those movies did well.

[Laughs.] "Tough Enough" came out and went [points down]. Boom. Then "Jaws 3D" was No. 1 at the box office, but I was a little embarrassed about it — not anymore. And "The Right Stuff," I put all my marbles in that, and it came out, and it bombed. It made $2 million. It has since become a classic. That, along with "Reagan," are my favorite movies that I've ever done, personally. But by the end of that year, it was a disappointment. 

However, it only got better from there. 

Hey, lucky guy. Lucky life. 

It is true that for one year you spent 12 hours a day learning the piano to play Jerry Lee Lewis in "Great Balls of Fire!"? 

Yes. I was 34 when I got that role. I had plenty of time to prepare for it, a year. I had to look like I knew what I was doing. And then there's Jerry's style, the shuffle. The left hand, I had to get that down and then everything else followed.

Plus, I was also on cocaine, so that made it a little simpler to be at the piano 12 hours at a time. But I'm not advocating to take cocaine to learn how to play the piano. You will wind up in a bad place. 

On regretting not starring opposite Kevin Costner in 'Tin Cup' and never wanting to do a 'Parent Trap' sequel

You played Doc Holliday opposite Kevin Costner in the 1994 epic "Wyatt Earp." What was the worst thing about going down to 139 pounds to play the outlaw?

Getting down there and then staying down there for five months. I had a doctor and a nutritionist with me.

Are you still cool with Kevin Costner?

Oh yeah. 

Have you two ever talked about doing a golf movie? I know how much you love golf and he starred in "Tin Cup." 

It's so funny, I was offered "Tin Cup," the Don Johnson role. 

How did you not take that role?

I was already doing another movie that I wanted to do. But, yeah, what was I thinking? It's one of the best golf movies ever made. 

Was there ever talk of making a sequel to "The Parent Trap" before Natasha Richardson's passing in 2009?

There had been some talk, but it would be impossible to do now. 

So you wouldn't even discuss it now?

No, and nobody else does. I don't think we'd have the heart for it. Maybe one day, another version will be made for another generation. We all still miss Natasha. 

On playing real-life presidents and the best football movie ever made

If you're flipping through the channels on the TV and "Any Given Sunday" and "The Rookie" are both on, which are you going to watch?

That's a tough one. I think "Any Given Sunday" is the best football movie ever made. I really do.

Even better than "Rudy"?

Yeah, it's so visceral. It puts you right down on the field. It's so much about the players and what they go through and the business. It was so close that the NFL wouldn't even endorse it. We started out with its endorsement and then we had to change the uniforms right before. [Laughs.] But I still would watch "The Rookie." I just love that movie. 

You have played two US presidents in your career, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, who are two very different men. But were there any similarities in playing them?

No, because they are very different people. I knew Bill Clinton. I played golf with him. I spent a weekend at the White House and we'd talk on the telephone. He would call me out of the blue. He's probably the smartest person that I've ever been around. Very magnetic and charismatic.

Reagan was like everybody. He was like my dad. He was somebody we really needed. Reagan I admire so much for what he accomplished. Reagan stuck to his guns. Clinton was able to change with the times, Reagan stuck to his guns and won the Cold War. 

So what's left for Dennis Quaid to do? We just talked about a slew of characters, each different from the next —

And that's what makes life an adventure, you never know what's going to come along. I have some things that our production company, Bonniedale Films, is working on that I'd like to do, and that's what's exciting about this era of my career, taking something from beginning to end and getting some unwarranted respect to actually get it done.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

New episodes of "Happy Face" air Thursdays on Paramount+.

More from this series

• Patricia Arquette has a message for anyone looking for 'Severance' spoilers
• Billy Bob Thornton ad-libbed his famous 'Friday Night Lights' speech after being betrayed
• Paul Reiser says he still doesn't know if Dr. Owens on 'Stranger Things' is good or bad

• NOAA, the agency that tracks extreme weather, has lost more than 1,000 employees since Donald Trump took office.
• Current and former employees worried about less accurate forecasts and aviation issues.
• Agency changes, like stricter rules around travel, are making it harder for those left to do their jobs, some employees said.

As California recovers from devastating wildfires and hurricane season fast approaches, President Donald Trump and the White House DOGE team are slashing the workforce at the federal agency responsible for monitoring extreme weather.

Business Insider spoke to more than a dozen current and former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who said that staff and policy changes were making their day-to-day jobs more challenging. They worried about how the upheaval would affect Americans' safety — especially as hurricane and tornado seasons rapidly approach.

Andrew Hazelton, a former NOAA hurricane modeler who was fired in February alongside other probationary employees, was blunt: If forecasts and hurricane warnings go downhill, he told BI, "we could see loss of life as a result."

The agency's reach extends across the country and the globe. Besides its work on extreme climate conditions, NOAA provides the data that powers the weather app on your phone, alerts pilots to turbulence, and helps farmers know when to plant to keep American agriculture rolling.

"It really, truly affects every single American every day," a former probationary employee said. (Some employees we spoke to asked to remain anonymous.)

