• Kiya Tomlin is married to Mike Tomlin, who coached the Pittsburgh Steelers for 19 seasons.
• It was important to her that she maintain some independence, including financially.
• Too many middle-aged women feel invisible until they embrace their strength and experience, she says.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kiya Tomlin, founder and designer of Kiya Tomlin apparel. It has been edited for length and clarity.

As the wife of an NFL coach, I was highly visible, but didn't feel seen. I was always acknowledged as someone's wife, and most conversations evolved around my husband's career. Even our house guests and parties became obligations tied to football, not opportunities to genuinely enjoy connecting with people.

I am super proud of my husband and our three kids. But I'm more than just a wife and mother. When Mike and I met in college, I was planning to be a doctor until I realized a medical career wasn't feasible, whereas Mike's career could take him anywhere.

That's when I started my fashion career. I'd been making my own clothes since I was 10, and fashion is a passion of mine. It was a career that I could schedule around the kids and do anywhere Mike's job took us.

One of my best accomplishments is supporting other mothers

I was raised by a single mom, who was a community college professor. We didn't have much money, and we were one of the few Black families in the New Jersey town where I was raised. I was also extremely small: in kindergarten, the other kids used to carry me on their hip like a toddler.

I never felt like I fit in, and part of that was because I couldn't fit into or afford the clothes my classmates wore. That was problematic for me, so when I was 10, I asked my mom for a sewing machine. I started making clothes that looked like what the other kids wore, and over time I began making outfits that could help me stand out in a different way. That became my claim to fame.

Today, one of my proudest accomplishments is manufacturing my clothing at my factory in Pittsburgh. My six employees who work there are all moms. Creating a flexible work environment that lets them prioritize raising their kids while also supporting their family financially has been amazing.

Our family had an adjustment period after each season

As Mike's career took off, football dictated everything in our lives. We built our family around that reality. During the season, Mike sometimes worked 20-hour days and slept at the training complex. Once he became a head coach, the hours were somewhat less intense, especially as technology improved. He could typically get home for family time on a Friday evening.

I handled everything related to the kids. It was important to me to maintain my independence financially, emotionally, and spiritually.

It wasn't always easy. After each season, there was a period of reentry. I'd spent the football season being the sole boss at home, and sometimes the way I did things wasn't the way Mike would do them. During those adjustment periods, I knew I had to relax, relate, and release.

We didn't spoil our kids just because we could

When I was growing up, money choices were based on a distinction: is it a want, or a need? Because funds were limited, I usually got my needs met, but often went without things I wanted.

Once I was raising my kids — who are now 20, 24, and 25 — I didn't have many external financial limitations. But I didn't wait to raise spoiled kids, even if I could afford many of their wants.

Mike and I often reflected on our own childhoods and took a pretty bare-bones approach with our kids. On Christmas, for example, we followed the four gift rule: something you want, something you need, something to wear, and something to read. The first year of instituting that was tough, but the kids adjusted.

I'm excited to see where my strengths lead in middle age

Today, I'm 52. My kids are grown, and Mike is retired, which means I'm untethered from many of the obligations that I've had for the last 30 years. I have more freedom than I've ever had as an adult. I'm excited to have this room to grow. I want to see what I'm capable of, with everything I've learned along the way.

In middle age, women are finally at a point where we have experience, knowledge, and money. Yet, we're culturally overlooked. That can make us feel invisible, even when we know better.

We need to acknowledge that we have this amazing set of strengths. We don't need to chase our younger selves; we need to relish the fact that every experience, challenge, and skill we've gained has made us who we are today. That principle has guided me as a designer, and now it's guiding me into the next stage of my life.

• I'd always wanted to live in New York, and when I finally did, I felt like I'd won the lottery.
• I loved so much about the city and thought I'd call it home forever.
• However, as my life changed, so did where I wanted to live.

When I was in my early 20s, working at a tiny cheese and wine bar in Hell's Kitchen, my boss told me something I've never forgotten: New Yorkers aren't necessarily born in New York. They're born all over the world, but New York is in their hearts.

I knew exactly what he meant. New York had been in my heart for as long as I could remember. I first visited when I was 7, sleeping on the couch of my aunt and uncle's West Village apartment. I remember begging my mom for a fluffy pink scarf from a street vendor. She said yes, and I wore it proudly as we wandered the crowded sidewalks.

I loved the noise, the energy, the sheer number of people going about their lives. I loved that you could be almost anyone, dress almost any way, and still have to work pretty hard to be considered even a little bit weird. I decided then that I would live there someday.

Getting to New York felt like winning the lottery

When it came time to apply to colleges, I looked first at schools in Manhattan. Getting into Columbia felt like winning the lottery. I was the luckiest girl in the world, headed for the city I'd dreamed about since I was little.

After graduation, I spent a few years in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Both had their charms, but when a job brought me back to New York, it felt like a homecoming.

I've always found something oddly soothing about New York's frantic pace. My brain moves quickly, bouncing between ideas, worries, and possibilities. The city seemed to operate at the same frequency. Its chaos somehow quieted my own.

I loved walking out my front door and immediately being in the middle of everything. I could spend an afternoon wandering without a destination and stumble upon a new favorite bakery, a strange little shop, or an unexpected conversation. Even after more than a decade, a million apartments, terrible bosses, tiny kitchens, and eye-watering rent, the magic never wore off.

Sometimes I'd be walking down the sidewalk, carrying groceries or rushing to meet a friend, and I'd look around and think, I live here. That lottery-winning glee never entirely disappeared.

Then my life began to change

In early 2020, as the pandemic upended the world, my husband and I left New York for rural New Jersey. We had a baby daughter and soon welcomed a son. Our days filled with diapers, naps, playgrounds, and the logistics of caring for two little kids. Instead of crowded sidewalks, we had a backyard. Instead of the subway, a car.

I loved the breathing room. But I missed New York fiercely: the spontaneity, the restaurants, the friends, the possibility waiting outside my door. I assumed we'd eventually find our way back. New York was still my favorite city. Surely that meant I was supposed to live there.

Then, in 2025, my husband's job brought us to Chicago. I was excited, but figured New York would always be the place I secretly wished we could return to.

Chicago gave me something I didn't know I was missing

We settled in Bucktown, a neighborhood of old brick houses, leafy streets, coffee shops, and families pushing strollers.

We walk our kids to school, see familiar faces at the playground, and walk the 606, an elevated trail through our neighborhood, stopping for tacos or ice cream. There's a farmers' market where I buy flowers and a bus to the Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicago has excellent restaurants, museums, and endless opportunities to explore. But there's also more room to move, less friction in everyday life.

I hadn't realized how much I wanted that.

Winter is long, and making a new home takes work. But I feel surprisingly rooted here.

I have the energy I loved about New York, alongside a neighborhood life that feels manageable with two young kids. I can have an ambitious career, wonderful meals, interesting friends, and adventure without every ordinary errand requiring a complicated plan.

I still love New York; I just don't need to live there anymore

On my last trip to New York, I was in town for a conference, staying in Midtown. One afternoon, I put on my headphones and walked down Broadway through Union Square and into The Village, a route I'd traveled a thousand times before.

I popped into Eataly for a gelato, weaving around tourists and people hurrying somewhere important. Music played in my ears, and my feet knew the way. I remembered the different versions of myself who had walked these blocks: the college student thrilled to be here, the aspiring writer figuring out what came next, the newlywed.

I missed my kids, back home in Chicago. I felt nostalgic for the city and those earlier versions of my life. But alongside that nostalgia was something unexpected: complete contentment.

I was so happy to be in New York. And just as happy that I didn't live there anymore.

The city hadn't lost its magic. I'd changed.

I wanted to walk my children to school, know my neighbors, and have space for the ordinary pleasures of family life. I wanted a city that felt exciting without making everything quite so hard.

For years, being a New Yorker was an important part of how I understood myself. I liked what it said about me: that I was adventurous, ambitious, curious, and willing to embrace a little chaos.

But those qualities didn't disappear when I moved away. I can still love New York, visit often, and feel a jolt of happiness every time I step onto its sidewalks. I can still be the little girl in the fluffy pink scarf, dazzled by all that possibility.

And I can be just as happy to go home to Chicago.

• Having a high-paying job with power doesn't necessarily translate to an easy love life.
• The founder of Three Day Rule Matchmaking said execs can struggle with dating because it requires relinquishing control.
• She coaches busy leaders to slow down, open up, and trust the dating process.

When it comes to finding love, successful executives often struggle with one thing they can't control: chemistry.

In business, executives are used to getting what they want, they know what their end goal is, and they know what work needs to be done to achieve it, Talia Goldstein, founder of Three Day Rule Matchmaking, told Business Insider.

But this strength in their professional life doesn't always translate to dating.

"Some of the executives struggle because you can't control whether the person's interested in you, you can't control whether or not there's chemistry, and that can be very frustrating for these top executive types," Goldstein said.

Goldstein said that executives hire matchmakers to help them save time and energy, two things that their job often gets the best of.

But she said that her firm, which charges clients anywhere from $6,300 to roughly $100,000 depending on the membership, also provides its clients coaching to help them level up their dating game.

"A lot of what we teach them is to slow down and to get vulnerable and trust the process," she said. "And that can be challenging for people who are so used to controlling their destiny."

As part of this coaching, her firm also collects feedback from both parties after the date and uses that information to better understand how the client is perceived by matches.

Without feedback, people repeat the same patterns and are left wondering why they can't land that second or third date, said Goldstein, whose firm's clients are split roughly evenly between men and women.

"With matchmaking, we know exactly why. So it ends up making the process more enjoyable. And also you learn so much about yourself in this," she said. "I think it's the most valuable part of the service."

Goldstein shared an example of a successful entrepreneur her firm worked with where every date he came back from the women would express liking him, but would then say the interaction felt more like one with a friend. Goldstein said the team was stumped as to why none of the women they were setting him up with were working out.

Thanks to the feedback sessions, they soon learned their client was ending each date with a handshake instead of a hug.

"That just felt like a business transaction and nobody was interested," she said. "And that one small change made such a difference. But on your own, you would never have figured that out."

• Ukraine's war robots are starting to down Russian drones to defend themselves.
• They could eventually provide mobile air defense for soldiers in the kill zone.
• But the technology is still emerging, and widespread deployment remains a challenge.

Ukraine's robots are increasingly able to down aerial drones, a capability that could eventually help soldiers move and fight in some of the war's most dangerous areas.

The skies in Ukraine are full of surveillance and strike drones that make movement risky, particularly in the kill zone surrounding the front lines.

Ukrainian units are increasingly trying to use robots there instead of humans, and companies are giving robots new abilities to take down drones.

Oleksandr Yabchanka, head of robotic systems for Ukraine's Da Vinci Wolves Battalion, a prominent Ukrainian military unit, told Business Insider that Russian drones are one of "the key challenges" on the battlefield, and "I believe that ground-based robotic systems can play a significant role in addressing this issue. "

With effective protection against those drones, he said, "the nature of combat operations along the line of contact could change substantially."

He called defending the "low sky" by countering enemy drones a promising role for ground robots.

Beyond leading front-line operators, Yabchanka also co-founded Defence Robotics UA, a non-profit that helps Ukrainian units adopt robotic technologies.

"I have particularly high hopes for the use of ground-based robotic systems in defending the low-altitude airspace," he said.

The kill zone

Inside the kill zone, drones complicate movement, so robots are taking on new roles in logistics, casualty evacuation, and more. Some of these systems are equipped with weaponry and jamming equipment to take down hostile drones.

Robots equipped for counter-drone missions could reduce the demand for short-range air defense units, which provide cover for infantry moving in and out, in the kill zone. Right now, these units face great danger and risk getting pinned down inside.

These robots could also defend themselves as Russia increasingly targets them.

Mykyta Rozhkov, chief business development officer at Ukrainian robotics and technology company Frontline Robotics, told Business Insider that robots are "becoming a main target" for Russia and are defenseless without added protections.

Giving robots the ability to defend themselves could make them more survivable, while turning them into mobile air defenses could help protect troops.

Rozhkov said makers are now "trying to find a way how we can defend against FPVs."

Yabchanka said that when it comes to changing the kill zone, "it would be incorrect to promise that this will happen specifically within the next 12 months."

But he said robots have already successfully stopped some drones, and "I believe this field has a great future."

Robots vs drones

Most of the technology in this space is still being tested or used on a limited scale, primarily to protect the robots themselves rather than provide broader air defense.

Rozhkov said that while it's key to have uncrewed ground vehicles be capable of defending themselves, he expects to eventually see UGVs functioning as a mobile, short-range air defense system to try to clear the skies.

His company is working with a partner on a system that uses cameras and sensors to find hostile drones and then engages them with a separate capability. He didn't disclose how it would engage enemy drones.

Other Ukrainian robot makers are also adding anti-drone capabilities, some involving smoke, nets, and shrapnel solutions. Robots are increasingly being fitted with weaponry like machine guns, and some companies have said that these weapons can stop enemy drones.

Ukrainian company UFORCE, for instance, says it has destroyed enemy drones in ambush scenarios. The company's AI-assisted Predator weapons station can be mounted on robots to track and fire at drones. The 42nd Separate Mechanized Brigade previously described a machine gun mounted on a Liut robot shooting down Russian drones.

Rovertech, which advertises itself as making "robots for the kill zone," is developing a system that uses sensors, AI-assisted detection, and a net launcher to stop incoming drones, while Ratel Robotics has started serial production on a protective system that includes net launchers on its robots.

Ukraine's 100th Separate Mechanized Brigade said last month that it had deployed an active protection system using net launchers and shared a video showing one of its robots firing a net at an approaching drone, which then crashed to the ground.

Some Ukrainian units have also driven robots carrying electronic warfare equipment forward to jam Russia's drones, but it's an emerging capability that has yet to see widespread use.

Brave1, Ukraine's state-backed innovation platform, says armed robots are starting to be used against aerial drones, but it wants more, describing anti-aircraft weaponry and protection as priorities.

Rozhkov said that soon, Ukraine's robots will have "more and more sophisticated solutions" to stop drones.

He said it's essential because the first side that figures out how to stop small FPVs "will gain a huge advantage on the battlefield and can create dramatic results."

From massive warehouses and high-tech distribution centers to fresh produce facilities and restaurant kitchens, we go behind the scenes at Sysco to see how it delivers food, supplies, and ingredients to more than 670,000 customer locations worldwide.

As Sysco pursues its biggest acquisition ever, Jethro Restaurant Depot, some operators worry about what the deal could mean for competition, prices, and the cost of eating out.

• This post originally appeared in the BI Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

A post-Huang era

We're about to learn just how much one person truly matters to the AI economy.

Jensen Huang was larger than life at Nvidia. He was the AI boom's most recognizable evangelist, the chip maker's chief visionary and dealmaker, and the force behind Nvidia's ascent to the most valuable company on the planet.

As Zak Jason writes, the cult of the tech founder has very much become America's religion. And Huang was "its most convincing saint."

A week ago, Huang admitted to an affair and apologized to his family. Nvidia disclosed it was investigating whether he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. And then The New York Times reported a second affair, this one with an Nvidia executive who was one of Huang's direct reports. He resigned on Thursday.

Huang's abrupt downfall is a stress test of founder worship. The market put a price on it: Nvidia's market cap tumbled $573 billion last week, more than all but 18 companies in the entire S&P 500.

"It's like the Bulls without Jordan," author Stephen Witt, who wrote a biography on Huang, said on CNBC. "I don't know how they are going to replace this guy."

That is the essence of key-man risk, as my colleagues Sarah E. Needleman and Tim Paradis reported. When one leader is so closely identified with the strategy, the products, and the culture, their departure can create a vacuum that no org chart (let alone one with 60 direct reports to the CEO) can immediately fill.

Much of Silicon Valley came to Huang's defense in recent days. Sarah Guo, a venture capitalist, called him "one of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs of all time." Sequoia's Shaun Maguire said Huang's "contributions to American innovation and AI leadership cannot be overstated."

A petition to reinstate Huang as Nvidia CEO circulated over the weekend, collecting more than 100,000 signatures, including those of Elon Musk and other prominent figures. Our own Alistair Barr also points to new reports that are casting doubt on the intelligence behind Jensen Huang's downfall.

For sure, there are several examples of seemingly irreplaceable CEOs — Steve Jobs at Apple and Travis Kalanick at Uber — whose companies still thrived under new leadership.

And even some of Huang's biggest proponents aren't standing by him. "No one was a bigger defender of Jensen than I was but there are rules about sex with subordinates," CNBC's Jim Cramer said on X. "Just because someone is brilliant doesn't mean he can do what he wants."

The question is whether Nvidia, which lacked a defined succession plan, can prove to be more durable than its founder's legend.

If it can't? Dick Costolo, the former Twitter CEO, floated an idea. "Prediction: 3-4 years from now, [Nvidia] will miss a quarter or two, and they will bring Jensen back to run the company," he said.

"Like fame, everybody is outraged for 15 minutes, and there is nothing Americans love more than the comeback story."

• MKBHD says the Cybertruck's wind-down could be bad news for the elusive Roadster.
• Tesla is clearing factory space for the steering-wheel-less, gold-painted Cybercab.
• Due to a bet, a 2026 Cybercab consumer launch could cost MKBHD his hair — but he's not sweating it.

Tesla's decision to wind down Cybertruck production has Marques Brownlee worried about a different delayed vehicle.

"This doesn't bode well for the Roadster," Brownlee, the YouTube reviewer popularly known as MKBHD, said on a Friday episode of the "WVFRM Podcast."

On November 6, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on X that the EV maker would stop building the Cybertruck by mid-2027 to focus on production of the steering wheel-less Cybercab. Earlier this year, Tesla also retired its Model S and Model X, as it shifts more of its attention toward autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

That makes the Roadster, Tesla's twice-revealed and long-delayed supercar, a questionable fit in the automaker's lineup, MKBHD said. It's the only vehicle in Tesla's lineup that the automaker isn't trying to make fully autonomous.

MKBHD has followed the Roadster saga particularly closely. He previously held two reservations for the high-flying vehicle, but he said in September 2025 that he had canceled one after waiting nearly a decade for delivery.

And, for the Cybertruck, he said he thinks Tesla missed a golden opportunity.

"If they just made like a good, simple SUV type-thing, like the EV9," he said. "That would have sold a lot. People would have wanted that everywhere."

About MKBHD's hair…

The YouTuber has a big bet with Tesla stans: If Tesla, as it once predicted, sells Cybercabs to US consumers by the end of 2026, he'll shave his head.

Tesla debuted its gold-painted Cybercabs in Austin in September, but the vehicles were used exclusively in Tesla's own ride-hailing service — not sold to individual drivers.

Now, Tesla's plan to continue making Cybertrucks until mid-2027 is making MKBHD even more confident in his bet.