Before Trump took office in January, NOAA employed around 12,430 people, according to a congressional report. More than 1,000 employees have departed through layoffs or buyouts, said JoAnn Becker, the president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union representing NOAA employees. More than 600 were terminated in February and about 500 took the administration's buyout offer, according to previous reporting.

Between the uncertain future for probationary employees, voluntary early retirements and buyouts, and Trump's ongoing government-wide reduction-in-force effort, the agency may shrink further.

"We would like to just go on and do our jobs and save people's lives," an employee at the National Weather Service, a department within NOAA, said.

Outside of staffing cuts, some employees said stricter rules around travel and expense budgets have made it difficult to do the jobs that are vital to protecting people from natural disasters. Expiration dates for contracts marked as "urgent" are also coming up soon, according to internal documents viewed by BI.

An "extensive process was conducted to ensure that mission-critical functions to fulfill NOAA's statutory responsibilities weren't compromised," a Trump administration spokesperson told BI in a statement. The spokesperson declined to provide additional details about the process.

Susan Buchanan, a NOAA spokeswoman, said that the agency remains dedicated to its mission. A spokesperson for the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, did not respond to a request for comment from BI.

For those who remain, the show must go on, even as resources and staff dwindle.

"We are catching a lot of balls, with very little people," a NOAA employee said. "Eventually one of them is probably going to fall."

Aviation at risk

Several people who spoke to BI expressed unease over how the staffing cuts and operational changes at NOAA could affect the aviation industry.

Though flying remains the safest mode of transportation, a National Weather Service employee who's worked at the agency for more than a decade said that if the turmoil at the agency continues long term, "I don't know if I'd trust getting on a plane."

NOAA assists with running aviation-specific weather models for pilots, helping them track things like turbulence. Its data "ripples right through the whole system," Brad Colman, the former president of the American Meteorological Society, said.

"If systems are degraded, a turbulence forecast may go down in quality, and uncertainty is increased," Colman said. "There's more exposure, more risk."

A spokesperson for the Airline Dispatchers Federation told BI in an email that NOAA provides dispatchers with "essential tools," including turbulence, wind, and weather forecasts.

"Virtually all" of the weather data for domestic flights comes from NOAA, and its data is "fundamental" to daily operations, the spokesperson said. The organization hasn't yet noticed operational impacts but warned that "even subtle degradations could affect our operations."

The Federal Aviation Administration did not respond to a request for comment.

Meteorologists who work for airlines receive foundational data from NOAA to develop their forecasts, the spokesperson added, noting that smaller airlines will likely face more challenges if NOAA's data degrades — potentially creating a disparity in safety across the industry.

Or as Tom Di Liberto, a former public affairs official and climate scientist who was fired in February, put it: "There's a reason why a lot of weather forecast offices are close by or at a major airport."

Less reliable forecasts

Staffers affected by the terminations weren't just at NOAA's headquarters in Maryland; they were stationed in regional offices across the country.

One office in Alaska stopped launching daily weather balloons to collect data for forecasts, Larry Hubble, an upper air program manager in the state, said. On March 20, the National Weather Service temporarily suspended weather balloon launches at offices in Nebraska and South Dakota, while seven other sites are scaling back to one launch a day instead of two because of staffing shortages.

Other instruments, like radars on commercial aircraft and satellites, also collect data. The NWS employee of more than a decade said that balloons are one of the most accurate methods of weather measurement, and if they're scaled back, "they're going to start seeing the degradation of the models and the forecast is going to lose its accuracy."

"If you degrade our capabilities, our warnings get weaker and people and property get compromised," a NOAA employee told BI. "Damages are going to increase, people are not going to get out of harm's way, and they're going to die."

The Government and Accountability Office said in a March report that staffing shortages and aircraft maintenance problems in recent years had already hampered hurricane hunters' ability to perform their jobs — well before DOGE ever came knocking on doors.

The private sector depends on NOAA

The changes at NOAA will likely ripple across the private sector, affecting a range of industries, some employees told BI. The reinsurance industry, for example, uses NOAA data to help confirm damages from natural disasters and dole out funds. Construction workers rely on NOAA data to figure out where to build new projects.

The economic implications are vast — NOAA's products impact more than one-third of the country's GDP, according to the agency's website.

"If you take out NOAA, the private sector cannot do what NOAA does," Di Liberto said. The agency operates thousands of weather balloons, hundreds of buoys, 10 airplanes, and 18 satellites and makes that information accessible to the entire public — not just those who can pay for it.

The spokesperson from the Airline Dispatchers Federation said that private weather companies provide helpful supplemental services, but they ultimately rely on NOAA's raw data.

"There is simply no replacement for NOAA's comprehensive data collection infrastructure," the spokesperson said.

Additional reporting by Juliana Kaplan.