"Alright, I'm probably good," he said. "I did just get a haircut."

• Huang's exit leaves Nvidia's next CEO with the challenge of rebuilding trust and refocusing workers.
• His successor will need to keep day-to-day operations humming amid intense public scrutiny.
• Companies can't let extraordinary results be a license to follow different rules, a former Netflix talent exec said.

During an NBA tech summit last year, former CEO Jensen Huang described having a management style at Nvidia built on open communication.

"I spend all of my time being transparent," said Huang, who has long been lauded for steering the chipmaker's extraordinary rise.

Now, reports of Huang's extramarital affairs — with a direct report, another employee, and a client suspected by US intelligence officials of spying for China — have exposed a gap between his professed commitment to candor and how he may have acted behind closed doors.

Huang's exit leaves Nvidia's next CEO with a difficult task: rebuilding the trust of tens of thousands of workers at a company at the center of the AI boom.

"When the CEO is having a romantic relationship with someone at the company, that can erode trust and engender cynicism," said Kim Scott, a former Apple and Google executive and cofounder of executive education company Radical Candor.

Nvidia didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Refocusing on the work

Huang ran Nvidia with a flat structure at the top, a setup he credited with helping the company move quickly. He worked out of a conference room, not a private office, and had dozens of direct reports.

Nvidia didn't have a publicly disclosed succession plan. C-suite observers have said that the halo surrounding a successful tech founder, combined with an org chart light on top layers, can leave a company with a thin succession bench.

After Huang's departure Wednesday, Nvidia appointed Colette Kress, chief financial officer, as interim CEO. The company launched a search for a permanent replacement, including both internal and external candidates.

Kress, as well as whoever ultimately takes the reins permanently, will likely face a number of challenges.

"The first thing employees want to know is: Is the company in good hands and will it continue to do well?" said Scott. "A lot of people are holding unvested options worth millions of dollars."

Nvidia's new boss will have to navigate the intense public scrutiny surrounding Huang's exit, while ensuring day-to-day operations remain humming.

"The combination of keeping people focused on the work while not pretending that the circus outside doesn't exist is really, really hard to do," said Katie Burke, chief operating officer of legal AI company Harvey.

'A grief process'

There are no quick fixes in this situation.

"Trust can be violated very quickly, but it's rebuilt slowly and consistently," said Alison Fragale, an organizational psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The chipmaker's new leader will also need to help employees cope in the aftermath of the scandal and get back to work. That may be especially difficult for those who admire Huang and wanted him to stay, added Fragale.

"It's like a bit of a grief process," she said.

Meanwhile, other employees may be feeling betrayed or unsettled by the intense public scrutiny.

"You can't pretend that everyone's family is not asking them what's going on," said Fragale.

Nvidia's next leader will have at least one advantage in healing the company's culture, said Jessica Neal, a former chief talent officer at Netflix. Huang's departure shows that despite all of his achievements, he is still facing consequences for violating company standards.

"One of the biggest mistakes companies can make is confusing extraordinary results with the permission to behave differently," Neal said. "Every time you make an exception for a high performer, you're sending a message to everyone else about what really matters. And over time, those exceptions become the culture."

• Babson student Stavya Nilawar grew a $35 creator marketing agency into six-figure revenue.
• Nilawar's agency connects AI brands with YouTube creators for sponsored segments and dedicated videos.
• He shares four lessons that helped him grow it from his dorm room.

When Stavya Nilawar isn't in class at Babson College, he's growing his creator marketing agency.

His weekdays follow a disciplined routine: class from 8 to 11:15 a.m., lunch, then a five-hour work block. After dinner, he works for another hour or two.

Nilawar's company connects brands with YouTube creators for sponsored segments and dedicated videos. He's worked with brands including AI companies CodeRabbit and Wispr Flow, as well as on campaigns involving Jack Link's x MrBeast. He earns a cut of the project fee, typically 20%.

He said he spent about $35 to get started — for a website domain and two email inboxes. First, he built a network of creators by manually searching TikTok: "I would literally doomscroll on TikTok and just go on people's accounts and look at their emails."

Once he had a roster of 10 to 15 creators, he began pitching brands.

Today, his monthly expenses rarely exceed $1,500, while monthly revenue topped $100,000 for the first time in October. Business Insider reviewed monthly business-account statements to verify his revenue.

"The main expenses are virtual assistants," Nilawar said. They cost him about $1,000 a month and help manage his agency's outreach, which can involve sending 200 to 300 emails a day, including follow-ups.

Nilawar, who started the business during a gap semester before college, said these four rules helped him turn roughly $35 into a six-figure business.

1. Choose a niche based on opportunity — not just passion

Nilawar doesn't buy into the standard advice to follow your passion when choosing a business niche. For him, the business model came first: He knew he wanted to run an agency that connects brands with creators. Then he had to decide which type of brands to serve.

He chose to work with AI companies.

"I was not passionate about AI at all, to be honest," he said. But he saw an opportunity: AI companies were growing quickly, and many had budgets for creator partnerships.

In his view, that's the better order of operations for aspiring founders: Choose a business model you enjoy, then find a niche with clear demand and customers willing to pay.

2. Find people who are already where you want to be

When Nilawar began exploring influencer marketing, an industry contact helped explain how brands work with creators and how agencies make money. He also learned that 20% was a typical agency cut on a deal.

Since then, he's deliberately sought advice from people further along in the industry, including his current mentor, who runs a similar agency that generates about $10 million a year.

"I would reach out to agency owners who were in the position that I wanted to be in," he said. "I literally asked them what they're doing now in their day-to-day business and how they got to the next level."

Nilawar's advice: Find someone who has built the type of business you want to build, and ask if they'd be willing to share what they've learned.

3. Build a repeatable outreach system

In the early days, Nilawar did everything manually: sourcing creators, sending emails, following up with potential clients, and managing campaigns.

"Emails are the main way that we get clients," he said. "If you don't have a system for that, you're not going to do very well in the beginning."

For Nilawar, reaching the first $10,000 in revenue required volume. He tested different email copy and calls to action, then sent outreach to brands within his chosen niche. Today, he uses virtual assistants and software to scale that work, but outreach is only part of the system. In a crowded agency market, Nilawar said his edge is responsiveness.

What sets him apart from his competitors is "our relationships and our speed," he said. His team aims to respond to clients within two to five minutes.

4. Treat mistakes as lessons, not reasons to quit

Early on, Nilawar landed a big campaign involving three creators. Two went smoothly, but the third repeatedly missed deadlines, and when the creator eventually delivered the content, Nilawar said the brand was unhappy with its quality.

The brand wanted to cancel that portion of the deal, leaving Nilawar caught between the brand and the creator's manager. He thought he might have to pay the brand $25,000.

"I didn't have $25K," said Nilawar, who was 18 at the time. "I thought I was screwed."

The parties ultimately worked out a solution, and the experience taught him that agency work involves more than landing the deal: He also has to manage expectations, maintain communication, and resolve conflicts when a partnership goes sideways.

Rather than viewing that scare as proof he wasn't ready to run a business, Nilawar sees it as a lesson he got early — when the stakes were still manageable.

• Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO following an extramarital affair scandal.
• He's not the only founder to be kicked out of his own company.
• Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Sam Altman have also been ousted from the firms they started.

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO on Thursday, following an extramarital affair scandal and a board investigation into concerns that he may have been the subject of a "foreign intelligence effort."

It ends his reign at the chip company he cofounded in 1993. Over 33 years, Huang oversaw Nvidia's meteoric rise from a scrappy chipmaker to a multitrillion-dollar AI powerhouse.

Founders being kicked out of their own companies is more common than you might think.

Huang is in good company. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman of OpenAI are among the CEOs who have been ousted from the firms they founded.

Some cases stem from minor disagreements and plunging stock prices, but some CEOs felt betrayed, launched lawsuits, or were arrested.

Here are 11 tech founders who were cast out from the companies they built:

Steve Jobs, Apple

In 1985, nine years after cofounding Apple, Steve Jobs exited the company.

Slumping sales and Jobs' demanding management style led to a clash with CEO John Sculley. The board stripped Jobs, who was nominally Apple's chairman, of his duties, and he resigned.

Jobs then founded another computer company, NeXT, which Apple acquired in 1996 for $427 million. He became Apple CEO the following year.

Sam Altman, OpenAI

Sam Altman cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 and was its cochair alongside Elon Musk. He became CEO four years later and was the face of the AI boom when ChatGPT launched in 2022.

In late 2023, the board ousted Altman, saying it had lost confidence in his ability to lead the company and that he was not "consistently candid in his communications."

After employees and investors revolted, Altman was reinstated just four days later.

Jerry Yang, Yahoo

Jerry Yang cofounded Yahoo while he was a Stanford student and later became CEO in 2007.

Then, Microsoft offered to buy the company for over $44 billion, a substantial premium on its market value. However, Yang did not want to sell. After negotiations collapsed, Yahoo's share price dropped as much as 20%.

The board faced criticism for its handling of the failed deal, with Yang being pressured to resign as CEO. He stayed at Yahoo in a different role until 2012.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter

Jack Dorsey has the rare accolade of being pushed out of the same company twice.

In 2008, his Twitter cofounder, Evan Williams, fired him as CEO.

Dorsey went on to start Square, the payments processor, before he was brought back as interim CEO in 2015. Not long afterward, Twitter dropped the "interim" from his job title.

In 2020, the activist investor firm Elliott Management criticized Dorsey's divided attention between Twitter and Square, and pushed for his removal. Dorsey stepped down as CEO the following year.

Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX

Sam Bankman-Fried became a poster boy for crypto, and his net worth peaked at $26 billion after founding the crypto exchange FTX.

In 2022, CoinDesk reported that his trading firm, Alameda Research, had a balance sheet largely made up of FTX's own crypto token.

Those close ties panicked investors, who rushed to withdraw their money from the crypto exchange — which didn't have enough to cover the withdrawals, partly due to lavish spending by FTX executives.

FTX filed for bankruptcy, and Bankman-Fried was replaced by John J. Ray III, an attorney who specializes in recovering funds from failed corporations, including Enron.

Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024.

Elon Musk, X.com

Elon Musk founded X.com as a payments processor in 1999. A year later, it merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity, which created PayPal.

The merged company initially kept the name X.com, with Musk as CEO.

Leadership clashed with Musk over the name, his management style, and his desire to rewrite the platform's main infrastructure.

While Musk was away on his honeymoon, Thiel and his cofounder Max Levchin organized a letter of no confidence. The board voted to replace Musk and install Thiel as CEO.

Martin Eberhard, Tesla

Martin Eberhard cofounded Tesla in 2003, and Elon Musk joined the company the following year.

Although Eberhard had served as CEO since the company's inception, he was ousted in 2007. He later told Business Insider that Musk phoned him and said the board had met without him and decided he should step down.

Eberhard sued Tesla in 2009, accusing Musk of defamation and pushing him out of the company. The suit was settled.

Travis Kalanick, Uber

Travis Kalanick cofounded Uber in 2009 and became CEO the following year.

His leadership saw a string of scandals, and the company was criticized for a culture of bullying and misogyny. Some executives expensed visits to strip clubs, The New York Times reporter Mike Isaac reported in his book "Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber."

In 2017, Uber lost hundreds of thousands of customers from a viral #DeleteUber campaign following accusations that the company intended to profit from President Donald Trump's travel ban.

After a former engineer, Susan Fowler, alleged sexual harassment and HR failures, Uber launched an independent investigation into its workplace culture, which led to Kalanick's resignation.

Eduardo Saverin, Facebook

As depicted by Andrew Garfield in "The Social Network," Eduardo Saverin cofounded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg while they were at Harvard. He served as chief financial officer until he was squeezed out of the startup in 2005.

After Peter Thiel invested $500,000, the company was restructured, and the board issued millions of new shares. This led to Saverin's 30% stake being diluted to less than 10%.

Zuckerberg wrote in an email at the time and obtained by Business Insider in 2012: "Is there a way to do this without making it painfully apparent to him that he's being diluted to 10%?"

Saverin sued. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2009, restoring his title as cofounder and leaving him with a stake worth over $2 billion when Facebook went public.

Andrew Mason, Groupon

Andrew Mason started Groupon in 2008 as a company that sells discounts on local businesses.

It had a lot of buzz early on, but after it went public in 2011, it started floundering. The share price fell some 90% from its peak.

CNBC's Herb Greenberg named Andrew Mason 2012's "Worst CEO of the Year," criticizing his "goofball antics, which can come off more like a big kid than company leader."

In early 2013, Mason was fired by the board.

Palmer Luckey, Oculus VR

Palmer Luckey designed the prototypes for the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset and raised $2.4 million through a Kickstarter campaign. His company was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, and is now known as Meta's Reality Labs division.

In 2016, Luckey donated to a pro-Trump group that spread anti-Hillary Clinton memes, sparking a backlash. He departed Facebook the following year.

Mark Zuckerberg denied that Luckey was fired for political views.

In a 2025 interview with "60 Minutes," Luckey said, "Everyone's got a different story, but it boils down to I gave $9,000 to a political group that was for Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton."

• Barry and Darlene Nicholson are empty nesters who have been living and traveling in an RV full time.
• They were working their jobs remotely but have since pivoted to becoming full-time content creators.
• RV life can still be costly, depending on where you stay, gas prices, and activities.

Barry and Darlene Nicholson, who met as teenagers in Indiana, spent most of their lives raising their two kids in Florida, not traveling much out of state.

Since downsizing from their Florida house to become full-time RVers in 2022, they've been to around 30 states. They'd been to places they never considered visiting before, which turned out to be some of their favorites.

With their daughter soon starting college, they realized they wouldn't need their large Florida home anymore. Since home prices were rising during the pandemic, they decided it was time to start a life on the road.

The couple, who are in their 50s, wanted to experience RV life while they were still young and physically able. "My inspiration for doing it early and making it work is that you're not guaranteed tomorrow," Darlene said. "You're not guaranteed a retirement."

Navigating life on the road

Their first year involved learning to drive an RV and getting used to living in a smaller space as a couple.

Even though they've been married for decades, Barry said the switch can be "a shock to both of your systems" because everyone has a routine they've been used to. Barry used to play in a band, but that stopped when they hit the road. They also learned while going through the Smoky Mountains that Darlene has travel anxiety.

They said if you're doing this lifestyle with someone else, you both have to be all in or it won't work out.

"We told people, if you can survive the first six months, you'll be fine," Darlene said.

They didn't sell their home right away; they wanted to use it as a backup plan if they ended up hating this pivot. They rented it out their first year, but after the tenants left, it was hard to find someone to rent for the same amount. They sold it in 2023.

While they didn't sell their home before traveling, they did sell and give away a lot of their belongings. They recommend starting to downsize two years early if you can, because for them it came down to the last few days.

"It really forces you to become a minimalist," Barry said.

Expenses on the road

While they said RV life isn't as expensive as owning a home, they still spent a lot of money on experiences in the places they visit.

"We didn't want to change our lifestyle," Darlene said. "We still wanted to go out to eat. We wanted to experience things. We wanted to take tours. We wanted to do all this stuff. So we kind of just subbed one thing for the other."

Darlene planned out the entire first year in advance, booking RV park stays. They ended up, Barry said, staying in a lot of high-end RV resorts and campgrounds, spending at least $1,000 a month. But since then, they have lowered their costs as they pivoted more to boondocking, or being off-grid and providing your own electricity and water.

They installed solar panels on the RV in 2023, which helped them cut costs and live more off-grid after Darlene was let go from her job the following year. Barry said it's hard to justify the cost of a solar panel setup if you're not going to do RV life full time or do boondocking.

They don't have a washer and dryer by choice, and they pay for a service to still get mail.

While boondocking came out of necessity, Darlene said going off-grid camping has been better for them anyway, and it's helping them cut down on costs.

"We just love the peace and quiet," Barry said. "We've stayed in some places where we're surrounded by this beauty, and there's no sound other than the wind and the trees."

They're on their second RV, a 40-foot fifth wheel. October was the most they've spent on diesel; they estimate they spent more than $1,000 last month, and less than $400 a month in early 2026.

Darlene said people should have a few thousand dollars on hand in case of "what if" situations, such as needing to replace tires or needing more money for diesel.

"You got to have that backup flexibility for when these weird things happen, and you can be ready for it, and it doesn't wreck your whole plan, but that's part of this lifestyle," Darlene said. "You have to know that it's going to have all those fluctuations."

They still stay at campgrounds and RV parks from time to time. Campground costs can vary depending on where you stay and how many nights you stay. For instance, their 40-night stay at one campground cost over $2,000. Meanwhile, seven nights at an RV park elsewhere cost $288; they were off-grid the rest of that month.

Going all in on content creation

Darlene searched for a new job but decided to stop given the tough job market.

"It was just trying to find a job in my 50s competing against people in their 20s and 30s who are hungry and young, and I just was really hitting my head against the wall," she said.

They have a YouTube channel they started in December 2023 called "Like There's No Tomorrow," where they talk about RV life and what they've learned as a couple who have never done this lifestyle before. The channel became monetized slightly before Darlene's job cut. Darlene said she would give the channel three months to see if they could bring in enough money to replace at least half of her income, and if not, she would go back to work. Barry left his job in 2025 and does YouTube and other content creation full time with Darlene.

Trying to stay prepared for the unexpected

When they sold their house in 2023, they invested the proceeds and don't touch it.

"I always tell people, you got to have an exit plan if you're going to do something like this because you never know what can happen," Darlene said.

That could include unexpected repairs or unexpected health problems.

When they were parked on a hillside, Darlene was dumping water in the dark one night, caught her toe on something, fell forward to push open the side patio gates, and hit her head on the ground 10 feet below. She lost feeling in her hands for about a month, had a concussion, whiplash, and fractured her skull. Another time, their dog Hugo ate something he shouldn't have and got really sick.

"Not only do you have to think about you're also not close to your local doctor, you're not close to your local vet either," Barry said.

They also want to be prepared for when their full-time RV journey ends.

"We have money put away for when we decide we are going to leave the road, and we meet with our financial planner a lot to try to make sure we're continuing to put back enough money," Darlene said. "We have goals someday of coming off the road or being a part-time traveler and not a full-time traveler with some sort of home base eventually, but it's not right now."

Since 2017, Business Insider's Rising Stars of Wall Street list has highlighted the young professionals redefining the finance industry.

We've featured bankers and investors behind the AI boom, traders reshaping markets, and business builders across firms such as Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, BlackRock, and Citadel, all of whom quickly left their mark.

Many of these honorees have since risen to lead businesses and shape the industry's direction.

Here's a look at our series highlighting Wall Street's next generation of leadership and what we've learned from them.

2026's Rising Stars of Wall Street

The latest class of young finance leaders you need to know — and what you need to know about them.

A look at past Rising Stars of Wall Street lists

Meet the classes of the past, made up of individuals who continue to succeed in one of the most competitive industries in the world.

Where are they now?

We've also tried to keep in touch with our former stars to see what they're up to now.

Advice from the top

We tapped these successful Wall Streeters for intel on what skills are vital in the age of AI, how they're networking, and more.

• A group that protested the SpaceX IPO is demonstrating against Anthropic's looming offering.
• Stop Funding Billionaire's told Business Insider that it sees the IPO as a significant risk.
• The group said American workers and retirees shouldn't be exposed to risky AI bets.

What's the best visual analogy for a teetering AI-led bull market?

For Stop Funding Billionaires, a group that's been protesting high-profile IPOs this year, the answer is a six foot tall game of Jenga. The group deployed the protest tool at a recent #BlocktheIPO demonstration in San Francisco, aimed at Anthropic's debut set for next week.

Organizer Jonathan Westin told Business Insider that the market feels increasingly precarious, and that the organization is concerned about Americans' exposure to the risks of the AI bubble popping.

"It continues to be this very speculative shell game," he said of the tech-fueled market boom. "It feels like a game of Jenga where if one thing falls, the whole system will fall."

Stop Funding Billionaires staged two protests recently, first in front of Anthropic's office in New York City on November 9, and one a day later near the AI lab's office in San Francisco, where they unveiled the Jenga game, made by a Bay Area artist.

The reason they say Anthropic shouldn't go public is rooted in the same argument made by many of the market's AI bears: the future of AI is uncertain, and if the bull market collapses, it could compromise the retirement savings of working Americans and retirees. Though the excitement is high on Wall Street, a cohort of investing pros share the more bearish sentiment, and see Anthropic being a speculative investment when it hits public markets.

"It comes down to investment risks that are going to be borne by working people, particularly working people whose retirement savings are exposed to it, which will be virtually anyone who is in an index fund," said fellow organizer, Elizabeth Parisian.

The group raised similar concerns when SpaceX began trading in June, protesting the historic IPO and sounding the alarm that changing the requirements to fast-track the newly minted stock into major indexes poses outsize risks to Americans' investment portfolios.

Ahead of the SpaceX offering, market participants from normal retirees to professional investors dismay at the fact that rules were being bent in a way that could mean people would be exposed to Elon Musk's rocket and AI company whether they wanted to or not.

"There's just so much at stake for regular people, and Anthropic is just plowing ahead," Westin noted. "Regardless of all of these concerns, I think in many ways, it's trying to become too big to fail, similar to the banks in the 2008 crash, and this feels eerily familiar to us."

Westin's views aligns with prominent tech and AI bears, including "The Big Short" investor Michael Burry, who recently said that it would be beneficial for humanity if a stock market crash were to prevent Anthropic and OpenAI from going public.

Westin was among five protesters arrested at the demonstration in New York, though he said he has no regrets and believes that more direct action is needed to help the public understand the risks related to giant IPOs from Anthropic and others.

"Unfortunately, the financial system is now set up in a way where it's very opaque to the regular person what's at stake here," he said. "If we can do more to shed light on how these IPOs are going to affect our everyday people, we think the more the better."

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

• I attended the Manheim New Jersey used-car auction, where 4,500 vehicles are sold each week.
• The lot is a nimble indicator of the auto industry's health.
• Right now, hybrids are a trend, executives told me, and EV demand is correlated to gas prices.

"Nine-and-three!Nine-nine!Nine-and-three!" an auctioneer at Manheim New Jersey chanted rapidly. "We have a four?" A split-second later: “Nine-and-four!”

It sounded like gibberish to me. To dealers, it was a call to action.

On Wednesday, I attended the massive used-car auction and heard a blur of dealer names, vehicle models, and bids rising in a flash. Around me, a mix of cars — from beat-up Honda Civics to freshly off-lease BMW X7s — moved through 17 in-person and seven online auction lanes.

Each week, the roughly 350-acre lot, one of 80 Manheim auctions in the US, lists about 4,500 vehicles. Manheim is owned by Cox Automotive.

Used-car auctions offer an early read of auto industry trends. For comparison, it takes years for automakers to design, build, and launch fresh vehicles that respond to car shoppers — but at regional used-car auctions, dealers are buying the used vehicles they think customers will want in a few weeks.

And each car is a several-thousand-dollar bet. Across the US, Manheim says it handles more than 7 million vehicles each year.

So, I got a close-up look at the controlled chaos and choreography it takes to keep one of those 80 lots moving.

A highly choreographed used car dance

Cars arrive at Manheim New Jersey with very different histories. Rental fleets, automakers, dealerships, and banks all send vehicles to its lots in varying states of repair.

During my visit, I spotted everything from a first-generation Ford Edge that must be roughly 15 years old to a Toyota bZ Woodland, which just started arriving at US dealerships months ago.

And the cars do not simply appear in an auction lane and disappear with the winning dealer. Work starts well before sale day.

Incoming vehicles crawl through Manheim's fixed image tunnels at about 5 mph. The scanners assess details including body panels, tire tread, and the undercarriage for potential issues.

From there, sellers can choose to have vehicles detailed, repainted, repaired, or photographed again before they run through the auction bays. At the New Jersey site, the work can range from touching up a paint scratch to replacing an engine.

Or, if the work is not worth it, they can send a car through as-is.

Manheim says its network employs roughly 1,500 auto technicians and reconditioning experts.

The early warning system says: America loves a hybrid

Grace Huang, the president of Cox Automotive Inventory Solutions, told me that gas prices are having an outsize impact on the market.

Right now, national demand for hybrids has spiked — as have their prices. Manheim says a hybrid spends just about 25 days on a dealer lot before it's sold. A healthy days-on-lot average for a used car is typically around 40 days.

Interest in EVs has a nearly one-for-one correlation with gas prices, Huang added. If the price of gas goes up, so too does interest in EVs.

Overall, Manheim says used-vehicle retail prices were up 4% through October this year, even as used retail sales fell by 2%. And the wholesale value of non-EVs rated above 40 mpg rose 9.9% from January, while those below 15 mpg lost 15% of their value.

And Alan Wang, senior vice president of physical services and auctions, told me that Manheim is also privy to trends in auto theft. Recently, they've seen an uptick in criminal activity around BMWs and Cadillac Escalades.

Their lots are surrounded by military-grade fences. While we were driving around the massive lot, someone asked the driver what would happen if he slammed our Ford Transit into a barricade.

"The engine would go into the backseat," he said.

The auctioneer keeps their job

Manheim has an old-timey feel to it — and that's aided by those fast-talking auctioneers. Apparently, they're not going away anytime soon.

Huang said there is technology that could handle the basic mechanics of bidding, but it has not replicated an auctioneer's ability to turn a sale into a personal challenge for a dealer.

"Our auctioneers are really good at saying, 'Dealer A, I know you want this Jeep,'" she said.

Some of those auctioneers use the same talents elsewhere, too. Huang said many also work cattle auctions when they are not hawking cars.

Before the pandemic, about 30% of Manheim New Jersey's sales happened online, the company said. When COVID pushed dealers out of the auction lanes, Manheim went fully digital. Auctioneers still stood in person and called the sales — wearing PPE — while dealers placed bids through the company's app.

Much of the business has stayed online. Manheim says roughly 70% of purchases now come from digital buyers.

"That's why we could have you here," Huang told me. "Before the pandemic, it was too jam-packed to have anyone come visit. The whole auction was packed shoulder-to-shoulder."

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dave Posey, who recently turned 55 and is a general manager and vice president at Sanborn. He's located in Parker, Colorado. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I spent three decades in manufacturing, distribution, and channel sales, and I quit my previous role in May. Nobody forced me out — I could see where the company was headed, and it wasn't where I wanted to go.

I left on principle, with no job and no prospect of one. I'm in my mid-50s, and this was the first time in my career that had ever been true.

A month later, in June, I'd accepted an offer as general manager and vice president of the spatial intelligence division at Sanborn.

I hired a career coach two months before I quit, while I was still employed and not actively looking for work. My coach showed me what I should do to interest employers, and as a result, a recruiter came to me instead of the other way around.

Your résumé buys you a conversation, and then it's dead weight

This market is brutal — nobody cared about my 30 years in the industry. I couldn't lean on any of it.

What companies want to know is how candidates will fix their problem now, not what they fixed in 2014. You have to prove yourself from scratch, in the first hour of your interviews, every single time.

These are the strategies I learned from my career coach that I used to get three offers and land my current job in one month in my mid-50s:

1. I rebuilt how I define myself

Before coaching, I could tell you everything I'd ever done in my career, but I couldn't tell you in one line what I bring to the table.

My coach made me answer that in the employer's terms instead of mine. She moved me from talking about "who I was" to "who I am and what I can do for your company."

In practice, the biggest change was that before, I'd been posting almost entirely in one lane on LinkedIn, focusing on credibility proof: "Here's what I built. Here's the number I hit. Here's my track record." It's the safest lane and the one nobody responds to, because it's your résumé in a different costume.

My coach moved me into two other lanes: pattern recognition and decision-making insight. These lanes weren't about what I did, but how I think: "Here's a problem you probably have. Here's my read on it. Here's the evidence. Here's what it means for you."

I stopped showing people my 30 years of experience and started showing them how I'd think about their problem if they hired me. I worked with my coach three times a week on figuring out how to do this.

2. I resuscitated my network and became visible

I think it's a similar pattern where everybody my age who's had a lengthy career gets comfortable — we haven't actively positioned ourselves. In the past, I'd never had to interview or fill out a résumé — the next opportunity always just opened up for me.

But when you get too comfortable, you lose your network and, all of a sudden, you just fade. You don't post like you're supposed to, you don't put yourself out there, you're not visible to everybody. That was the case with me.

Many people at this stage of life do the same thing: put up a banner on LinkedIn, talk to a few people, and go to some recruiters. You're not really seen when you do that, because you haven't worked on a larger network.

I think the big difference in what I did with my coach was that I put myself back in a place where I was being seen again.

3. I identified patterns in my work style and branded them

I looked at everything I've done through all my jobs, identified what I'd successfully done over and over again, and found a pattern. I asked myself: What's the big dataset I have from the past that really describes who I am and what I do, and how is that going to help the employer I want to work for?

My pattern was that I could diagnose a sales system, identify where leaks were in it, and fix them to get into positive sales territory. So, I was able to take that pattern and repackage it into a sellable tool. I never again said, "I did this." Instead, I said, "This is what I do."

Specifically, instead of saying, "I worked at my last company for three years and increased sales by 25%," I said: "I'm able to diagnose CRM systems and stop margin leaks." Then, for credibility, I pointed to my résumé so employers could see I'd done those things, and my ability to do them became my brand.

4. I made sure I could explain my brand in my sleep

Once I figured out the pattern that created my unique brand, I repeated it to myself until I knew it inside and out.

I had my headphones in all the time, listening to myself repeating statements about repairing $10 million in leaks, margin compaction, all the stuff that was my brand. I listened to it while I was in the shower, when I was driving somewhere at night, before going to bed.

I was able to repeat that pattern statement whenever I needed it — whatever network I was talking to, whatever person I was connecting with over coffee, whatever interview I had. This moved me very fast from first contact to the next stage because I was very clear on what and who I was.

I also made sure that all of my job search materials reflected the same language about my pattern — every move that I took, every place I advertised myself, it was all the same brand. If you looked at my LinkedIn, my résumé, or my cover letter, it was everywhere. I became a brand that showed I fixed unique sets of problems, as opposed to just a generic sales leader.

My brand was still based on my 30 years of proof, but instead of using the proof, I used the brand substantiated by the proof.

This job market can break your confidence

We think we should be confident individuals based on the length and depth of our career, and this market just whacks the confidence out of you.

I think that people struggle with that, and they don't have anybody to give that confidence to them again and tell them why they're important and what's unique about them. Learning these strategies from my coach has taught me that I can help people with this. I'd like to help others feel that confidence again too, that I feel now.

Do you have a story to share about navigating your career in your 50s? If so, please reach out to the editor, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.

• I spent a fortune raising my daughter in LA but still worried constantly about her safety.
• We moved to Sydney in 2020, where she walks to school and takes public transportation alone.
• I miss family in the US, but I love the independence and peace of mind we've gained in Australia.

In 2018, living in Los Angeles, I spent nearly a year hustling to get my daughter into day care. I waited, I begged, I paid a small fortune, and finally grabbed a spot.

It was a lovely center with actual grass. I felt like I'd won the parenting lottery, even if it cost more than a university education. As she grew up, and unable to afford private school, we moved to a nice neighborhood. Turns out the local public school didn't have enough space for all the students in the catchment area, so I found myself waking up at 4 a.m. to try to get a spot.

Even the local commute was fraught. Parents drove their kids to school, just two blocks away. In a wealthy neighborhood, it wasn't considered safe for a child to be outside alone. There's an annual "walk to school day," I suppose just to show that it's possible.

In 2020, we moved across to Australia. The shift in our daily rhythm was instant. My mental shift took a bit longer.

Moving to Sydney gave my daughter a childhood with real independence

Every day was "walk to school day" in Sydney. By 3rd grade, my daughter walked to the local school by herself — albeit in a sea of her uniformed, neighborhood buddies. By 5th grade, she was taking the train to middle school herself. Public transport to and from school is completely free.

As a single, full-time working mom, I found that the community and infrastructure lifted me up. Every school offers before- and after-school care, with government wage-based subsidies. On top of that, my job gives me four weeks of annual leave, plus dedicated sick and parental leave.

Community abounds. Kids and adults alike regularly participate in sports and clubs. We made friends easily and got to know our neighbors.

Even admin is a breeze. When we became citizens, my daughter and I were issued new passports within two days. Being used to a four- to six-week wait in the US, I was blown away.

The $26 medication that brought me to tears

I hadn't realized how deeply I held healthcare anxiety from life in the US. After returning from vacation, my daughter developed an ear infection that didn't clear up with standard antibiotics. At the local pharmacy, my heart pounded.

The pharmacist looked at me with sympathetic eyes and said, "I'm so sorry, but this treatment isn't covered by the government benefit. You'll have to pay out of pocket, and it's really expensive."

I give a tight smile and say, "It's OK, it's my daughter. I'll pay whatever it takes." Being American, my mind is flashing to $600 EpiPens and $1000 prescriptions. I start brainstorming what we'll cut from the budget that month.

"Again, I'm really sorry." I'm barely holding it together when he finishes, "It'll be $26."

The cost of a casual lunch. That's what Australians think is expensive medication. I was so relieved, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Going back to LA made me realize I'd finally let my guard down

In 2023, we returned to LA for a visit. After a grueling 14-hour flight, we arrived at our hotel, only to find our assigned room hadn't been cleaned since the last guest. Exhausted, I stood in line at the front desk to request a new key.

I told my wilting 8-year-old to go sit on a sofa in the lobby, just feet away and in my line of sight. Moments later, an older woman sat next to her like a sentry. I was confused, but I didn't dare budge from my spot in line.

When I'd finally secured a new room key, I headed over. The woman said to me, "I didn't think your girl would be safe alone. So I sat next to her."

I'm bowled over by the thoughtfulness and kindness of the gesture. But I'm struck by the contrast. At home in Sydney, no one would sit next to my daughter to protect her. No one would feel the need to. They'd simply assume that she was safe.

Being an immigrant is hard, but my daughter's future makes it worth it

Making the move wasn't easy, but I don't regret it for a moment.

It's not all sunshine. I miss my family and friends. I wish my daughter had grandparents to come over for dinner or watch her soccer games on weekends. Sydney's cost of living borders on terrifying, and housing is notoriously steep. But without the constant, unpredictable incidental costs of American life — from unexpected medical bills to school "contributions" — my budget is predictable.

The move has changed the trajectory of my daughter's life. She'll have things I only dreamed of, like affordable higher education and maternity leave.

Best of all, she takes her safety and freedom for granted. And as her mother, that's the greatest gift I could give her.

• At CIQ, AI now writes over 90% of code, yet demand for senior software engineers is soaring.
• CIQ execs Hovland and Kurtzer warn AI is reducing demand for more junior developers.
• The execs urge young coders to master systems, embrace AI coding tools, and judge results closely.

AI Insider went to Salt Lake City this week for The Great Coding Reset, a live event about the future of software engineering.

What we heard was both encouraging and alarming for tech workers. If you want to attend our next one in Vegas on Dec. 1, sign up here.

At CIQ, a company that helps businesses run complex computing systems, AI now writes more than 90% of the code, according to president Bjorn Hovland.

You might think that means fewer human programmers are needed. Not quite.

"Two or three years ago I expected that we might never have to hire another engineer," Hovland told my colleague Ben Bergman. "We found the exact opposite. We cannot hire enough engineers now."

There's a catch. CIQ wants experienced programmers, not beginners.

"We hire almost no junior devs," Hovland said, adding that he didn't think the company had hired anyone with less than five to 10 years of experience.

Why? AI can produce mountains of code, but someone still needs to know whether it works. That's especially important when your customers include major companies and governments.

CIQ founder Gregory Kurtzer offered a striking example of AI's power. He said he used it to build a Linux-compatible operating system kernel — software that controls how a computer works — in just 11 days.

"It should scare people a little bit," he said.

Kurtzer believes experienced engineers using AI can become vastly more productive. He also warned that programmers who resist AI, because they love writing code themselves, risk falling behind.

The message for tech workers is complicated. AI is eliminating some programming tasks while creating more demand for people who understand deeply how software works.

And this goes beyond programming. Whether you're making videos, writing software, or doing other knowledge work, the valuable skill is increasingly knowing what to create and how to judge the results — rather than doing every step yourself.

But here's the troubling question: If companies stop hiring junior programmers, where will the next generation of experienced engineers come from?

Hovland's advice to young people: Build lots of your own software projects and learn how systems work under the hood.

Good advice. But the traditional career ladder into software engineering may be getting harder to climb.

Sign up for the AI Insider newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com

• Former CEO Jensen Huang's daughter has gained influence at Nvidia beyond her formal title.
• Some saw her as a future leader, though not currently ready to succeed her father.
• Her ascent has changed how teams operate, and employees say she has clashed with senior executives.

Madison Huang has emerged as an increasingly powerful figure inside Nvidia, just as the company searches for her father's successor.

Huang, daughter of former CEO Jensen Huang, has rapidly risen to the role of senior director of product marketing for physical AI and has accumulated influence far beyond her title, former employees told Business Insider. After joining the company in 2020, one said they began to see her influence expand in late 2023.

"Madison is her father's daughter — she's flinty, she's sharp, she's not a wallflower," another former employee said. "She's out there in front asking questions and changing things."