Have a tip? Contact these reporters via email or Signal at [email protected] or alicetecotzky.05; [email protected] or cboudreau.37; [email protected] or neinbinder.70. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

Lee insists he's "famously" a very good Catholic. He's a moral person — his mother raised him right. And by his internal calculation, it's OK to shoplift from Whole Foods. Why? Because of Jeff Bezos.

From about 2020 to 2022, Lee, a 20-something communications professional living in the Washington, DC, area, engaged in what he describes as "grand theft auto-ing" from his local Whole Foods store. He would cheat the scale at the hot bar, pocket spices, or take home four lemons in the self-checkout aisle while only declaring two. Lee has never shoplifted from anywhere else — not Safeway, not a local store. He's largely stopped taking from Whole Foods because he moved to a different neighborhood that doesn't have one. However, he told me, there's one by his gym he'll pop into — and steal from — from time to time.

Lee has weighed the ethics of what he's doing. At one point, the guilt got to be so much that he confessed his misdeeds to his mother. Once he explained his reasoning — Amazon's market power, Bezos' wealth, what the billionaire has done at The Washington Post — she came around.

"If a billionaire can steal from me, I can scrape a little off the top, too," Lee says. Lee is a pseudonym — the same goes for all of the shoplifters and ethically (and legally) compromised individuals quoted in this story. Over the past several months, I've spoken with nearly a dozen of them — some I found through their confessions online; others reached out when they heard through social media I was working on this story.

Practically speaking, it's a good moment to be a billionaire in America — you've probably got more tax cuts on the way, and the president is nice to you as long as you're nice to him. Maybe your stocks are down, but you're still a billionaire, so it's fine. In terms of public perception, however, the superrich have seen better days. Americans are vandalizing Teslas to get back at Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg's "Zuckermoon" is over. As for Jeff Bezos, some people are stealing from him — or, rather, his companies — in an effort to exact revenge. Like Lee, they're enacting some moral payback, one fancy cheese from Whole Foods or fudged Amazon return at a time. They're sticking it to The Man, who in this case is one specific individual.

These subversive infractions directed at Bezos and his billionaire cohort may be rooted in legitimate gripes with the state of the world and its unfathomable wealth inequality. On the spectrum of crime severity, swiping $20 worth of goods from a multibillion-dollar corporation does not rank high. But the justifications people offer are just that — justifications. None of what they're doing is actually making the type of impact they might like to see, and they're conveniently ignoring Bezos' positive contributions, such as his philanthropy. And they could be causing unintended harm to the non-Bezoses of the world, as in, everyone else. Many retailers have put items behind glass cases to combat theft, which is a headache for everybody. Shoplifting can demoralize workers, and if enough people do it, it may lead companies to raise prices, or in the case of return fraud, mean businesses make sending unwanted items back a lot harder.

In the realm of retail theft, middle-class consumers and opportunist thieves are a growing group of culprits. It's difficult to tease out the exact size and scope of the cohort, given how incomplete retail-theft data can be. Amazon isn't exactly shouting its shrink numbers from the rooftops, and other companies have even admitted to mistakes in assessing the problem. But as one loss prevention professional put it to me last year, everyday, ordinary shoplifters are "like a giant organized mob, they just don't know each other."

Many of them abide by a certain code around who they take from, and the swath of small-time larcenists I've spoken to consistently say that anything Jeff Bezos-related falls into the "allowed" column. He's the second-richest man in the world, he's highly visible, and they don't love what they know about him personally. They feel like they're balancing the scales in stealing from one of his companies, undertaking some sort of Robin Hood-esque endeavor where they take from the rich to give to the poor, the comparatively poor being themselves.

Take Jesse, a 30-something tech worker who until recently would steal entire bags of groceries from Whole Foods with his roommates. A friend at Instacart tipped them off to the opportunity — with so many personal shoppers roaming around the aisles, workers weren't going to notice another person loading bags or whether they were paying for what was in them. Once, they got expensive steaks from the butcher and left without paying for them, later grilling them out on a friend's roof.

"I never felt bad for the corporation as a whole, because it was Amazon and, you know, it was Jeff Bezos," Jesse said. "He just profits so much taking advantage of the little people, so if we as little people can bite back a little bit, and that's me taking $100 maybe out of revenue for him, that's a little bit of a middle finger."

Separately, there's Carson, another Whole Foods bandit whose friends joke they're actually "liberating" items from the store, not stealing. As Carson, a 30-something who works in the nonprofit sector, told me for a story last year, he likes slipping salmon lox into his laptop sleeve and estimates he saves about $1,000 in groceries a year by shoplifting, largely from Whole Foods.

"It's easy to look at him like a Lex Luthor," Carson told me recently, referring to the Superman villain.

Carson isn't just extracting his purported payback through Whole Foods. He likes to throw big, complicated parties, so he'll buy $1,000 of decorations from Amazon, use them, and then return them.

"Who's actually hurt in this strange, dehumanized system?" he said.

Reporting for this story, I heard the same sentiment over and over from shoplifters and less-than-honest Amazon shoppers. One Whole Foods nabber, a 30-something tech worker, justified their penchant for lifting from the grocery store as a mix of ease, quality, and antipathy toward one of the richest people in the world. "My lack of remorse for any of this is — it's a big corporation. They have so much money, eggs are $10, screw them," they said.

One 50-something business owner explained how they would exploit a loophole in Amazon's return system to get what amounted to free money for runs to an Amazon Go store in their office building. When I asked whether they felt any sense of regret, the answer was succinct: "F— no. He's the most successful entrepreneur alive."

Jimmy, a 30-something government worker, told me he's "indifferent" toward Bezos, and he does feel somewhat bad about engaging in some light return fraud. One of his gaming controllers recently broke, so he bought a new one, stuck the old one in the box it came in, and sent it back undetected. Still, he's not losing sleep over it. "We know how much money that company makes. They're not going to be worried about that $70," he says. "I feel like the Batman of returns. I choose my targets."

The Bezos bashers' complaints ran the gamut: Whole Foods is a gentrifier; he's just too rich; shooting himself into space is gauche. Whatever anyone's precise justifications, there have been plenty of headlines and accusations that paint Bezos and his companies in an unflattering light. Amazon's e-commerce practices are bad for the environment. His businesses have been widely criticized for their approach to workers, including subjecting them to brutal work conditions and engaging in wage theft. His recent political turn and push to exert more influence over The Washington Post, which he owns, has turned many people off and reportedly lost the paper thousands of subscribers.

To be sure, Bezos has also given people plenty to be happy about. It's super convenient to have stuff delivered to your door at the drop of a hat. Whole Foods is, for the most part, a lovely shopping experience. But in an era where billionaires are viewed as the bad guys, and there's growing anger about extreme wealth inequality, it can be easy for people to overlook any upsides. There are a handful of guys in popular culture who epitomize the enormous gap between haves and have-nots. Bezos is one of them.

It is fair to wonder, though, if stealing from Whole Foods or returning a dress you wore to a wedding is the best way to get back at Bezos. It's a bit of a stretch to think the answer to that one is yes.

I reached out to Garret Merriam, an associate philosophy professor at California State University, Sacramento, who studies ethics, to get his read. He told me there are likely three broad categories of thinking going on here. There are those who don't really consider what they're doing to be stealing — they're oblivious to it. Like taking a pen from the breakroom at work, they figure it's baked in when they grab a snack as they browse the Whole Foods aisles. There are people who recognize it's cheating, but they don't think it's wrong, given Bezos' wealth and his business practices. In a context where Amazon has paid millions of dollars to settle wage theft lawsuits, they figure lying about a lost package is a small way to try to even things out. And then there are those who feel a sense of political desperation — they're powerless in the face of massive political and economic forces, and this is an outlet for some sort of action, even if futile. "The target is misapplied, but the anger is, I would say, understandable," he said.

People have a tendency to try to neutralize potentially unsavory behavior by coming up with ways to justify their actions, Emmeline Taylor, a professor of criminology at City St. George's, University of London, said. In this case, they tell themselves things like, "Bezos is bad, Amazon won't even notice, this seems like a victimless crime," to make themselves feel better and like they're in the right. "They've sort of rehearsed this in their head so many times or even said it out loud, they start to believe it themselves," she said. "That's what allows them these sorts of moral gymnastics."

While people may see their actions as a way to get back at Bezos, the sheer size of the modern corporation creates a level of removal that makes it easy to sit back and think, "Who cares if someone pulls one over on them?" After all, it feels like they're pulling one over on us all the time.

"When we take from a store or a workplace, it gets a little bit easier to distance yourself," Terrence Shulman, the founder of the Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft, Spending, and Hoarding, said.

Beyond the fact that theft and fraud are, you know, against the law, anti-Amazon avengers may not recognize the collateral damage they could be inadvertently causing. If you steal from Whole Foods, Bezos won't know, but the store manager who's fired over it will. (I did survey some Whole Foods workers about this, and several of them confirmed that (a) they see a lot of middle-class and even seemingly wealthy shoplifters, and (b) they may be a little bothered by some of it but are not in a tizzy.) Before you lie to Amazon that your package never arrived or return the wrong item, you might want to check who the actual seller is.

John Roman, the CEO of BattlBox, which sells outdoor gear and equipment, would rather just sell everything from his own website, but they've got to be on Amazon and other e-commerce platforms just because of the reach. He's currently dealing with a return fraud situation — someone bought a new spotlight from him, said they didn't like it, and shipped an older model back. BattlBox didn't even realize what had happened until they sent the returned item to another customer who flagged it. Roman has filed an appeal with Amazon, but there's "no telling" whether the company will side with him.

He doesn't really blame people for doing this. By making returns so easy and taking "the customer is right" philosophy to the extreme, Amazon has fostered this behavior. "I don't think the average consumer even understands that it's not Amazon selling the product," he said, pointing to the fact that Amazon regularly introduces an Amazon Basic version of a best-selling item — which then gets prominent website placement near or above the original — in order to get in on the action. Roman even understands the get-back-at-Bezos stuff, given how the ultrawealthy are viewed.