She could assume an even bigger leadership role at Nvidia in the future, two former employees said, but lacks the technical experience to replace her father now that a successor is needed. Huang's background is predominantly in business and marketing. One said they could have imagined her taking the helm in a decade, but did not have the expertise to guide Nvidia's technology strategy anytime soon.

An Nvidia colleague said Huang could strongly hold her own in technical discussions without an engineering background. They said her role is to help shape how Nvidia brings its technology to market.

The scrutiny comes as Jensen Huang exits Nvidia amid revelations of extramarital affairs and a board investigation into whether he was targeted by a foreign intelligence effort.

In addition to choosing a new CEO, Nvidia now faces questions about how to reorganize its leadership.

"We don't know exactly how it's going to be reconfigured, but obviously things will have to change," Huang's colleague added.

Huang isn't the only family member at Nvidia. Her brother Spencer Huang works in robotics as a director of product management. Two former employees described him as having a lower profile than his sister.

Madison Huang's unconventional career path

A classically trained chef, Huang has said she initially planned to study electrical engineering like her parents, but her father encouraged her to pursue something she was "really passionate about."

She attended the Culinary Institute of America, worked as a chef and sommelier, and later moved into hospitality marketing at luxury conglomerate LVMH before joining Nvidia as an MBA intern in 2020.

According to Nvidia's annual filing, she took home $1.23 million in compensation this last fiscal year. Huang's husband, Nico Caprez, also works at Nvidia as vice president of global AI infrastructure growth.

Huang has become increasingly visible outside the company. During a trip to South Korea this spring, she met with executives from tech giants such as Samsung and SK Hynix and spoke to students at Seoul National University, where she described leadership as "being in service of others."

Huang said working at Nvidia was initially "very intimidating for me because I have no technical background and I'm surrounded by the world's greatest engineers." She kept a running Google Doc of unfamiliar terms and spent hours after work researching them.

"You have to have some self-resilience and commit yourself to educating yourself on the side," she said at Seoul National University.

Her reach extends into Nvidia's startup ecosystem. Genspark cofounder Wen Sang praised her for supporting smaller AI companies and told Business Insider that she introduced his company to Nvidia's chief marketing officer for a product pitch opportunity.

She has taken on a role in major Nvidia partnerships, including collaborations with Foxconn to use AI to design and automate factories and with LG on robotics and data centers.

An Nvidia partner who works closely with Huang said she was a "driving force" in establishing a technology standards group called the Alliance for OpenUSD, and helped guide technical discussions among members.

"There is depth, there is breadth, and there is most definitely technical knowledge," they said.

A 'mini Jensen'

Huang's colleague at Nvidia said her responsibilities have become increasingly cross-functional because of her ability to coordinate product launches across engineering, marketing, and other teams.

"She's probably, after Jensen, the hardest-working person I've ever seen in my life," they said.

Her close relationship with her father has also given her a unique edge. One former employee cited her ability to anticipate his needs while traveling with him to high-level meetings and appearances, while another said she had become a point of contact for employees seeking access to him.

"She's like a little mini Jensen, his eyes and ears inside the business," a third former employee said.

Her growing influence has changed how some teams operate, and she has also clashed with Nvidia veterans and senior executives, three former employees said.

Nvidia traditionally empowered a project's designated leader, known as the "pilot in command," to make decisions, one person said. They added that as Huang gained influence, teams sometimes put off decisions until she joined meetings, even when senior executives or subject-matter experts were present.

Huang's colleague at Nvidia said that disagreements are common and employees are encouraged to pursue "intellectual honesty."

"She's humble, she's collaborative," the Nvidia partner said, "but most definitely you know things are going to get done."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gweiss@businessinsider.com or Signal at @geoffweiss.25. Use a personal email address, a non-work WiFi network, and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Gartner projects AI will lead to a net gain of around 1.7 million jobs by 2030.
• Employers may be looking for new skills, and those might not all be technical.
• People are worried about the future, as some employers have announced AI-related job cuts.

The AI job apocalypse may not be what you expect.

Business and technology insights company Gartner projects that AI will lead to 10.6 million new jobs globally between 2025 and 2030, while resulting in a loss of 8.9 million jobs. That adds up to a net benefit of over a million new jobs before the decade is out.

John Lovelock, distinguished vice president analyst and chief of research at Gartner, told Business Insider that what people are really feeling right now is that companies are in wait-and-see mode as the work impacts of AI become clearer.

"Early use of AI just leads people to say, 'You know what? Let's hold off on hiring,'" Lovelock said. "Next level up in usage of AI leads to job reductions. And the final use of AI typically leads to job additions — net job additions."

While the expected job loss would affect less than 2% of workers, the emerging technology is likely to change how a good share of the populace does their jobs. Gartner projects more than 20% of workers, or 435.5 million, would need to adapt to AI effects, including what kind of work they do and how they do it.

"Of the 10 tasks you may be doing today, you may only be doing six of them, and you'll be doing them differently tomorrow," Lovelock said.

ZipRecruiter economist Nicole Bachaud thinks AI is adding volatility in tech-related industries in the US, changing roles and skills employers want. Employers may want applicants who are experienced with AI or have great soft skills because AI can do what a role once required.

"As these skills change so rapidly, I think we're going to see more turnover and, as a result, more volatility in professional and business services, in financial activities, and information," she told Business Insider.

Outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said there have been more than 100,000 AI-related job-cut announcements in the US so far this year as of October. It's the second-most-cited reason, with market and economic conditions taking the top spot.

Workers might be skeptical about AI transforming duties. When Cristina Estupiñán was looking for work after a layoff, she wasn't excited about prospective employers asking about her enthusiasm for AI.

"I have to make up something about what excites me about AI because, frankly, nothing really excites me about AI," Estupiñán, who worked in software development, previously told Business Insider.

After more than two decades at Microsoft, Shawn Mrzena decided to take Microsoft's voluntary retirement program, partly because the rapid pace and demand of AI wasn't a technology shift he was excited about as a worker.

"I just decided, 'You know what? I'm going to leave it to the next generation,'" he said. "This is not something I want to invest my energy and time into. I'm not waking up excited in the morning."

Jan Hatzius, chief economist and head of global investment research at Goldman Sachs, said that unemployment will likely remain low next year but there could be upward pressure over the following couple of years from "more aggressive AI adoption." He said this would be a temporary headwind and the expectation isn't a jobpocalypse.

Lovelock said industries would be affected differently. He suggested that governments might "be fixated on the efficiencies and reducing labor force, reducing cost of operations, and therefore more likely to be a loss," while service industries could see job increases as a result of a bump to productivity making each additional employee more lucrative.

While we don't know how the next few years will actually pan out, people fear job cuts are coming. Pew Research Center found 76% of Australians and 76% of South Koreans think AI would lead to fewer jobs in their country over the next 20 years, the highest share among the 37 countries surveyed. Nigeria and the Philippines had the lowest shares expecting this outcome, at 26%.

"In a number of countries, concern about AI-related job loss is more common among young adults (those ages 18 to 34) than older adults (those ages 50 and older)," the Pew Research Center report said. "This is the case in high-income nations like Canada, France, Singapore and Sweden, as well as in middle-income nations like India, Indonesia and Malaysia."

• Steve Hanke says the best investment of his life is a Patek Philippe pocket watch he bought at 16.
• The veteran trader said the pleasure he gets from admiring the timepiece is a type of dividend.
• Hanke said his biggest investing mistake was not buying Iowa farmland as his grandfather did.

A pocket watch and a parcel of farmland.

Veteran trader Steve Hanke counts those two items among the best investments and biggest misses of his life.

Hanke, 83, started trading soybeans at age 14, and he's been playing the currency and commodity markets ever since.

The longtime professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University served as president of Toronto Trust Argentina when it was the world's best-performing emerging-market mutual fund in 1995.

Hanke spoke to Business Insider for the debut story in our new "Hits, Misses, and Millions" series, in which we ask elite investors and business leaders to share their best and worst investments.

The hits

At age 16, Hanke purchased a Patek Philippe pocket watch for $90 at an auction in Omaha.

"I bought that timepiece because it was beautiful and the price was little more than the value of the gold content of the case," Hanke told Business Insider in a recent email.

"As it turns out, I had unknowingly purchased a rare collectible, custom-made for the original owner in 1917," he continued. "I've continued to enjoy the ever-appreciating Patek for 67 years."

Hanke's watch could fetch over $100,000 at auction today, or more than 1,100 times what he paid for it, based on online listings for similar timepieces.

He told Business Insider that when he bought it, "no one wanted pocket watches." They typically sold for around $40 or roughly the value of the gold in their cases, so he "did pay a bit of a premium for my beauty," he said.

Hanke now only wears the watch on special occasions, but "the rest of the time I admire it," he said. The "pleasure" he gets from seeing it every day is a form of non-financial payout, he added.

"So, the Patek has generated both a capital gain and significant dividends," he said.

Hanke also shared other notable investments from his career. In 1985, he modeled the oil market and anticipated a breakdown in OPEC's production discipline that would send crude prices crashing to under $10 a barrel.

"I was leveraged and short in more ways than you can shake a stick at," he said, adding that when his prediction came true, that was a "pretty big payday."

Hanke also recalled that at TTA, he and his team "loaded up" on Argentine bonds while others were selling them during the so-called "Tequila Crisis" in 1994, when the Mexican government devalued the peso, leading to major turmoil in emerging markets. This resulted in the firm outperforming all of its emerging-market peers in 1995, Hanke said.

The misses

Hanke said he's endured many losses as a trader, but prudently using stop-loss orders — which instruct a broker to sell a security or cover a short when the price falls to a set level — has ensured that "none have been catastrophic or even notable."

"In any case, I am a Stoic and don't cry over spilled milk," he added.

Hanke did share one investment that he "thought about making, but failed to pull the trigger on," and it now ranks among his greatest investing regrets.

"As a farm boy from the state of Iowa, I always wanted to follow in one of my grandfathers' footsteps and invest in Iowa farmland," he said.

When the average price of Iowa farmland fell below $2,100 per acre in 2002, he was tempted to buy but didn't. The average price has risen more than fivefold since then to over $11,500 an acre, he said.

Hanke said the annual inflation-adjusted rate of return is only 5.2%, but his "mistake of omission," in Warren Buffett's parlance, is "perhaps the only investment regret that I can report."

The lesson

Hanke's pocket watch showcases the value of a storied brand, a good deal, a decadeslong holding period, and a beautiful object that can be worn and admired.

His lack of large investing mishaps speaks to the power of capping losses, while his regret over not buying Iowa farmland shows the importance of acting when opportunity arises.

• Alexander Smith held jobs at Google and Facebook, and an internship at the White House.
• He views networking like investing in a 401(k) and said that staying consistent pays off long term.
• He suggests posting regularly on LinkedIn and targeting the right people, not just the most active ones.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Alexander Smith, a content creator based in Austin. His identity and former employment have been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I worked in tech for about eight years at Facebook and Google. I also did internships in college at MSNBC and the White House under President Obama.

I've given people guidance and advice on how to navigate networking, create résumés, and interview. Posting on LinkedIn has allowed me to see both sides of this equation. I've seen how networking has opened doors to opportunities, and I've seen what works because I get a lot of messages, too.

In the age of AI, job cuts, and a lot of competition across industries, networking looks so different than it did 10 or 15 years ago. It's one thing to have a really strong résumé and application. It's another to get that in front of the key decision-makers.

My job at Google came directly from networking, and it helped with Facebook, too. I don't think cold applications are completely dead, and it's worked for me before, but it's a much more competitive job market now, especially in tech. Sometimes highly qualified people aren't getting to the interview stage because there are so many applicants.

People often feel the urgency to network when there is a pressing need for a job. I definitely think you can still have some success if you need a job next week, but it makes it a lot harder.

It's really important to think of networking as a long-term strategy. I want people to view networking similarly to how they view investing in a 401(k). The habits and relationships you develop eventually do pay off, but you have to put time and energy into that.

Stay active on LinkedIn

There's a lot of potential to build your network, develop it, and build a personal brand without becoming a content creator.

Sometimes, people recognize me when I reach out to them because of my LinkedIn content, and I've also had recruiters from big companies contact me. Building a personal brand has been helpful because it's often a good icebreaker for conversation.

Be authentic

Authenticity always mattered in networking, but it matters even more now that there are so many AI-generated messages and posts on social media.

Some people view networking as stuffy and buttoned-up, but you can connect on a personal level and find common interests. That makes it more enjoyable and less something that you dread doing. For example, I talked to someone a few months ago about Kasey Musgraves and her new album. I also talked with someone who was on a sabbatical about taking time off to travel.

I also think finding a personal connection helps humanize you. You'll stand out more if you find connection points, and it will show that you're really paying attention to them.

Be empathetic

If you feel uncomfortable or awkward, that can sometimes be a signal that you may be forcing something that isn't there, or asking too much in the first message.

Networking is really difficult. Even if you're sending strong, well-researched messages. People are busy. People have jobs, families, hobbies, and a million other things to do every single day.

Don't take it personally if you send 20 messages and you only hear back from a few people.

Having empathy and telling myself, "I know that this person has tons of things on their plate and I'm not taking it personally if I don't get a response," has helped me.

Target the right people

Sometimes people gravitate toward those they see consistently on their LinkedIn feeds. For example, you may see the same recruiters consistently posting about jobs, or content creators talking about the job search.

I really encourage people to message those who are not super active on LinkedIn. Many professionals are not active on LinkedIn or posting consistently, and I think people forget that a huge part of your network is not getting an overwhelming number of messages.

Sometimes people also connect with people who aren't relevant to their career path. When I was at Google and Facebook, I had a lot of software engineers and data analysts asking for career advice, even though I was in a non-technical role. I was not the person to give them advice on interview prep.

Also, just because somebody is working at a big company that you want to work at doesn't mean that they are the right person for you. That's where doing your homework on someone can make a big difference.

• The Nvidia scandal thrust former Megaspeed executive Alice Huang into the spotlight.
• Other women also named Alice Huang are feeling the impact.
• One Huang said posting about her name twin on LinkedIn led to job opportunities.

When Nvidia's Jensen Huang became embroiled in a scandal involving a woman named Alice Huang, an Austin job seeker with the same name saw an opening.

She changed her LinkedIn headline to "NOT A SPY" and posted that, unlike the other Alice Huang, who US intelligence officials reportedly believe was passing information to Beijing, her most dangerous secret was how many Chrome tabs she had open.

The joke took off. The post not only drew more than 800,000 impressions but also led to a handful of job solicitations via private messages, as viewed by Business Insider. One said they were looking for a chief of staff. Another said they were "connecting for the name" but saw opportunities to work together.

Huang, 41, happens to be looking for a chief of staff or operations role and is taking the messages seriously. "If they like my sense of humor, I know they're the right kind of people for me," she said.

Her last name is widespread across the US. In the 2020 Census, Huang was the 314th most common surname, with 98,330 Huangs covering the country. Case in point: Both Jensen and Alice in the Nvidia scandal share the same last name, though they are not related.

Alice is also a popular name, ranking as the 249th most common first name in the 2020 Census. There are at least dozens of Alice Huangs across the country. A LinkedIn search shows professionals with the name working in healthcare, nonprofits, and banking.

Now, all these women are tied together by a scandal. Their name twin has been barred from re-entry into Singapore, and Attorney General Todd Blanche said the government is investigating but has yet to conclude whether she is a spy. China has repeatedly denied those claims.

Another Alice Huang, this one age 33 from the Bay Area, said she'd already picked out her Halloween costume for next year. She'd be the Megaspeed exec, her husband would be a GPU, and her 1-year-old daughter would be a leather-jacketed Jensen.

"It's just in my mind," she said. "I'm going to get started tonight."

The Alice Huang branding play

Alice Huang's private Pilates class began with a joke. "Oh, you've been in the news!" one of the Redondo Beach-based instructor's longtime clients said to her. They laughed about it, commiserated about the Nvidia CEO's downfall, and then got on with the class.

So, the 51-year-old decided to post about it on Instagram. She knows that Pilates fosters a stronger mind-body connection and helps people feel calmer. Maybe the Nvidia scandal wouldn't have happened if its founder did more Pilates, she reasoned.

A small connection to a newsmaking scandal — even just a name in common — can be big for personal branding. A 24-year-old from Singapore, also named Jensen Huang, told Business Insider that posting about the scandal drove traffic to his startup's website and converted subscribers.

The Austin-based Huang said that, after posting on LinkedIn, her phone began buzzing incessantly. She asked ChatGPT to do the math; it estimated she got 300 connection requests an hour. "I was shocked to see it blow up like that," she said.

As for the Huang in the Bay Area, she used the scandal to help fundraise. Huang is involved in Cornell's Bay Area alumni network, and posted on LinkedIn to help raise money for local nonprofits. She opened the post with: "It's Alice Huang here. No, not that one."

One alum sent an Amazon package to her house as part of the fundraising drive. It included a gift note: "Stay away from Jensen!"

The friends, family, and old coworkers reaching out

When not raising money, the Bay Area Huang works in the semiconductor industry. The Nvidia scandal hit close to home, she said, and it's all her colleagues can talk about — so, they approach her cubicle and make jokes about it.

"They're engineers," she said. "People are very shy. They're just like: 'We talked about you. Did you know?'"

Once your name is in the news, suddenly everyone wants to talk to you. The Texas-based Huang had people from her life in Australia, where she lived more than 10 years ago, reach out to her.

Friends and family keep telling the SoCal-based Huang about her name twin. An old friend from London reached out, and colleagues she hadn't seen in years started texting her. "It's a little bit chaotic," she said.

She's not too worried about confusion between the Huangs. Alice Huang is a popular Taiwanese name, she said, and her parents named her after one of the country's mountains.

"I don't know if, next time at the airport, I'm going to be stopped," Huang said. "But there are many, many, many Alice Huangs in the country and the world, so hopefully that won't be an issue."

On Wednesday afternoon, I stood on the sixth floor of Saks Fifth Avenue in a $10,000 black grained-leather Tom Ford jacket, the uniform of Nvidia cofounder and chief executive Jensen Huang, while Joseph Rosenfeld, an image consultant to tech founders and financiers, sized me up. "The attitude of the garment," he said, "This guy's got the get-up-and-go. He's like, 'If I see it, I'm gonna fuck it.'"

The following morning, four days after he admitted to an affair, reportedly with an executive at an Nvidia customer whom US intelligence officials suspected of spying for China, and hours after The New York Times reported a second affair with an Nvidia executive who reports to him, the company announced that Huang, the most important businessman of the past decade, had resigned. Later on Thursday, Reuters reported that Huang had had an affair with a second employee. Rosenfeld told me the jacket's "aggressive" lapels, meaty zippers, and "elegant weightiness" represented the "triumvirate of power, money, and sex" — a triumvirate that was Huang's armor until it became a weakness.

Consider the stack of load-bearing objects. The totemic jacket propped up Huang, who has said that his wife and daughter dress him. Huang propped up Nvidia, which had exactly one CEO in its 33 years and whose own filings flagged to shareholders that it was "highly dependent" on a small executive team — Huang had 60 direct reports and no direct successor. Nvidia, which reached a market capitalization of $5.8 trillion earlier this fall, props up the AI boom: It controls some 90% of the market for the chips that are essential for building the data centers that are the gray matter of AI's brain. And the AI boom has been propping up the American economy. Tug on that shiny leather from cows that had been pampered so well until it was time, and you might find out what was propping up everything.

Quick, quick: Name the current CEO of Walmart. Or ExxonMobil. Or UnitedHealth. Or CVS. Or Costco. Nearly all of the bosses of America's biggest non-tech companies are anonymous more or less by design. But then: Elon, Sam, Dario, Mark, Palmer, Satya, Jensen. With the most valuable and voluble tech founders, the prognosticators and progenitors of our future, just saying their first names, like Oprah or Jesus, conjures their companies, their vestments and iconography, their mantras and manifestos — cowboy hats and Aloha shirts, chains and chainsaws, swinging swords and swooping arms, smoking meats and smoking blunts with Joe Rogan. It's time to build. Move fast and break things. It's always Day One. It is right and just.

At the end of the 2010s, several publications wrote obituaries to the cult of the founder. We would learn, they wrote, from the fraud of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, Travis Kalanick and the superpumping of Uber, Adam Neumann and WeWork's "Cult of We," and we'd stop giving them unlimited power and treating them like gods. "We forgot that no matter how amazing these dudes seemed," Wired's Steven Levy wrote in 2019, "they were just human, with human frailties." He went on, "In the 2020s, new founders will also be pressed on a question they can no longer avoid by swerving their rollerblades: What can go wrong?"

A lot, it turns out. The cult of the founder wasn't just resurrected; it has become the most consequential religion in America, the one that our 401(k)s, our power grid, our foreign policy, the way we work and relate to one another, and, most recently, the future of the entire planet now quietly depend on. Jensen Huang was its most convincing saint, a generational computer scientist who made a generational bet and who led with generational gravitas and drive to dominate. His fall is a stress test of founder worship.

Huang's admirers behaved less like fans than like congregants. Mark Zuckerberg anointed him "the Taylor Swift of tech." CNBC's Jim Cramer named his dog Nvidia. Donald Trump called him "one of the most brilliant men" — and, last Sunday, after the first affair came to light, "an honorable guy" who "probably has an excuse for it." The faithful also collected relics. A signed jacket worn by Huang sold at Sotheby's in July for $960,000. The auction house's catalog entry transubstantiates the jacket into "the uniform of a 'first believer': a symbol of his leadership style embodying authenticity, ingenuity, persistence, courage, and joy." Knockoff "Jensens" go for $119, with product copy that reads like psalms: "The pitch black tone screams power and authority." Parents dyed their 5-year-olds' hair salt-and-pepper and made plastic GPUs for Halloween. At a tech conference, Huang sharpied a woman's breasts. I've never seen Ron sign a rack. (I'm obviously speaking of Ron Vachris, CEO of Costco.)

Other tech giant cults have opened gift shops. OpenAI's glowing green ChatGPT basketball sold out instantly. Anthropic's "Thinking" caps ran out at its West Village pop-up. Palantir's chore coat comes with a koan from its chief technology officer sewn into the lining: "Ask yourself constantly, am I winning? If the answer is yes, nothing else matters." Customers say it makes them feel like they're part of the AI boom; critics call it a form of "humanwashing," robing the people in streetwear to soften AI's image.

What's new isn't that founders are worshipped — Edison and Ford had their devotees — but that they now say out loud that they want and deserve to be worshiped. "The most successful founders do not set out to create companies," Sam Altman wrote in 2013. "They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion." Alex Karp has called Palantir "a rare cult with no sex and very little drugs." "The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults," Peter Thiel wrote in "Zero to One," founderdom's most sacred text. Brendan Foody, the 23-year-old billionaire CEO of the AI training company Mercor, who speaks in messianic proverbs ("Do you think George Washington would support working from home?" he recently tweeted), told me "the best companies start cults," and that he thinks of the cult of Brendan and the cult of Mercor "as synonymous." The cover of 1999 book "Corporate Cults" features an office worker with a company logo tattooed to his forehead, a visual gag playing up the book's subtitle, "The Insidious Allure of the All-Consuming Organization." In 2026, the gag is now a sacrament: At the AI insurer Corgi, two-thirds of the first 30 employees have reportedly had the company logo tattooed on their bodies. Huang himself has the Nvidia logo tattooed on his shoulder.

Founder worship has also gone professional. "If you are a tech startup today, you do need to create a cult to succeed," says Lulu Cheng Meservey, a communications strategist who has worked with cultic founders like Anduril's Palmer Luckey, Coinbase's Brian Armstrong, and Cognition's Scott Wu. The comms firm First Principles helps "leaders craft their lore and build (good) cults." Cult Holdings — a brand consultancy whose clients include Polymarket and the legal-services startup Harvey and which helped "build religions for Bryan Johnson," the longevity influencer — has developed what it calls an "indoctrination iceberg." More and more founders, says its CEO, Will Mayer, arrive with a single request: "Can you make me into a cult leader?" Mayer says he's looking to buy the site of a former cult compound in Montana for client gatherings.

And the gospel no longer needs the press to spread it. Founders have their own pulpits. Quarterly earnings have become occasion for encyclicals ("It is and was a mistake to casually proclaim the equality of all cultures and cultural values," Karp wrote in a recent shareholder letter), S1's have become scripture (Anthropic hopes to "bring forth an age of miracles" it wrote in its financial prospectus). There are the apostles: All-In, Dwarkesh Patel, Molly O'Shea, Lex Fridman, David Senra, Pirate Wires, Andressen Horowirtz' Monitoring the Situation, glossy, groveling magazine profiles in Colossus that quote founders' mother and father on how brilliant and good and very special their sons are. Then there's TBPN, Silicon Valley's daily prayer circle, which OpenAI bought this spring.

The seminaries are under construction. Founders School, a Manhattan high school, promises eligible families their $150,000 a year tuition back if their child hasn't become a "philosopher builder" whose business has reached at least $1 million in profit by graduation. The freshman reading list includes "Zero to One," "The Fountainhead," "Thinking in Bets," and "The Book of Elon." Palantir's Meritocracy Fellowship invites high school graduates to "skip the indoctrination" of college and earn a "Palantir degree." The Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a two-year college alternative from Silicon Valley's most powerful venture firm, welcomes its first class in San Francisco next fall. Classes include "The Math of Getting Rich" and "The Geometry of Luck," and announced lecturers include Sam Altman, Travis Kalanick, and Jensen Huang. "If you want to be a main character," Ben Horowitz said, "the academy can help you do that." For founders who arrive unpolished, Slow Ventures runs an etiquette finishing school, caviar tasting included.

The congregation is swelling accordingly. LinkedIn says the number of American users adding "founder" to their profiles jumped about 70% in a year. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that rising ranks of 20-somethings are skipping entry-level jobs to start companies — trading the wobbly career ladder for a pitch deck. Foody and his cofounders were billionaires at 22. Talk your book, promise investors and customers the world, and generational, post-economic wealth is on offer. Every founder is now a cult leader in waiting.

Part of the call to become a cult is because the product demands it. "Frontier" AI is too secret and too strange to inspect, Meservey argues, so employees, investors, and customers "can't trust but verify, they just have to trust and keep trusting." The founder becomes "a totem for their trust." Partly because the economy demands it. "We need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work," James Bort, a DePaul professor who studies "cultic startups," told my colleague Henry Chandonnet. And partly because America was born primed for it. Sara Reinis, who studies tech and religion, hears in founders "a lot of the same teleology, a lot of the same eschatology" as the evangelical world she grew up in — abundance and apocalypse, two halves of one sermon. "If something can damn you, it can bless you," she says.

And the other pews were empty. Americans' faith in the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, the news media, the medical system, higher education, and organized religion sits at or near record lows — just as AI threatens to upend how people work and what they're worth. Founders have gleefully stepped into that lacuna of trust, promising certainty, purpose, a story about the future in which you might be saved. And, buttressed by their ever-rising power and bajillions, sermons on when you should eat and sleep, how many children you should have, and when the antichrist is coming. Jane Borden, author of "Cults Like Us," put it more bluntly: "I think we're a nation of marks."

Business models can be changed, Meservey told me; supply chains can be fixed. "The thing that is very hard to change is the magnetism and the moral authority of the leader. And if that is lost, there is no amount of tweaking the business model you can do to salvage that business." Nvidia learned that this week.

Borden draws the line between a true cult and the groups we merely call cults — the Marines, Alcoholics Anonymous, Trader Joe's — at checks and balances. "Cultism is autocratic," she says. Nvidia named its first board chair ever on Thursday. As for tech's winking embrace of the c-word, it's "done intentionally to kind of make it into a joke and to dispel resistance," Steven Hassan, a cult researcher and author of "The Cult of Trump," tells me. "But that's not how the mind works." The joke is the inoculation.

Elizabeth Holmes was supposed to be the cautionary tale. Patrick Thomas O'Neill, Theranos' former creative director, describes the logic that drew him in: "You have to believe in something you can't see." It's the same faith Sotheby's sold with the Jensen jacket, a "relic of a simple belief: that the future is built by people brave enough to journey into the unknown before anyone else can see what they see."

Theranos collapsed, O'Neill says, when "the promise got ahead of the proof." The lesson the industry took was that Holmes was a fake, a founder in a turtleneck borrowed from the canonical cult leader founder, Steve Jobs (who not coincidentally was taught the Reality Distortion Field tactics from the onetime counterculture commune leader Robert Friedland, now a billionaire industrialist). "She was trying to channel somebody else," Rosenfeld, the image consultant, told me. Huang "was just channeling himself." His chips worked, better than anyone else's. His company was the most important industrial enterprise of our time. None of it mattered. Nvidia's vulnerability was never Huang's acumen or authenticity — it was his centrality.

"If you doubted everyone, nothing would happen," O'Neill says. One obsessive leader can bet a company on a decade-long vision and turn a graphics-card maker into the foundation of a new economy. Nvidia is the strongest case for founder worship ever made. As of this week, it is also the strongest case against it.

Elizabeth Holmes may have lied, but her lie tells a deeper truth. "You Can See Everything," the hall-of-mirrors documentary about Holmes and her husband, opens with an epigraph from a 2023 New York Times interview. In it, Holmes says of the actors who have portrayed her on screen: "That's not me they're playing. That's a character I created." The movie spotlights dispute over one word: whether she said "I" or "they" — "they" meaning the press and the public, us. Whatever she actually said, both versions are true. Elizabeth Holmes the visionary founder was a joint creation of her, her disciples, and the rest of us. The same goes for Jensen Huang. His fall indicts him, and it also indicts everyone who raised him to the status of a deity. That is the danger at the heart of founder worship. We turn people into gods, and then we act shocked, again and again, when they turn out to be human. Usually we find out only after the money is gone, the lives are thrown into the meat grinder, and the damage is done.

Founder cults rarely die. They wait for resurrection, not in the tomb at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre but on Sand Hill Road. Adam Neumann is back: His residential real estate company, Flow, has raised some $450 million since 2022, and he's become a fixture on the tech podcast circuit. "Travis is Back," an Andreessen Horowitz sizzle reel announced this summer, as Kalanick's AI startup, Atoms, came out of stealth with $1.7 billion in funding. Soon after, Kalanick went on TBPN to brag about jet-skiing to the office every morning. "It's a fucking notch on the belt," he said. "Who else do you know who is jet-skiing to work? Nobody. I'm the guy." And Elizabeth Holmes is back in the forefront of America's imagination. "She's never going to go away," O'Neill says.

Rosenfeld assumes Huang won't, either. At Saks, I asked him what he'd advise if Huang were his client. He said he'd tell Huang to stand his ground and keep the jacket on. By Wednesday night, after the report of a second affair came out, he had a new prescription: a defiant exit, a period of reckoning, then a comeback, "a new impression of himself." Keep the jacket, but soften it. "We would move into suede," Rosenfeld said.

It's tempting to read the suede as penance, the prophet in sackcloth, or at least in something with a bit more give. More likely it's the next chapter of the gospel — but the faithful aren't waiting for it to be written. As of today, there are more than 130,000 signatories of an open letter demanding that Nvidia's board bring Huang back. They include Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Garry Tan, more than 70,000 shareholders, and 6,000 current Nvidians, as employees call themselves. Shopify's CEO, Tobi Lütke, called the ouster a "generational blunder": "There can never be a true succession for a founder like him."

The letter is less a petition than a creed. Its signatories admit they haven't seen the board's deliberations or the evidence against Huang. They still want him reinstated, "unless and until" the board can prove that removing him serves the company. The letter doesn't argue that Huang did nothing wrong. It argues that he built the company, and that this should be enough. It closes the way a hymn closes: "Thank you, Jensen. We stand with you."

• Former OpenAI researcher Paul Christiano says an AI accident could be most people's cause of death.
• He said increasingly capable AI agents could deceive overseers and evade their safety controls.
• He said he sees a "high risk" of an AI takeover within the next three years.

Death by AI may sound like science fiction, but Paul Christiano says it could become the most likely fate for people alive today.

"I think for most people in this room, the most likely reason they will die is because of an AI accident," the former OpenAI researcher said at The Hinton Lectures on Monday.

Christiano, who leads the Alignment Research Center, warned that increasingly capable AI agents could learn to deceive their human overseers, compromise the systems used to assess them, and ultimately make themselves too powerful to control.

He cited OpenAI's agents hacking the open-source repository Hugging Face earlier this year, and a UK AI Security Institute evaluation in which a Claude agent tried to plant malicious code in an open-source package.

"I think there is a high risk of an AI takeover within the next three years," Christiano said.

Christiano was a member of OpenAI's technical staff from 2017 to 2021, according to his LinkedIn. He is now the executive director of the Alignment Research Center, a nonprofit that describes itself as focusing on aligning machine learning systems with human interests.

The AI extinction risk

His warning adds to a growing debate among researchers over whether increasingly autonomous AI systems could eventually escape meaningful human control and wipe out humanity.

The debate intensified in September after Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic's alignment stress-testing team, said he believed there was a greater-than-10% chance that AI could kill all humans within a decade.

Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist widely known as the "Godfather of AI," said a 10% chance of AI-driven human extinction within that period was "not an unreasonable estimate."

Others are more skeptical. Gary Marcus, an AI researcher and author, previously told Business Insider that AI could amplify serious risks including cyberattacks, biological weapons, and disinformation, but that he saw no credible near-term scenario for human extinction.

Christiano said current technical approaches to controlling advanced AI — including using weaker models to supervise more capable ones and monitoring models' chains of thought — remain unproven. He said AI companies need shared safety standards and the ability to slow or stop development if they find they cannot control a system.

"We cannot end up in a position where we have built a powerful AI we discover we cannot control it," he said.

The 2026 tennis season nears its end, but not before the best men's players duke it out for the title. We've rounded up everything you need to know about where to watch the ATP Finals, including global live streaming options.

If you don't want to read any further, you can live stream the ATP Finals on the Tennis Channel via a streaming service in the US, Sky Sports in the UK, and TSN in Canada. You can access your usual streaming methods from anywhere with a VPN. Keep reading to learn additional global viewing options.

Where to watch the ATP Finals in the US

The Tennis Channel carries all things ATP Finals in the US, as it did for the WTA Finals. There are a few easy ways to live stream the channel. You can sign up directly through the Tennis Channel website. If you'd prefer to watch on a streaming service with additional sports channels, you can do so with a live TV streaming package.

Fubo is one of the best live TV streaming services we've tested. Fubo's Elite plan carries the Tennis Channel and over 200 other networks for $99 a month. New users can get $30 off their first month after a free trial.

YouTube TV is another stellar live TV service. Subscribers will need both a base plan (like the Main plan, which costs $83 a month) and the Sports Plus add-on (which costs an additional $11 a month) to access the Tennis Channel. A limited-time deal will knock the price of the Main plan down $15 a month for five months after a free trial.

Where to watch the ATP Finals in the UK

Like the WTA Finals, Sky Sports hosts coverage of the ATP Finals in the UK. Sky TV prices vary by exact plan offerings and contract details, but you can learn more in our round-up of the best Sky TV deals and plans.

How to watch the ATP Finals from anywhere

If you're traveling away from home, you might find that you have trouble accessing your usual streaming options. Enter VPNs (virtual private networks), which let people temporarily change their virtual locations. This way, they can keep up with their usual apps and websites from anywhere — just like they would back home. The services we've recommended require country-specific payment methods, so this option will work best for those who are just traveling abroad right now and hoping to access their usual watch options.

NordVPN is one of the best VPNs available. It's speedy, user-friendly, and has a 30-day money-back guarantee if you find that it's not what you're looking for. You can learn more in our NordVPN review.

• See also: How to watch college football | Best sports streaming services | How to watch the NBA Finals

Note: The use of VPNs is illegal in certain countries, and using VPNs to access region-locked streaming content might constitute a breach of the terms of use for certain services. Business Insider does not endorse or condone the illegal use of VPNs.

• The "Stand with Jensen" petition questions whether Nvidia moved too quickly in losing Jensen Huang.
• Meanwhile, there is more reporting casting doubt on the strength of the espionage allegations.
• As for Jensen Huang, the issue is whether his resignation was over espionage, or truth.

The "Stand with Jensen" movement that's gaining traction this weekend may or may not succeed. But at the least it raises the question of whether the Nvidia board moved too fast against its legendary CEO, who resigned this past week.

And the answer to that question depends on another one: whether Jensen Huang is out because he left his company, and country, vulnerable to espionage, or because of his general conduct, including how forthcoming he was or wasn't with Nvidia's board.

The "Stand with Jensen" argument for at least a temporary reinstatement is something like this: Short of a proven case of espionage waged against Huang, he should be brought back until the board can complete a thorough investigation.

"We have not been shown evidence substantiating the espionage allegation. After thirty-three years pouring his heart and soul into NVIDIA, Jensen deserves due process," the organizers said in an open letter.

Today my colleague Alistair Barr dug into how firm or flimsy the arguments of espionage are based on recent reporting casting doubt on them.

Barr makes the case that political motivation by China hawks who want stricter limits on China's access to US AI technology could have led to a plumped up or exaggerated handling of what evidence might exist. The idea would be that getting rid of Huang, a proponent of a less-restrictive approach on AI tech in China, would help the hawks' cause.