"I'm not saying I agree with it, but I fully understand the people that view that they're giving it to The Man, but the reality is that you are actually hurting small businesses," he said.

Ironically, shoplifting at other retailers has been a plus for Amazon's business — people frustrated that everything is locked up at CVS and Target just go to Amazon's website instead. It's not clear how big of a problem shrink is for Whole Foods and Amazon since the company doesn't break it out in their financials. When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was asked about return fraud in a CNBC interview last year, he sort of shrugged it off, saying at the company's scale, "You get a bit of everything."

"It matters to them, but does it matter enough to put the time and effort into trying to stop that? I would say probably not," Arun Sundaram, an analyst at CFRA Research, said. He joked that given how profitable some other arms of Amazon's business arms are, if it wanted to give free food to customers for a month, it probably could.

Amazon declined to comment for this story. Jeff Bezos did not respond to a request for comment.

I'm not trying to say that the logic among Amazon and Whole Foods thieves is, "I woke up in the morning mad at Jeff Bezos because killed The Washington Post's Kamala Harris endorsement, so now I'm going to steal overpriced salami from Whole Foods." Attitudes are generally more removed and hazy. They view snacking while shopping (without paying for said snack) as a victimless crime, with the only potential victim being Bezos, even if that's a stretch.

"I don't know who I'm hurting," Lee said.

In the current economy, it's hard not to feel like you're being taken advantage of at every turn. Everything's getting more expensive, but corporate profits are still going up. Companies are constantly cutting costs, whether that means laying off workers or making it impossible to talk to a customer service representative on the phone. People feel like they have to be on guard against business trickery and slights. If you've shrugged and said, "That's how they get you," enough times, you start to think about how you'll get them. People feel like big business has broken the social contract, so they can break it back.

If people want to hurt Amazon with their pocketbooks, the best thing they can probably do is just not shop there. But that would require effort, planning, and forgoing the luxuries of on-demand shopping, which many people don't seem so willing to do.

"That would be a moral response," said Stuart Green, a Rutgers law professor who focuses on the moral theory underlying laws. "I don't think you can steal things that you like and then say you're doing it because you don't like the company."

At least it's better than setting Teslas on fire.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Stephen Curry is undeniably one of basketball's best-ever shooters — but even would-be GOATs can't cheat time.

As the 37-year-old four-time NBA champion enters the twilight of his career on the court, he told Business Insider he's still playing at such a high level thanks to his exacting recovery routine.

Sticking to it is key if Curry is to achieve his goal of outplaying the end of his Golden State Warriors contract when the 2026-2027 season wraps.

Cold plunges and compression boots are merely just a part of the Olympic gold medalist's routine. His wife Ayesha's "exceptional" cooking and the time he spends with his four children — who are between the ages of 12 years and 9 months — at their home in Atherton, California is part of Curry's secret sauce.

In the latest installment of Business Insider's "5 to 9" series, Curry — who was promoting the new Plezi Hydration drink that he co-created — shared what he does in his spare time with BI.

When do you wake up?

My wake-up time depends on whether it's a game day or a practice day, but I get up around 7 a.m. on average.

Ayesha and I try to do school drop-offs and morning routines with our kids as much as possible, but it does take a village and we can't do it every day.

I usually get to practice around 9 a.m.

Do you eat breakfast before you go?

Most of the time, I eat breakfast at the facility right before practice.

I'm a creature of habit, so I like to have a yogurt parfait with granola and some mixed berries and some type of egg dish — whether that's an omelet or a scramble — sometimes with some spinach mixed in. I'll have half a waffle for some carbs and sometimes a protein shake on the side. So it's a healthy breakfast.

Sounds like a great breakfast. Is it a chore or a pleasure to eat so much for work?

It's definitely a chore, which is my wife's biggest call-out with me. I really have to force myself to eat and keep my calories up. I do like good food and to eat for fun, but I'm more someone who eats to live rather than lives to eat.

Pretty much every elite athlete I've ever spoken to has said the same. Are you disciplined with your diet?

I'm fairly disciplined. You want to have room for a cheat day once in a while just to be a human being and have a little fun.

It varies throughout the year, though. My birthday is in March, and after that, it's the lock-in period leading up to the playoffs and the stretch run when you're trying to chase championships on the court. So I'm a little more disciplined then.

But other times, like in summer, there are no rules. You just want to make sure you're having everything in moderation and trying to eat as cleanly as possible.

Endless choices for dinner

Do you cook dinner in the evening?

I like cooking but I never cook because I have a beautiful wife who's an exceptional chef.

Lucky you.

I know, for sure. She loves taking care of the family.

Sometimes, she'll say, "What do you want for dinner?" And I can never answer that question because the options are endless. So I get her to give me three options to pick between. But you name it, she can make it — and it's always good. She makes it look so easy.

Are your kids picky eaters?