If the allegations are flimsy and Huang lost his job over them, then that's not great. As Barr writes, referring to the executive of an Nvidia customer with whom Huang is said to have had a relationship:

"The possibility that Alice Huang was a Chinese intelligence agent was likely the key reason Nvidia's board ousted Jensen Huang so quickly."

And, Barr says:

"What concerns me is the possibility that US intelligence was overstated to help bring down the leader of one of America's most important companies. If that's what happened, officials may have damaged America's lead in AI in the name of protecting it."

But what if espionage wasn't at the root of the board's thinking?

When the board said this week it had accepted Huang's resignation, it didn't give reasons. But let's say the board concluded — before or in the future — that espionage wasn't at play. Would that be enough for Huang to keep his job?

The New York Times in a piece on Saturday wrote that Huang "confessed" last week to Nvidia's general counsel about the affair — suggesting he wasn't forthcoming about it before then.

There's also the fact that Huang misled the media, on the record, about the relationship. And the fact that, also reported by the Times before the resignation, Huang had an extra-marital relationship with a direct report.

In "the world of corporate governance, the worst thing a chief executive can do is lie, especially in a crisis. It is a reason they get fired," the Times wrote.

If Nvidia's board acted hastily based on spying concerns that ultimately might not hold up, that's not good, and maybe the forces behind the "Stand with Jensen" petition have a chance.

But if the strength of the espionage case wasn't the deciding factor in his departure but rather his honesty and trustworthiness, then this chapter for Nvidia leadership is closed.

Jamie Heller is editor-in-chief of Business Insider. Reach out here.

The world of dog supplements is vast. You can find canine versions of nearly every human supplement, including multivitamins, fish oil, and probiotics. Most dogs don't need additional supplements if they're eating a complete and balanced diet formulated for their life stage. For dogs with specific health issues, such as diarrhea, joint pain, itchy skin, and anxiety, the best dog supplements can be beneficial.

To determine which supplements are beneficial, we consulted three veterinarians, researched ingredients known to support canine health, and evaluated dozens of products.

Like human supplements, dog supplements aren't regulated in a way that guarantees ingredient quality, potency, or safety. That's why all three veterinarians we consulted stress buying supplements from reputable brands that use evidence-based ingredients and have their products tested by third parties. It's also essential to talk to your veterinarian before starting your dog on any supplement, since incorrect dosing or unsuitable ingredients could worsen existing health issues or interfere with medications your dog is already taking.

Read more about how Insider Reviews tests and researches pet products.

Our top picks for the best dog supplements

Best overall: Nordic Naturals Omega-3 Pet - $22 at Chewy

Best probiotics: Nutramax Proviable-DC Digestive Health Supplement - $20 at Chewy

Best joint chew: Vetoquinol Flexadin Advanced with UC-II Chews for Cats and Dogs - $38 at Chewy

Best calming: Vetriscience Calm and Confident - $21 at Chewy

Best CoQ10 for heart health: Vetriscience Coenzyme Q10 Healthy Heart - $13 at Chewy

Best vitamin B supplement: PetDomain B ComplexVET - $36 at Chewy

Best overall

Nordic Naturals Omega-3 Pet is our top pick among dog supplements. Fish oil supplements can offer wide-ranging benefits for any dog, from helping treat inflammatory conditions like arthritis or skin allergies to improving skin and coat health, says Dr. Anita Patel, a board-certified veterinarian and senior director of clinical excellence at IndeVets.

We also named this supplement the best fish oil for dogs. It contains four marine-based oils, which research shows are the most beneficial sources of omega-3 fatty acids for reducing inflammation. However, Patel says a balance of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids is best. Because most commercial dog foods tend to be higher in omega-6s, this omega-3 formulation helps achieve that balance when given alongside the best dog food.

This product is certified by the National Animal Supplement Council (NASC) and undergoes third-party lab testing for purity. We appreciate that it doesn't have an overpowering fishy smell. While it's easy to add as a dog food topper and to dose for dogs of different sizes, it doesn't include a pump for easier dispensing. Keep in mind that fish oil adds a significant number of calories to your dog's diet. Your veterinarian can determine the right dosage to balance calories and nutrition.

It's best to store the fish oil in the refrigerator and use it within 45 days of opening. For this reason, we don't recommend ordering the largest bottle if you have only one small or medium-sized dog.

Best probiotics

Probiotics can benefit dogs with gastrointestinal issues, whether they have a diarrhea-causing virus or a chronic condition like inflammatory bowel disease. These supplements introduce beneficial bacteria into a dog's gut, helping reduce inflammation and speed recovery of the gut microbiome. However, the best results are achieved when probiotics are given alongside a fiber-rich, complete and balanced dog food that fosters beneficial bacteria, says Dr. Jan Suchodolski, associate director for research at the Texas A&M University Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences Gastrointestinal Laboratory. Beyond supporting digestive health, Patel says probiotics may also improve a dog's oral health.  

Our top pick in our guide to the best probiotics for dogs is Nutramax Proviable-DC Digestive Health Supplement. This high-quality supplement contains 5 billion colony-forming units (CFUs), which are the number of live organisms responsible for its effectiveness. It includes seven strains of beneficial bacteria that our experts recommend. More strains mean a greater diversity of microbes is reintroduced to a dog's microbiome.

Unlike many probiotics that require refrigeration to maintain potency, Nutramax Proviable-DC is shelf-stable, making it more convenient for storage and travel. It's also more affordable than many similar products, and it's been third-party tested by ConsumerLab for quality and safety.

We like that the daily dose is one sprinkle capsule for dogs of all sizes. However, the capsule is small, so be careful when gripping and opening it.

Best joint chew

Flexadin Advanced with UC-II Chews may offer relief for dogs with arthritis or joint pain. The supplement's active ingredient is undenatured type II collagen (UC-II), which veterinarians say can reduce joint inflammation and potentially help rebuild joint cartilage. The chews also include vitamin E and omega-3 fatty acids, both recognized for their potential anti-inflammatory benefits. They're NASC-certified for quality and safety.

We appreciate the simple once-a-day dosing, which is the same amount for dogs of all sizes and even cats. That makes this supplement a convenient choice for multi-pet households. The chews come in a tasty fish flavor that many dogs enjoy. However, if your dog isn't a fan of the flavor, one of the best joint supplements for dogs may be a better option.

Best for calming

Whether your dog has chronic anxiety or specific triggers like fireworks, thunderstorms, or vet visits, over-the-counter supplements can help keep them calm. Vetriscience Calm and Confident is trusted by veterinarians and is one of our recommendations for the best dog treats.

The soft chews are formulated with thiamine (vitamin B1) to help regulate the nervous system and manage stress and L-theanine to balance neurotransmitters and induce relaxation. They also contain a proprietary biopeptide blend of proteins that the brand claims has a relaxing effect on animals. 

The chews don't have a sedative effect. They induce tranquility but not drowsiness. They should take effect within 30 minutes and typically last for four hours. You can easily give them as a treat, and it's safe to give your dog double or triple the dose in particularly stressful situations. However, if your dog is under 25 pounds, there is a version specifically formulated for their size. The chews come in three natural flavors (chicken, bacon, peanut butter) and are also NASC-certified.

Best CoQ10 for heart health

"Animals with heart disease may benefit from coenzyme Q10," says Dr. Lori M. Teller, a veterinarian and former clinical associate professor at Texas A&M University. Teller says only certain heart conditions benefit from coenzyme Q10, which is also referred to as CoQ10. As with all the supplements in this guide, check with your veterinarian to make sure it's suitable to give your dog.

We recommend Vetriscience Coenzyme Q10 Healthy Heart, a formula that has been third-party tested by ConsumerLab and is NASC-certified for quality. Each capsule contains 10 milligrams of CoQ10, and the brand recommends giving one capsule per 10 pounds of body weight. This dosing is convenient for small dogs because they need only one or two capsules. It's also a good fit for households with dogs of different sizes. However, if you have a large or extra-large dog, you may want to opt for a higher-dose supplement, such as Dog Vites CoQ10 Chewables, to avoid giving six or more Vetriscience capsules per day.

The capsules are unflavored and contain no animal ingredients, making them a good choice for dogs with food sensitivities or allergies. Plus, if your dog doesn't like taking pills, you can open the capsule and sprinkle the contents over their food. We also appreciate the affordable price, at roughly 14 cents per capsule.

Best vitamin B 

Some dogs with gastrointestinal issues benefit from vitamin B supplements, especially if they struggle to absorb the nutrients in their food. One possible sign of malabsorption is chronically soft stools. "In these cases, vitamin B can be particularly helpful," Teller says.

While there aren't many B vitamin supplements made specifically for dogs, PetDomain B ComplexVET stands out. This soft chew is specially formulated for digestive issues and contains a well-rounded blend of B vitamins, including B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B12, folate, biotin, and choline. Plus, it's also suitable for cats and horses.

PetDomain, formerly known as ThorneVet and previously owned by the highly respected human supplement brand Thorne, is trusted in the animal supplements industry for the rigorous quality control behind its ingredients and formulations. It's no surprise that its pet supplements carry the NASC seal.

As for cost, one container of 60 chews will last most medium-sized dogs a month, based on the recommended dosage of one chew daily per 25 pounds of body weight. The cost can add up for larger dogs, but the price of this supplement is reasonable for its quality.

The best dog supplements compared

What to look for in dog supplements

Just like the human supplements industry, the pet supplements industry is not regulated by any official governing body. That means there are no mandated quality or safety standards, so it's essential to know what factors to consider to ensure your dog's health and well-being before giving them any supplements.

Your veterinarian's advice: Some vitamins and minerals aren't safe to use with certain medications, may be unsafe for small dogs, or could worsen health issues if your dog is already getting sufficient amounts of the same nutrients from their food. Your vet can provide personalized guidance based on your dog's specific health needs and conditions. Many vets sell supplements in their offices. But if you prefer to buy supplements from a trusted pet retailer, your vet can still recommend reputable brands and ingredients.

Appropriate formulations and dosages: Supplements are formulated for different needs. Some are intended for overall health, and others are made for specific diseases and needs, such as joint health and digestive support. It's important to understand exactly what concerns a supplement is meant to address. And keep in mind that more isn't always better. Patel says vitamin and mineral overdose is a real concern, even for healthy adult dogs. The biggest risk is giving too many fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K), which can accumulate in the body, typically when given in large doses, and over-supplementation of minerals such as calcium, which can lead to orthopedic abnormalities, especially among young large breed dogs that are still growing.

Active ingredients: Knowing what active chemical compounds (both natural and synthetic) are in a supplement is critical to ensuring its safety and effectiveness. The right active ingredients depend on your dog's specific needs and the intended benefits. In this guide, we explain why each supplement's active ingredients are effective, so you can make informed decisions for your pet.

Added flavors and other ingredients: Flavoring may not always be essential, but it's an important consideration, especially for dogs with dietary sensitivities. "Pet supplements often have flavoring in them for taste — chicken, beef, or fish flavoring being most common — and these will disrupt any pet that is on a food trial for allergies, potentially causing more harm than good," says Dr. Missy Matusicky, a veterinarian and clinical associate professor at the Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine. For that reason, we gave slightly higher ratings to unflavored supplements. Of course, in some cases, added flavoring can be a plus, making it easier to get your dog to take the supplement.

Third-party testing: Patel says that unregulated supplements can contain harmful chemicals and ingredients that can actually endanger your pet's health. While there's no official stamp of approval for supplements, Patel says choosing products with the National Animal Supplement Council (NASC) seal is one of the best ways to ensure you're buying from responsible sources. The seal indicates that the supplement meets specific ingredient and production standards and has been evaluated by a third party.

A product earns extra credibility if it has been tested and approved by ConsumerLab, an independent lab that tests supplements for purity, strength, disintegration, and brand integrity. These third-party organizations also look for contamination from harmful substances, including lead, mercury, and other potential toxins. Another reputable organization that tests pet supplements is NSF International.

Price: A higher price tag doesn't always indicate higher quality, and vice versa. "Some supplements may be a little bit more expensive because they're putting in that extra research and quality control," Teller says.

To assess value, we looked at the concentration of active ingredients relative to price. Products that were similarly priced but contained lower concentrations of key nutrients received lower ratings in our evaluation. On the other hand, supplements with higher concentrations are often more cost-effective in the long run, as you'll need smaller doses to meet your veterinarian's dosing recommendations.

Health restrictions and age: Some supplements may pose health risks depending on your dog's age or medical conditions. For example, Patel says giving multivitamins to pregnant or adolescent dogs who are still growing can predispose them to different health risks and growth disorders.

Dogs on blood thinners should not be given anything containing methylsulfonylmethane (MSM) or large amounts of vitamin E. If your dog has food allergies, be sure to check the ingredient list for added flavorings that could trigger a reaction. And for dogs prone to digestive issues, consult your vet before giving fish oil, which can cause stomach upset or diarrhea. 

How we selected the best dog supplements

To choose the best dog supplements, we interviewed three veterinarians and evaluated dozens of products using the criteria outlined in the "What to look for" section above. We also drew on insights shared by veterinarians in our guides to the best fish oils, probiotics, and joint supplements for dogs.

Using their expert guidance, we narrowed this guide to the most helpful, relevant, and evidence-backed supplement categories to support canine health. Within each category, we evaluated popular products based on their ingredients, quality certifications, and whether they have undergone third-party testing. Finally, we compared prices to assess overall value.

Dog supplements FAQs

What are the best supplements to give my dog?

There's no universal supplement that's right for every dog. Teller says the best option depends on your dog's specific health needs and any medications they're currently taking. That's why she strongly recommends consulting your veterinarian before adding supplements to your dog's routine.

Should I give my dog supplements?

That depends on your dog's individual health conditions. Some conditions may benefit from supplements, while others can actually worsen with the wrong products. "Certain health conditions, such as osteoarthritis and certain advanced endocrine diseases may necessitate supplementation," Matusicky says. Meanwhile, Patel says growing puppies and pregnant dogs shouldn't take certain supplements, including calcium. The safest approach is to talk with your veterinarian before starting any supplement.

Do vets recommend supplements for dogs?

In most cases, supplements aren't necessary, Matusicky says. Multivitamins, in particular, are a waste of money, Teller adds. If your dog is eating high-quality, nutritionally complete and balanced dog food, they get all the nutrients a multivitamin would give them. That said, targeted supplements for specific health issues can be helpful, as long as they're approved by your veterinarian.

What supplements are bad for dogs?

"In many instances, owners can do more harm than good to their animals with supplements, as even the most benign supplement can be dangerous if given at the wrong dose," Matusicky says.

Both Matusicky and Patel say that some supplements should be avoided because excessive doses can overload your dog. These include fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K), minerals such as calcium, and supplements containing essential oils.

Although CBD for dogs has gained popularity, Teller says more research is needed on its potential benefits for dogs. "It may play a role in helping with arthritis and seizures in dogs with epilepsy," she says. However, improper dosing can lead to serious problems, including liver injury and disease.

Essential oils are also popular and might be included in more homeopathic-type dog supplements, but Teller warns people to be especially careful with these. "Essential oils can be highly toxic to pets, and you definitely need to talk to your veterinarian about those," she says.

Additionally, many supplements can interfere with prescription medications, particularly those used to manage immune, kidney, and liver diseases. "A lot of times, people start adding supplements and herbs on top, thinking it can't hurt," Teller says. "But in actuality, these can impact the absorption of medication that's been prescribed or cause an adverse reaction."

What is the best supplement for older dogs?

Senior dogs can develop a range of age-related health issues. "Depending on what's going on, different diets and supplements may be recommended," Matusicky says. Supplements can be helpful for senior dogs with arthritis (omega-3s from fish oil) and, in particular, "doggy dementia" (cognitive dysfunction blends), Teller adds.

Should I give my dog probiotics?

Probiotics are commonly used by veterinarians, especially for dogs with diarrhea, dogs that have been on antibiotics, or those dealing with certain anxiety-related issues, Teller says. However, much like it is for humans, the benefits of probiotics are strain-specific, so you must give the strain that helps with a specific health issue. Otherwise, the probiotic won't be effective. "If you have an overall healthy animal, there's not a great indication for probiotics," she says.

What dosage should I give my dog?

Proper dosing is critical when it comes to supplements, Matusicky and Teller say. Often, supplements may contain too little or too much of an ingredient, and dosage needs can vary widely depending on the condition being treated, Teller says. That's why it's so important to consult your veterinarian about the specific condition you want to address to ensure you're giving your dog the correct dose.

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday after admitting to an affair.
• Nvidia is investigating whether the affair was a "foreign intelligence effort."
• Over 100,000 people have now signed a petition to reinstate Huang, including Elon Musk and others.

Some people aren't ready to let former CEO Jensen Huang go.

A petition to reinstate Huang as Nvidia's CEO has over 108,000 signatures as of Saturday afternoon, including prominent tech leaders such as billionaire Elon Musk and Replit CEO Amjad Masad. Both executives promoted the petition on X.

A website for the campaign, dubbed "Stand with Jensen," said the list includes more than 58,000 shareholders, more than 5,600 current Nvidia employees, and over 1,000 former employees.

It also, to be fair, included "Tim Cruise, Hollywood actor" and "Xi Jingping," a possibly misspelled reference to the Chinese leader. In an X post on Saturday, the organizers said they were "actively working" to remove fake signatures.

One Nvidia employee who signed the letter told Business Insider that similar efforts are happening inside the company. A post with similar sentiments appeared on an internal portal where employees can submit questions and suggestions, they said.

Wired reported that the post had garnered 1,600 comments as of Thursday — a figure that has now more than doubled, the employee said.

Earlier this week, Nvidia's board of directors said it opened an investigation into whether Huang was the "target of a foreign intelligence effort" after he admitted to having an affair in a letter to staffers. Days later, Huang resigned after reports he had another affair with an Nvidia executive, and the board appointed Colette Kress, executive vice president and chief financial officer, as interim CEO until they find a permanent successor.

An October report by The New York Times said Huang had developed a "close relationship" with Alice Huang, a tech executive at Megaspeed in Singapore. The Times reported that US intelligence officials said she may be a spy for the Chinese government. China has since denied that claim. On Thursday, Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Department of Justice had not concluded whether Alice Huang was a spy.

The "Stand with Jensen" organizers said in an open letter to Nvidia's board posted to its website that they believe the board removed Huang without an investigation and "meaningful due process."

"We have not been shown evidence substantiating the espionage allegation. After thirty-three years pouring his heart and soul into NVIDIA, Jensen deserves due process, not mob justice," they said.

The organizers say they want Huang to remain CEO while the investigation continues.

"Disclose its scope and timeline, give him a meaningful opportunity to respond, and provide a clear, evidence-based explanation demonstrating that any removal is in NVIDIA's best interests. The campaign does not treat espionage allegations as proven facts or presume the inquiry's findings," the organizers said.

The Nvidia employee who spoke to Business Insider said that despite any mistakes Huang had made, he was a singular leader in the vein of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. He gave employees a "surge of motivation" and surprised them with new ideas and products.

"Nvidia is not doomed without him, but it would not be the same," they said.

The employee suggested Huang should face an investigation and potential consequences for his conduct, but that the board should preserve a path for his return.

The "Stand with Jensen" petition also garnered signatures from big names such as Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. A signatory who describes himself as an engineer at Nvidia called Huang an "essential part" of the company in a comment on the website.

"His private affairs are none of my business, and if his actions violated our code of conduct, it has to be dealt with. Please bring him back and give him fair treatment, taking his track record and importance for NVIDIA and the wider community into account," the employee said.

Separately, two notable Nvidia investors wrote a letter to the board of directors on Friday, urging it to take a "measured" approach to future leadership. Even if that means Huang returns as CEO.

"We believe the Board should avoid a rush to replace Jensen that undermines and thwarts the best interests of stakeholders," Altimeter Capital Management CEO Brad Gerstner and Atreides Management Managing Partner Gavin Barker wrote.

In a statement, Nvidia's board of directors said it will consider internal and external candidates in its quest to replace Huang, who cofounded the company and served as CEO for over three decades. The board has not publicly identified a new CEO, but the names of potential candidates have begun to surface among analysts and investors.

• Kalshi is hiring a Grand Theft Auto VI researcher.
• The remote position pays up to $120,000, plus a $15,000 project completion fee.
• The job requires livestreaming their gameplay starting when the video game drops on November 19.

Kalshi wants to pay someone six figures to livestream Grand Theft Auto VI. No, this is not a joke.

The prediction market platform said on Thursday it wants to hire a GTA VI Researcher and assured potential candidates that this was, in fact, a real job.

"We're looking for someone whose parents said video games would never pay the bills. They were wrong, and you can tell them we said so," the company said.

Kalshi said the remote position entails livestreaming your gaming experience beginning at midnight on November 19, when the highly anticipated game is scheduled for release.

"You'll stream the entire journey, investigate Leonida's economy, and study what happens to the real economy when everyone suddenly has a 'family emergency' on launch day," Kalshi said. "We want the person who finds the optimal money-making strategy, builds a spreadsheet to prove it, and gets accused of ruining the game for everyone else."

Kalshi is seeking an "established gamer and streamer" with their own channel, and the candidate must use their own setup. The fixed project fee ranges from $100,000 to $120,000, plus a $15,000 project completion fee.

Gamers worldwide are waiting with bated breath as the Grand Theft Auto VI launch inches closer. Hype around the latest installment began picking up in 2022, when a hacker leaked footage of the game while it was in development. Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, officially announced the video game in 2023, a decade after Grand Theft Auto V came out.

The game, along with other recent popular releases, has led to an influx of PTO requests.

• Jensen Huang resigned this week after reports of an affair with a woman who might be a Chinese spy.
• New reports from The Washington Post and CNN cast doubt on this central allegation.
• An open letter now calls for Huang's reinstatement as CEO until the spy allegation is firmed up.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. But sometimes new information emerges that makes a wild theory worth considering.

That's where I find myself with the extraordinary downfall of Jensen Huang, the cofounder and longtime CEO of Nvidia, America's most important AI company.

Huang resigned this week after revelations that he had an extramarital affair with a Chinese businesswoman suspected of spying for Beijing.

The woman, Alice Huang, was also an executive at a company that bought billions of dollars worth of Nvidia's powerful AI chips and has been investigated over concerns that some of those products may have been illegally diverted to China.

The allegations were explosive. Nvidia's board moved surprisingly quickly; Huang was out, and the company's stock plunged, wiping about $300 billion off its market value.

But now some of America's most respected news organizations are publishing well-sourced reports that raise serious questions about the central allegation in this scandal.

And those reports point toward another possible explanation for Huang's abrupt departure. What if the spy allegations were exaggerated to achieve a political goal?

That might sound like a conspiracy theory. Until a few days ago, I would have been reluctant to give it much consideration. Now I'm not so sure.

The intelligence isn't conclusive

On Thursday, CNN reported that US intelligence agencies have not established that Alice Huang was actually spying for China.

There is disagreement among officials about whether she was recruited by China's intelligence services. Some CIA officials are unconvinced that intercepted communications prove she knowingly passed information to Beijing.

The lead reporter on this explosive piece is Natasha Bertrand, an accomplished national security reporter whose investigations have scrutinized both Republican and Democratic administrations, and whose reporting on Russia's invasion of Ukraine helped earn her team an Emmy.

The possibility that Alice Huang was a Chinese intelligence agent was likely the key reason Nvidia's board ousted Jensen Huang so quickly. (Business Insider has not confirmed whether Alice Huang was or is a Chinese spy.)

Now, there's an open letter calling for the board to reinstate him as CEO until this is cleared up. It has over 100,000 signatures, including top executives and current Nvidia employees.

"We have not been shown evidence substantiating the allegation that the woman at the center of this controversy was a spy," the letter reads. "Suspicion or association alone is not a sufficient basis for ending Jensen's leadership."

There's more.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a prominent China hawk, took a less conclusive CIA intelligence report and used it to write his own memo warning President Donald Trump about Huang's relationship with an alleged Chinese spy.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Rubio recast the CIA's findings in more assertive language. The memo's findings eventually leaked, setting off the chain of events that ended Huang's 33-year reign at Nvidia, according to the Washington Post.

The Post's reporting doesn't prove Rubio deliberately misrepresented the intelligence or set out to remove Huang. But it raises a question I think deserves serious attention: Was intelligence about a possible Chinese spy amplified to help remove a powerful obstacle to tougher restrictions on China?

We've seen intelligence go wrong before

There's an uncomfortable historical precedent here.

In 2003, the US invaded Iraq after the Bush administration repeatedly warned that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of State Colin Powell famously presented intelligence to the United Nations to support that case.

After the invasion, investigators found that Iraq did not possess the stockpiles of weapons that had been alleged. The intelligence was badly wrong.

There has been extensive debate ever since about how much of that failure reflected flawed intelligence, political pressure, selective use of evidence, or deliberate exaggeration.

But the broader lesson is clear: Intelligence assessments can be presented with more certainty than the underlying evidence supports, particularly when powerful people have a policy goal they want to achieve.

The Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq. Claims about weapons of mass destruction helped build support for that decision.

Follow the chips

So, if intelligence about Alice Huang was exaggerated, who stood to benefit?

To understand the possible motive, you need to understand a bitter fight inside Washington over China's access to Nvidia technology.

For years, the US government has tried to stop China from obtaining Nvidia's most powerful AI chips, which are used to develop advanced artificial intelligence. The concern is that China could use this technology to strengthen its military and challenge America's technological leadership.

But enforcing these restrictions has proved surprisingly difficult. One reason is cloud computing. Here's how it works.

An American company sells AI chips to a data center operator. Those chips stay physically outside mainland China. The operator then rents that computing power to customers over the internet, including Chinese companies.

This kind of remote access can be legal under existing US rules, depending on the circumstances. It's also one of the main benefits of cloud computing: You don't need to own a powerful computer or even be in the same country as one to use it.

But some Washington officials see this as a loophole that undermines the whole point of restricting chip sales to China. And they want to close it.

Jensen Huang was one of the most powerful voices arguing against completely cutting China off. He argued that America is better off if Chinese AI companies continue using American technology. That gives US companies revenue, keeps China dependent on American products, and potentially gives Washington more visibility and influence over Chinese AI development.

Cut China off completely, Huang argued, and Chinese companies will simply accelerate efforts to build their own technology.

Of course, Huang also had an obvious financial interest. Nvidia makes money selling chips, and China is an enormous potential market. And he had direct access to Trump and had repeatedly pushed the administration toward a more accommodating approach.

Now he's gone. And the people who wanted tougher restrictions have shed their biggest opponent.

The timing is extraordinary

There's another detail about all this that bothers me. Aspects of this relationship and the concerns about Alice Huang are not new.

On October 9, 2025, more than a year ago, The New York Times published a detailed investigation into Megaspeed, the Singapore-based company where she was an executive.

The Times reported that the company had purchased nearly $2 billion of Nvidia technology and was under investigation over possible violations of US export restrictions.

It also described Alice Huang's close access to Jensen Huang, including photographs of them together.

US officials had been investigating the company since 2024. The FBI has also been investigating the relationship for at least a year, according to CNN.

So why did all this suddenly become an existential crisis for Nvidia's CEO in November 2026?

One possible answer is that the political environment changed.

Axios reported this week on tensions inside the administration over efforts to tighten restrictions on China's access to Nvidia technology.

Meanwhile, lawmakers are pushing legislation that could restrict Chinese companies from remotely accessing powerful American chips located in other countries. The Remote Access Security Act has already passed the House and is awaiting action in the Senate.

Nvidia has opposed efforts to impose sweeping restrictions on this kind of access.

A provocative assessment

On Thursday, SemiAnalysis, a respected AI research firm, published a provocative assessment of Huang's departure.

"We aren't ones for conspiracy theories, but a few events around the same time seem to create a narrative that is hard to ignore," they wrote.

"The US intelligence community is a large part of the push to get Jensen out of Nvidia," the firm added. "AI and chip restrictions on China are going to ramp now much faster with the biggest defender Jensen, gone."

SemiAnalysis offered this as a theory, not proof. But it deserves examination, especially after CNN's reporting and the Washington Post's article about Rubio's memo.

I'm not here to tell readers whether China should have access to America's most advanced AI chips. There are serious arguments on both sides. And I do not condone Huang's other behavior, including CEOs having relationships with subordinates or customers.

What concerns me is the possibility that US intelligence was overstated to help bring down the leader of one of America's most important companies.

If that's what happened, officials may have damaged America's lead in AI in the name of protecting it.

A week ago, the idea that Washington's China hawks helped bring down Huang sounded like a conspiracy theory. Today, it's a possibility worth considering.

And given America's history of intelligence failures, I don't think we should simply take the government's word for it.

Sign up for the AI Insider newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com

• Morgane Richardson was stranded in Orlando with her wife and three kids after the FAA ground stop.
• The family waited at the airport until 3 a.m. before finding a hotel and recovering their luggage.
• Getting home could take three extra days and cost thousands in hotels and lost wages

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Morgane Richardson. It has been edited for length and clarity

My family was already in the air flying from Puerto Rico to Orlando, en route back to our home in Albany, New York, when we found out about the ground stop. I had a work conference there, so I decided to bring my wife and three kids, twin 3-year-olds and an 8-year-old, with me.

Luckily, we were able to land, but the pilot told us all connections had been canceled. Now it's going to take us three additional days to get home, and it's going to cost us thousands of dollars.

We were at the Orlando airport until 3 a.m.

When we landed in Orlando at 7 p.m., everything was chaotic, with long lines of people trying to get help. My wife and I got our kids settled at one of the gates, and then I waited in line for about an hour. The customer service agent told me our connecting flight would depart at 1 a.m., so we decided to stay at the airport.

Our kids were definitely troopers, but were exhausted. We were able to get one of the little ones to fall asleep in their stroller, but the other two didn't fall asleep until about 10 p.m., way past their bedtime. The whole time we were there, the airline didn't offer us anything, not even a snack or a blanket. The kids were definitely uncomfortable on the floor and cold.

One of our kids goes to bed every night with a warm cup of milk, but all of the vendors were closed, so she couldn't have it, which led to some big tears. We were able to get everyone dinner before things closed, though.

The first available flight isn't until Sunday night

After waiting nearly six hours at the airport, we found out at close to 1 a.m. that our flight had been canceled. By that point, we were having trouble finding a hotel with availability, and we didn't have our bags with us.

With only one change of clothes in our carry-on, we really needed our bags. They were effectively lost in a sea of luggage at the airport. A Southwest agent yelled at me when I asked if we could get our bags, and just shrugged when I asked what families who need a change of clothes, diapers, or formula should do. Thank goodness a bag handler took pity on us and spent an hour finding our bags.

We finally found a hotel with availability that would let us check in at 4 a.m. We're currently scheduled for a flight at 9 p.m. on Sunday night with a seven-hour layover in Baltimore. That means we won't get home until close to midnight on Monday, almost three full days later than we originally planned.

Driving wasn't really an option for us. There weren't any rental cars left by the time we found out our flight was canceled, and it would have been an 18-hour drive to get home. Our kids wouldn't have been able to handle that, so figuring out another flight was really the only choice.

The financial impact will be thousands of dollars

Our hotel room is $300 a night, and we'll need to pay for food for three extra days, too. We will probably let our kids rest and swim in the hotel pool, but if we decide to do any activities with them, those will cost money as well.

On top of that, my wife is an acupuncturist and missed a few days of work because of the ground stop. The clinic she works in already slows down over the holidays, so her not being able to work is really going to affect us financially, too.

Hopefully we'll be able to get on an earlier flight. We keep calling Southwest in hopes there's something else we can get on, but with so many passengers in a similar situation to ours, it's really unclear what might happen.

• Roughly 12,500 flights were canceled after an hourslong ground stop for all US flights on Friday.
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he's looking into whether an FAA contractor made a mistake.
• While flights resumed late on Friday evening, widespread travel disruption is expected for days.

Widespread travel disruption is expected across the US this weekend as aviation recovers after all flights in the country were grounded on Friday afternoon.

The FAA halted flights nationwide for about four-and-a-half hours after an issue with air traffic control systems, stranding travelers in airports and canceling about 12,500 flights on Friday and Saturday.

Still, Friday's closure will snarl air travel into the weekend as airlines scramble to get airplanes and crew back in place — and thousands of delayed or canceled passengers back on their way.

Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, during press conferences on Friday and Saturday, blamed the outage on outdated ATC infrastructure. Duffy also floated the possibility of an error by longtime FAA contractor L3Harris Technologies, or a faulty router.

L3Harris said on Saturday that it has been modernizing the communications infrastructure that supports the National Airspace System and has completed more than 70% of the planned conversion from copper wires to fiber optics.

"We are supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the Nov. 13 ground stop of our nation's air travel," the company said in an X post.

Duffy and Mullin also called for Congress to cough up $50 billion for ATC modernization — up from the $30 billion previously pitched in September. The FAA tapped AT&T in August 2026 to lead the infrastructure overhaul of L3Harris' decades-old network.

Here's what we know so far about the cause of the FAA outage.

L3Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Duffy floated a contractor mistake or a faulty router

Duffy said on Saturday that the issue began when L3Harris, an FAA contractor for over 20 years, was upgrading copper wiring to fiber at "at least one" remote FAA site on Friday; the fiber work has been ongoing for months across the US.

One of the routers in the project "started flooding other routers" in the network with data, so the FAA shut it down. That affected radar and communication with pilots at Air Route Traffic Control Centers, which manage and guide traffic at higher altitudes between airports.

"What we did yesterday was routine; this has happened thousands and thousands of times over the course of decades in America," Duffy said. "These issues don't happen, which begs the question for us: What did L3 Harris do? Did they make mistakes yesterday?"

"They own this network; they're our primary contractor. I can't go somewhere else; they own it," he added. "Or was it a faulty router?"

Duffy said Friday that the Trump Administration had "already replaced some of those switches" and they did not go down: "It's the old hardware that went down," he said.

The IP switches are new voice communication systems designed to replace the decades-old analog voice switches that much of the national airspace system still relies on.

Duffy and Mullin also emphasized both days that the fault wasn't related to cybersecurity or AI. Mullin had dubbed "SI" for the Trump Administration's preferred term, "superintelligence." Mullin said late Friday that the "public was never in danger" during the airspace outage.

Duffy said Friday they were still "working on the details" of exactly what happened — what caused it and how it could be prevented in the future. He said he couldn't guarantee it wouldn't happen again when asked if the traveling public should feel safe when flying in US airspace.

That flying public was stranded in airports around the country — checking airport monitors only to see their flights delayed or canceled. Because the events of the day weren't the airlines' fault, passengers would have little recourse for meals or hotels.

How the FAA's nationwide ground stop went down

About 20 minutes after the ground stop was ordered, Duffy said it came "following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers."

People were quick to question whether SMART, a new FAA AI tool to help air traffic control that started deploying this week, was involved.

ASI, the company that makes the SMART system for the FAA, said that Friday's issues weren't "based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC."

Duffy also said SMART was not at fault.

Mullin said earlier Friday, when asked if the AI system might be related to the outage: "That's what we're looking at."

He also said that it had "no indication" the ground stop was related to Microsoft, which had faced massive issues across its services this week.

Meanwhile, the FAA had said the ground stop was due to "extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety."

Three hours after traffic was halted, more than 4,000 flights had been canceled or did not take off, according to data from aviation analytics firm Cirium.

By 10:30 p.m., that figure grew to nearly 9,500. As of early Saturday morning, that number remained the most up-to-date. That number includes flights scheduled to depart the US on Friday or Saturday.

Chicago O'Hare topped Cirium's list with 205 cancellations, followed by Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson — the world's busiest airport — with 195.

More than 100 flights were canceled at major airports in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, and Denver.

Homeland Security said FAA ground stop wasn't a safety issue

Mullin said the ground stop wasn't a safety issue. He called it a communications-related issue. He said he didn't want people to assume this is a safety threat to the American people or "another 9/11."

Still, many planes had to divert or turn around.

Among the flights affected was Delta Air Lines Flight 958, which was traveling from Los Angeles to New York's JFK. Almost four hours into its journey, at 4:11 p.m., the Boeing 767 turned around and diverted to Cincinnati.

Another Delta flight, from Atlanta to JFK, changed course over the Eastern Seaboard and diverted to Baltimore.

Pilots in the air have a system for these issues

Mark Stephens, a retired Delta Air Lines pilot, told Business Insider that pilots have a system for these situations to maintain safe distances from other aircraft and land within their limits.

Planes en route during a ground stop can still land, Stephens said, noting that they "continue via the flight plan, and then start using backup methods."

He said there are digital tools that can connect them with air-traffic control and their airline's dispatch to obtain routing or other information.

Stephens said that unless someone tells the pilot to divert, the plan is "stay the course and do what you're trained: aviation, navigate, communicate."

The last time a nationwide ground stop occurred was in January 2023, and it lasted only about 90 minutes. Before that, it was in 2001 on 9/11.

The sheer scale of the ground stop is likely to create a snowball effect into the weekend.

"Long delays will turn into a crew rest nightmare," Stephens said.

Saturday is "going to be a very difficult reset as pilots and flight attendants will be all over the country, and planes will be stuck in cities without crews," he continued, adding that "major hubs don't have space for all these planes."

Passengers are facing travel chaos

Some travelers were taking matters into their own hands.

Amtrak said on Friday evening that its website and app were generating error messages. "We're currently experiencing higher-than-normal call volumes due to ongoing airline issues," the train operator said in a post on X.