Our oldest and our 6-year-old are, but once our oldest started to cook for herself a bit, she expanded her palette. Our 9-year-old eats whatever's on her plate. She was eating oysters at 3 years old. She wants to try everything, and eating is the love of her life.

Do you think a lot about nutrition for your family?

Yes. That's why we love working with Plezi. It's a brand that's mindful about what you're putting in your body, giving kids and families an option for nutritious products that also taste great.

Recovery is essential

Obviously, you have an intense training schedule, but what does movement look like outside work?

It's a way of life. When I'm playing golf, I try to walk the courses as much as possible instead of riding the golf cart. I like to go on long walks or ride bikes around the neighborhood with my kids. My son just wants to race everyone.

We, as a family, like to spend our time being active, on the move, and outside, and we've seen how much good that does for our minds and bodies. There's no better thing than getting fresh air and being in nature, too.

Do you have any recovery and longevity essentials?

You think about it more and more as you get older. I'm in my 16th year and just turned 37, and I've realized everything does matter, especially sleep: the amount you get, the consistency, and good sleep habits.

It's important to have a routine. And for me, getting in cold tubs, the sauna, compression sleeves to make sure you got good blood flow in your legs, different supplements — they all give me a little boost.

If I skip one of those, I feel it, and it doesn't give me the maximum recovery that I need, especially at this stage. So, I commit to my recovery and find fun in the process because that's more rewarding than what happens on the basketball court.

It's time-consuming. It's not always glamorous, but it does work. The results are proven, and it all allows me to play at a high level, even at this age.

What does your ideal evening look like?

A good family dinner, for sure. Yes, I have my recovery routine, but I also make sure I've got time to be with the family and watch a movie with the kids. We are very much homebodies and so when you have the entire family at home, it's always great to enjoy that energy and the laughs.

I then either watch a good TV show with my wife or put on a game. I watch basketball all the time, so I'm always doing homework and scouting and all that type of stuff. I try to get to bed at a decent time to be ready for the next day.

Do you have a nighttime wind-down routine?

Yeah, I wear Normatec compression boots when I watch a show in bed, read a book, or talk to my wife.

After that, I put on an audio track, a sleep sound device meant to trigger the brainwaves and help you get deep sleep. So, those two things get me in the mood to go to bed.

I go to sleep between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., depending on the night. My wife and I try to go to bed at the same time, but it doesn't always work.

I'm a night owl, so I keep her up later than she'd like. For some reason, I'm really productive at night.

Correction: March 27, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated Stephen Curry's role with Plezi Nutrition. He co-created Plezi Hydration, not the wider company.

• Berkshire Hathaway stock has jumped 16% this year while the S&P 500 has dropped 2%.
• Investors are flocking to Warren Buffett's company because of its huge cash reserves and reputation.
• Buffett is known for capitalizing on market chaos and has assuaged succession concerns.

Warren Buffett is off to a roaring start to 2025 with shares of his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate up 16%, trouncing the benchmark S&P 500's 2% decline.

The stock surge has boosted Buffett's net worth by an unmatched $23 billion, vaulting him past Bill Gates into sixth place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a $165 billion fortune.

The 94-year-old business icon and his company are riding high as investors seek shelter from roiling markets, trusting the legendary bargain hunter to pounce if asset prices crash and the economy tanks.

They're also cheering a rebound at Geico, which is owned by Berkshire, and banking on Buffett's planned successor to deliver when the time comes.

Port in a storm

"Berkshire is a stable, solid ship in a sea of uncertainty right now," Paul Lountzis, the president and founder of Lountzis Asset Management, told Business Insider.

The longtime Berkshire shareholder pointed to the company's "rock of Gibraltar" balance sheet, which boasted more than $320 billion in cash, Treasurys, and other liquid assets at the end of December, and stocks worth more than $270 billion.

During his 60 years in charge, Buffett has transformed Berkshire from a failing textile mill into a $1 trillion juggernaut. He's acquired scores of businesses across myriad industries, including See's Candies, Precision Castparts, and the BNSF Railway, and built multibillion-dollar stakes in blue-chip stocks such as Apple, Coca-Cola, and American Express.

Berkshire stock has soared in value by more than 5,500,000% during Buffett's tenure, crushing the S&P's roughly 39,000% gain over the same period. The stock has compounded at about 20% a year for six decades — almost twice as fast as the benchmark.

The billionaire philanthropist is also known for prudently managing Berkshire, prizing long-term success over short-term gains.

"In an uncertain world, investors place a higher value on the certainty that Berkshire offers," Darren Pollock, a portfolio manager at Cheviot Value Management and another longtime shareholder, told BI. "Consistency and reliability often get a bid when froth exits financial markets."

Cathy Seifert, a senior vice president at CFRA Research and a longtime Berkshire analyst, said there's been a "flight to quality amid an upswing in market and geopolitical volatility," and investors see Buffett's sprawling empire as a safe haven.

Profiting from chaos

Buffett is a value investor who specializes in spotting and scooping up stocks and businesses at a discount. The best time to do that is when prices tumble and the pool of buyers dries up.

"Warren Buffett has often demonstrated he is at his best with capital allocation with more challenging conditions," Macrae Sykes, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, told BI. He's "shown a unique ability to see through the noise and find value."

For example, the legendary investor struck lucrative deals with Goldman Sachs, General Electric, Mars, Dow Chemical, and Swiss Re during the financial crisis.

He deployed more than $21 billion across those five transactions between 2008 and 2009, securing positions worth a combined $26 billion — and yielding $2.1 billion in yearly interest and dividends — by the end of 2009.

Fast-forward to today, and Berkshire's huge "cash cushion" gives it "tremendous firepower for bargain hunting should opportunities arise," Pollock said.

Buffett's patience, discipline, and refusal to buy into bubbles and trendy stocks have paid off in the past. When the dot-com bubble burst and the S&P fell by an average of 14% a year between 2000 and 2002, Berkshire shares rose by 10% on average during those three years as investors dumped expensive tech stocks and returned to tried-and-true names.

Under Buffett's leadership, Berkshire stock "substantially outperformed" the market in 10 of the 12 years the S&P declined, David Kass, a finance professor at the University of Maryland who's followed Buffett for four decades, told BI.

Lifting the hood

Berkshire's business performance has also made it a draw for investors. The company has some "fundamental momentum," Sykes said, noting it generated about $30 billion in operating cash flow last year, or about $600 million a week.

Geico's profits soared last year as Todd Combs, the car insurer's CEO and one of Buffett's two investment managers, boosted efficiency and updated its underwriting practices.

Buffett described Geico as a "long-held gem that needed major repolishing" in his latest annual letter and hailed its recent performance as "spectacular."

The recovery helped lift Berkshire's operating earnings by 71% year-over-year last quarter. Kass said that was a key reason its shares have outpaced Magnificent Seven stocks such as Microsoft and Alphabet this year.

Seifert said the Geico turnaround should "significantly aid" Berkshire's profit growth given it's one of the company's most important business units. She also noted the Federal Reserve's hikes to interest rates since 2022 have made Berkshire's mountain of bonds more lucrative.

Buffett's company raked in nearly $22 billion in interest, dividend, and investment income last year, up from less than $16 billion in 2023 and about $10 billion in 2022.

Berkshire after Buffett

Buffett and Berkshire have become virtually synonymous, making it hard to imagine another CEO filling his shoes. Yet the demise of his longtime business partner, Charlie Munger, a few weeks shy of his 100th birthday in late 2023, underscored the Buffett era is nearing an end.

Buffett has carefully planned for his departure and worked to build shareholders' comfort with Greg Abel, the head of Berkshire's non-insurance businesses and his chosen successor.

A final reason for Berkshire's stock gains this year is "growing confidence" in Abel's ability to make Berkshire's subsidiaries sing and shrewdly allocate the company's capital, Sykes said.

Buffett has "done a great job preparing the firm for a future without him," Lountzis said. "There is not much more he could do — though I do wish he could clone himself and Charlie to keep running it for another 60 years."

• Private equity's slump continues as the business of buying and selling companies remains sluggish.
• Buyout funds recently underperformed the stock market for the first time in decades.
• Here's what it means for those already in the industry and those eager to break in.

Wall Street's "Barbarians at the Gate" are slowing down after nearly 25 years of beating the stock market. As a result, anyone contemplating a career in private equity should rethink their approach.

Earlier this month, investment firm Hamilton Lane issued a report showing that the MSCI World Index, a leading stock market indicator, beat out private equity returns for the first time since the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. Hamilton Lane's data represents performance through September 2024 for buyout funds that started investing in 2022.

Prior to this, the leveraged buyout industry, also known as private equity, had been on a tear. Sure, it felt some pain during the housing crash and the following recession, but that also meant that interest rates stayed lower for longer — paving the way for cash-rich companies like Blackstone to pick up assets on the cheap, which helped drive returns and more investors. In July 2023, Blackstone became the first private equity firm to manage $1 trillion in assets — three years ahead of the company's prediction to investors.

As Apollo CEO Marc Rowan said at a presentation last year, much of the industry's returns over the last 15 years (he excluded Apollo's) "was not the result of great investing, but as a result of $1 trillion in money printing. Well, guess what? We stopped printing that magnitude of money."

Indeed, since interest rates started ticking higher, financial sponsor dealmaking has slowed, IPOs have ground to a halt, and dry powder (industry speak for money yet to be invested) has stood at near all-time highs even as fundraising slowed by almost half from its 2021 peak.

That's not to say that the industry broadly known as "private equity" is dead — or that all buyout funds have underperformed stocks in recent years. Quite the opposite. Firms like Blackstone and Apollo have been busy issuing loans and investing in large infrastructure projects (think data centers). Indeed, Apollo's lending business is now nearly 10 times larger than its traditional buyout business.

What does it all mean for budding masters of the universe looking for a career in private equity? We spoke with a range of experts, from industry insiders to consultants and recruiters, to understand what is ahead for professionals looking to break into the lucrative field of private-market investing.

"Private equity was able to get lazy because of ZIRP."

They said there is no shortage of opportunities for aspiring financiers who know where to look. Private equity's loss has been private credit's gain, and within private equity, there are more opportunities than ever for pure-play operations experts skilled at running businesses.

As Robin Judson, founder of recruiting firm Robin Judson Partners, put it: "I think that people who want to do private equity will pursue it, while people who just want to invest may look toward other strategies."

Here's a guide to a career in private equity as the golden age of corporate buybacks gives way to private credit and other types of dealmaking.

The rise of the portfolio operator

When interest rates started rising in 2022, company valuations remained loft, making it harder for buyout firms, which rely heavily on debt to make purchases, to find deals that could generate returns. This has led to a shift in demand for professionals who know how to drive returns by changing how a business is run, said Glenn Mincey, KPMG's head of US private equity.

"This recalibration has given professionals in the industry new focus outside of buying and selling companies," Mincey told BI.

Indeed, these pros used to be called in to help manage a company after it was purchased. Increasingly, they are getting involved in advance of an acquisition because they are often best positioned to know how to maximize performance through operational improvements.

The largest firms will hire teams of operational experts with expertise ranging from technological transformation to supply chain and logistics to talent acquisition and management. Even traditional deal professionals have become more operationally focused.

"Private equity was able to get lazy because of ZIRP," a VP at a mid-market private equity firm told BI, referring to the acronym for the Federal Reserve's zero interest rate policy response to financial crises starting in 2001. "That's gone away, you have to know your shit now," this person added.

This hands-on, entrepreneurial approach can be seen in the growing rise of so-called search funds. Sometimes described as mini-private equity, a search fund is a small private equity fund run by one or two individuals that's focused on purchasing one small business like a carwash or HVAC company. Once purchased, the fund works on streamlining operations and creating value.

According to a 2024 Stanford Business School study, search fund creation hit an all-time high in 2023, the latest year with data, with more than 90 first-time search funds raised. This strategy is attracting a younger group of professionals right out of business school, or even before business school, with Stanford finding that nearly 80% of first-time fundraisers in 2023 clock in at 35 or younger.

The private credit boom

The same high interest rates and global uncertainty that have dampened the traditional private equity industry have made nonbank lending, also known as private credit, more attractive.

Even in a tough economy, "companies still need capitalization," explained Judson. And with banks pulling back on riskier lending, private investors have stepped in to offer "more creative financing solutions," she said.

Blackstone, which made its name in private equity and then real estate investing, saw its credit business grow to become the largest business in its portfolio by assets under management last year. Apollo now counts more than 80% of its $751 billion in assets under management as private credit.

As PWC's leader of its private equity advisory practice Kevin Desai told BI in January, the private credit job market is hot in part because there simply aren't enough people with direct experience to fill lenders' needs. One reason is that private credit firms want professionals with lending experience.

That means recruiting from the debt-raising or trading arms of investment banks — or really anyone with lending knowledge who can be trained.

Nelson Chu, CEO and founder of private credit investment marketplace Percent, told BI that his firm has also recruited talent from debt rating agencies like Morningstar and Moody's. Its often worked out so well that the firm has seen its workers get quickly poached after they get up to speed, he added.

What this means for private equity jobs

Anthony Keizner, cofounder and managing partner of Odyssey Search Partners, told BI that hiring is "very buoyant" in certain private equity businesses, including the popular and dry-powder-rich niches of secondaries, buying and selling of stakes in other private funds, and infrastructure.

The slowdown in the traditional private equity business of buyouts is felt most acutely in midlevel and senior positions, he said.

"Most buyout firms have slowed their hiring plans in 2025 compared to the recent boom years," he said. "Many private equity firms feel they are adequately staffed at current deal volume levels."

Hiring at the junior level remains active, he said — a sentiment echoed by Tim Roth, partner at advisory firm Armanino Advisory.

"I don't believe junior hiring is decreasing, but I think it's becoming more competitive to get a shot," Roth told BI, noting that AI could exacerbate the challenge.

For professionals who have already broken into the business, there's less pay but not a lot of eagerness to jump ship either. One reason is that PE firms still have a ton of dry powder to invest and portfolio companies to sell when the time is right.

"I tell candidates not to leave their jobs right now without having another job," Judson said. "If you have a job, assuming the portfolio is sustainable, you will eventually get paid."

The private equity VP agreed. "I haven't heard of many people at my level looking to run for the exits," he told BI. Even with realizations, and therefore carry and bonuses lower, the industry still offers "the highest upside" for compensation, he explained.

Private equity, with its tie to interest rates and the overall health of the economy, is a cyclical business. Previous golden ages, like the 1980s or the early 2000s, also ended, and new ones rose up in their stead.

"The key word right now is stagnation," Judson said. "Nobody knows how long this uncertainty is going to last. Is it going to last for months or years?"