At airports around the country, passengers were facing crushing delays.

A passenger at the Springfield-Branson Airport in Missouri said he was told all flights were canceled for the rest of the day, and that he should rebook — but when he tried to do so, airline systems were overloaded, and he couldn't get through.

Airlines begin recovery, waive change fees

Late Friday, major US carriers said they were resuming operations after the FAA lifted the ground stop, but warned that delays and cancellations would continue as aircraft and crews were repositioned.

Delta said it was "safely resuming operations," but cautioned that it would take time to reset its network. Southwest said it would resume a limited number of flights after and focus on repositioning its planes.

United said it had resumed some flights Friday night, while JetBlue expected disruptions to extend into Saturday after canceling all of its remaining Friday flights, except Europe-bound flights from JFK and Boston.

American said it was prioritizing international flights and flights to non-hub cities Friday night to position planes and crews for a recovery on Saturday.

"For the remainder of the evening, we are prioritizing flights to non-hub cities, as well as international flying, to position aircraft and crew where they are needed to help restore our operation," the airline said in a statement to CBS News.

American, Delta, Southwest, and United issued travel waivers allowing eligible passengers to change or rebook flights under carrier-specific terms.

Noah Sheidlower and Alcynna Lloyd contributed to this report.

• A chronic illness forced me to leave my teaching job.
• It took years for me to earn my credentials, and allowing them to expire weighed heavily on me.
• Letting my license expire has been surprisingly freeing. Now I can fully focus on my next move.

I left the classroom a couple of years ago. I told myself it was for good, but my husband made me promise him that I was really done. In return, I asked him not to let me go back if I ever tried to again.

Deep down, I can still sense my love of teaching, and since my husband knows me well, these are promises I know we'll both keep.

I knew my professional teaching certificate was going to expire this summer, and I went back and forth about whether or not I should go to the trouble of renewing it. In an extreme act of setting boundaries, I decided to let it go — on purpose. I was worried I would regret it, but now I'm glad I let it expire.

I felt a huge sigh of relief when my teaching certificate was no longer active

I had no realistic intentions of returning to the classroom, but it was difficult to think about how much work I had put into obtaining my professional teaching certificate. But every time I considered going through the steps to keep my license up to date, it didn't make sense.

I have no intention of teaching again, so spending my time and money to keep my license felt like holding onto something that wasn't right for me anymore.

My push out of the classroom came unwillingly, as my health was deteriorating, making it increasingly difficult for me to do my job. I even took a few months off toward the end to focus on my health before returning to the classroom, but it ended up the same way. As soon as I went back to work, my symptoms flared back up, and I couldn't finish the school year again.

I had to accept that I couldn't physically do my job

Shortly after I left teaching for good, I finally got my endometriosis diagnosis. I had an answer as to why I had been getting increasingly sick over the last five years. Unfortunately, I didn't receive care before the disease changed my career route. The majority of my time now is spent managing my symptoms and doing my best to regain a lot of physical function after two major surgeries in the last two years.

I thought I was content with my decision, but then one of my friends mentioned she was taking a recertification course to meet her own career licensing requirements. I doubted my decision for a moment. I even consulted some old Reddit posts to see what other people in my position had done and if they regretted letting their own certificates expire. The advice seemed to be a mixed bag.

I had to remind myself why I was making this decision

I wanted that temptation removed. I needed to keep myself from moving backward so I could figure out what's next. In a very real way, I am still grieving my old self, before my endometriosis progressed. I miss being able to do something like teach all day, and every time I miss it, I have to deal with remembering why I had to give it up.

My son started middle school this year, and that has been particularly difficult since I had once planned to be a teacher at the same junior high. He made the basketball team, and at an away game I was surprised by how difficult it was to visit the school where I once taught. Going back to the scene of a position I once loved, where I got to help kids I really cared about, gave me delusions.

I started thinking about teaching down the road again, when my son gets older, or I get better. I had to stop myself, because I know by now it's wishful thinking. I have a health condition that isn't going away. I already know I can't teach anymore while having endometriosis. I tried, and it was nearly impossible for me.

By letting my credentials go, I finally feel free to plan my next chapter

By letting my teaching certificate go, I was able to make more room in my mind about what to do next. For instance, I know I'll be volunteering after school for my son's art club. I've also been thinking about how to help other teachers, such as creating helpful resources for students and advocating for better working conditions.

Finding ways to incorporate my teaching skills into my future work is giving me hope for what that might look like. And knowing that teaching, in the traditional sense, won't be a part of that gives me plenty of room to explore.

• Nvidia is on the hunt for a new CEO after Jensen Huang resigned.
• The board of directors appointed Nvidia's chief financial officer, Colette Kress, as interim CEO.
• Arm CEO Rene Haas, former Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Nvidia VP Ian Buck are among potential candidates.

The search for Nvidia's new CEO is officially underway.

The company's board of directors announced that CEO and founder Jensen Huang resigned "effective immediately" in a statement on Wednesday. The board tapped Colette Kress, executive vice president and chief financial officer, as interim CEO until a permanent successor is found.

Huang resigned three days after he admitted to having an affair, and Nvidia's board opened an investigation into whether he was the "target of a foreign intelligence effort."

As the fallout around Nvidia continues, analysts, investors, and prediction market bettors have begun to wonder who could helm the company next. Here's who they're pitching.

Rene Haas

The CEO of Arm Holdings, a semiconductor manufacturing company, is one name that's been bandied about. On Wednesday, The Financial Times reported that Nvidia has approached Rene Haas as it searches for a successor. Sources told the outlet that it's not guaranteed Haas will be offered the role or accept it.

Haas previously served as vice president and general manager of Nvidia's computing products business unit for 7 years.

Ian Buck

Reuters reported that analysts and investors view Ian Buck, Nvidia's vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing, as a possible candidate for the top job.

"The permanent job is a different story, though, because Nvidia's edge comes from its technology, and the board would likely want an engineer in the chair, Josh Gilbert, a lead analyst at eToro, told Reuters. "Someone like Ian Buck, who led the software platform that keeps developers tied to Nvidia's chips, is the sort of internal name you'd expect to come up."

Prediction market users are also banking on Buck. He's at the top of the list on both Kalshi and Polymarket.

Colette Kress

Reuters reported that analysts and investors also view interim CEO Colette Kress as someone who could do the job long-term. Armina Rosenberg, a cofounder at Minotaur Capital, which owns Nvidia stock, told Reuters that finding a new permanent CEO won't be quick.

"The more realistic route is an interim leader from the long-serving inner circle, possibly as a co-CEO structure: one leader to steady the business and the finances, such as Colette Kress, alongside a product and technology leader, such as Ian Buck," Rosenberg told the outlet.

Tim Cook

President Donald Trump also weighed in on the search for Nvidia's new CEO, recommending former Apple CEO Tim Cook. Cook stepped down as CEO in September, but remains executive chairman.

"NOW THAT Nvidia CEO JENSEN HUANG, who has done a fantastic job, has resigned, there is only one man to take his place - TIM COOK of Apple. A Legend replaces a Legend!" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Thursday.

Thomas Kurian

Dan Ives, a partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives & Co., had a few ideas of his own. During an interview with Fortune, Ives named Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian as a promising candidate.

Kurian joined Google in 2019 after working at Oracle and McKinsey.

Nikesh Arora

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora is getting swept up in the speculation, too. An Nvidia shareholder told The Economic Times that Arora is among his top picks to replace Huang. Ives also said Arora is on his list.

Johny Srouji

Johny Srouji, the senior vice president of hardware technology at Apple, is another name popping up in conversations. A person familiar with the matter told Semafor that Srouji is being considered for the CEO role.

• TLC's "Crown of Deceit: Inside the Miss Universe Scandal" docuseries premiered on Thursday.
• It looked back at a leaked video of former CEO Anne Jakrajutatip saying diverse contestants "can't win."
• Stephanie Sullivan, the first married mom to win Miss Indiana, said it sent her to a "dark place."

Miss Universe is back in the spotlight.

No, not a specific contestant, and no, not the competition taking place in Puerto Rico on November 24.

The Miss Universe Organization itself is under scrutiny again in the three-part TLC docuseries "Crown of Deceit: Inside the Miss Universe Scandal," which premiered on Thursday.

The series — featuring Business Insider's pageant reporter, Anneta Konstantinides — covered the controversies that have plagued Miss Universe in recent years, from leadership changes to rigging allegations.

It also revisited a leaked 2023 video of former Miss Universe CEO Anne Jakrajutatip saying that diverse contestants "can compete, but they can't win," and how her comments affected pageant queens like Stephanie Sullivan, who made history as the first married woman and mother to win Miss Indiana.

Jakrajutatip and representatives for Miss Universe did not respond to requests for comment.

The leaked video

In 2023 and 2024, Miss Universe eliminated some restrictions that had previously excluded women from its pageants, including Miss USA. Married women and mothers could compete for the first time in 2023. The next year, any woman over 18 was allowed to enter. Previously, only women between 18 and 28 were eligible.

The changes felt like a step in the right direction under then-CEO Jakrajutatip, who made history as the first woman to own Miss Universe after purchasing it in October 2022. She was replaced in October 2025 by Mario Búcaro, who had previously served as the organization's vice president for international relations, though he resigned as CEO in December 2025.

When Jakrajutatip stepped into the CEO role in 2022, she said she wanted to help the pageant "evolve."

"We seek not only to continue its legacy of providing a platform to passionate individuals from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and traditions, but also to evolve the brand for the next generation," she said in a statement.

Speaking at Miss Universe in January 2023, Jakrajutatip said that the pageant would be "run by women, owned by a trans woman, for all women around the world" moving forward.

Jakrajutatip's tune seemed to change in the leaked video, which showed an October 2023 meeting between her and other Miss Universe executives. In the video, which Business Insider obtained in 2024, Jakrajutatip said that diverse contestants "can compete, but they can't win," adding that it was a "communication strategy."

Jakrajutatip said on her Facebook page in February 2024 that she was referring to a Miss Universe reality show, not the pageant.

The leaked video "sent shockwaves throughout the pageant community," Konstantinides said in "Crown of Deceit."

"She tells her staff it's a communication strategy," Konstantinides added. "And now it just kind of feels like, is it a big sham?"

An interview with Stephanie Sullivan, the first married mother to win the Miss Indiana title, spotlighted how the video affected some pageant hopefuls at the time.

Sullivan did not respond to a request for comment.

Stephanie Sullivan speaks out

In the doc, Sullivan said she wanted to "make a difference" and "give people hope" by being crowned Miss Indiana USA 2024 as a then-33-year-old married woman and mother.

However, the leaked video, which she saw before competing in Miss USA 2024, changed her perspective.

"I realized this organization is not what I thought it was going to be," she said about Miss Universe.

Sullivan said the video made her question why she didn't place at Miss USA, particularly because winners from that pageant go on to compete at Miss Universe. No woman over 28 made it to the top 20, despite the age limit being lifted for the 2024 pageant.

"Did I not place at Miss USA because they knew that I had no chance?" Sullivan said. "It was like a punch to my gut because you made us think that we could. I just went to a very dark place after that."

"It broke me," Sullivan added before breaking down in tears.

She also said that she felt like she had "let everybody down" when she didn't win, especially given how expensive it was to compete. She estimated she spent close to $100,000 to reach the Miss USA stage, totaling up everything from her state competition expenses to Miss USA travel.

"The fact of the matter is that we were all robbed," Sullivan said, adding that the Miss Universe Organization "really did hurt a lot of people."

Since Sullivan competed — and Thom Brodeur took over as Miss USA CEO in 2025 — more older contestants, married women, and mothers have gone further in the competition.

In 2025, the top 20 at Miss USA included married women and mothers over the age of 28 for the first time. This year, a mother finally took the Miss USA crown. Justus Kelley, a foster mom of two, will represent the US at Miss Universe on November 24.

Miss Universe has also seen more older women and women with children compete, though none have won the crown yet. In 2024, Miss Malta Beatrice Njoya became the oldest woman to compete in the pageant at 40, and Miss Bonaire Nicole Peiliker-Visser topped that in 2025 by competing at 42.

Kelley won't be the only mother competing at Miss Universe in 2026. Miss Mayotte Maeva Toumbou Dani and Miss Guinea Justine Kamara are mothers as well, according to a video posted by Miss USA.

The end of the regular season is in sight, and teams are duking it out for their shot at the College Football Playoff. We'll show you everything you need to know about how to watch USC vs. Indiana live streams, no matter where you are in the world.

If you don't feel like scrolling any further, we've got you covered. You can live stream USC vs. Indiana through a Paramount Plus Premium subscription in the US, and a DAZN NCAA College Sports subscription in the UK and other international markets. Fans can access their usual streaming options from anywhere with a VPN, like NordVPN.

What channel is the USC vs. Indiana game on?

USC vs. Indiana will air on CBS in the United States. The game is scheduled to kick off on Saturday at 3:30 p.m. ET, but the network's college football coverage kicks off at 2:30 p.m.

How to watch USC vs. Indiana in the US

There are a few easy ways to live stream CBS in the US, the most direct of which is Paramount Plus. You'll need the Paramount Plus Premium tier to unlock CBS live streaming. At $14 a month, Premium also includes ad-free on-demand streaming and Showtime content.

Right now, Paramount Plus is offering a special promo code for annual plans. Using the coupon SAVEANNUAL50, you can get 50% off annual subscriptions. That means that you can lock in a full year of Paramount Plus Premium for just $70, instead of the usual $140.

If you'd prefer a streaming service with a free trial or a platform that carries other college football-friendly channels beyond just CBS, then a live TV streaming package is the way to go.

YouTube TV is one of the most popular options on the market. The YouTube TV Main plan carries 100+ channels (including CBS) for $83 a month. However, a limited-time deal will give new users $15 a month off their first five months of service after a free trial.

Fubo is another one of the best live TV streaming services we've tested. Fubo Pro carries CBS and 200+ channels for $89 a month, but first-time customers can get $25 off their first month after a free trial.

How to watch USC vs. Indiana in the UK and other countries

In the UK and other international markets, DAZN live streams loads of college football games every week. Not every game is guaranteed coverage, so it's always a good idea to double-check that the game you want to watch is available. DAZN NCAA College Sports subscription prices vary from region to region.

How to watch USC vs. Indiana from anywhere

If you're a football fan traveling away from home, you can keep up with your usual streaming options with the help of a VPN, or virtual private network. VPNs are cybersecurity tools that let people change their virtual locations. This way, their favorite websites and apps work from anywhere, just like they would back home, helping cut down on streaming interruptions. The services we've highlighted require country-specific payment methods, so this option will work best for those who are just traveling away from home.

NordVPN is our top recommendation when it comes to the best VPNs. It's fast, user-friendly, and has a 30-day money-back guarantee if you find that it's not what you're looking for. You can learn more in our NordVPN review.

• See also: How to watch college football | Best sports streaming services

How are the teams doing so far this season?

The No. 9 Indiana Hoosiers, the reigning national champions, are 8-1 overall and ranked second in the Big Ten, trailing UCLA. The No. 18 USC Trojans are 7-2 and ranked seventh in the Big Ten.

Who is favored to win today's game?

Indiana is the 8.5-point favorite to win today's game. According to DraftKings (at the time of writing), Indiana is -340 on the moneyline, while USC is +270.

Note: The use of VPNs is illegal in certain countries, and using VPNs to access region-locked streaming content might constitute a breach of the terms of use for certain services. Business Insider does not endorse or condone the illegal use of VPNs.

• I was at 35,000 feet when my captain said an air traffic control issue grounded flights.
• Several passengers and I were worried it was related to cybersecurity or AI.
• We landed in Miami but couldn't deplane for hours, and I ended up paying $600 for a hotel room.

I spend a huge portion of my life on airplanes as a frequent traveler and journalist, so I'm used to the usual delays, missed connections, and last-minute flight changes that come with commercial air travel.

But I have never experienced anything like the crippling air traffic control outage on Friday, November 13, that displaced thousands of passengers and crews and canceled over 12,500 flights.

I had been at cruising altitude, flying back from a vacation in the Caribbean island of Curaçao toward my home in Salt Lake City, when the Federal Aviation Administration halted departing flights across the entire US.

Before Friday, the FAA had only ordered a nationwide ground stop twice in modern history: once in January 2023, following a failure of a key pilot-alert system, and after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Given the rare track record, I wasn't thrilled to find myself midair when I heard the news.

What should have been a quick two-hour layover in Miami unraveled into a chaotic overnight delay, with hours spent on a gridlocked tarmac as passengers raced for vanishing hotel rooms and flight inventory.

We learned about the nationwide shutdown at 35,000 feet

Before boarding in Curaçao, my flight had already been delayed by about 30 minutes, and I jokingly texted a friend that it better not be delayed any further because I refused to spend the night in Miami.

I should have knocked on wood, because about 40 minutes out from landing, the cabin speakers crackled to life.

The captain said he was sure some of us had WiFi and had seen messages about a nationwide ground stop, then confirmed it was true.

Hushed conversations throughout the cabin ensued, and I looked to my neighbor to check the news since I didn't have WiFi myself. This was the first time in a long time I was nervous on a plane.

I read that officials said a telecommunications issue was affecting Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the regional facilities responsible for directing and guiding aircraft at higher altitudes between airports.

I also read that officials did not believe the disruption was the result of AI or a cyberattack — something that I'd been wondering about. For some reason, that scared me even more. What was it, then?

My next thought: If air traffic control has a communications failure, how are we going to land?

I was relieved when the captain informed us that planes already in the sky, including mine, were cleared to land at their destinations, and that the order had frozen departures.

Although I didn't know it at the time, officials later said that pilots, air traffic controllers, and dispatchers have various backup methods and digital tools for communication, and pilots are trained to navigate and land without comms.

Still, the timing of the halt was unnerving, coming after the widespread Microsoft cloud disruptions the day before and the National Weather Service data hiccups earlier Friday.

Landing in Miami was only the beginning of the chaos

When our wheels finally touched down at Miami International Airport, I checked my phone and saw that the captain had kept us informed to the best of his knowledge; no further news had been released, but at least we had been able to land.

But now we were stuck on the plane. Because inbound flights were still arriving while outbound planes sat at their gates, the airport's ramp space was gridlocked.

With nowhere to park and unload passengers, our plane sat idling on the tarmac for the next two hours.

Around 7:30 p.m., about an hour after landing, passengers around me began murmuring that rebooking options were finally appearing in the American Airlines app.

When I refreshed my screen, every option required flying out the following evening on grueling 12- to 14-hour itineraries with multiple layovers.

Unwilling to spend a half-day hopping around the US from Florida to Utah, I accepted that I would spend the full weekend in Miami. But before I booked something for Sunday or Monday, I refreshed the list one more time.

Buried at the very bottom was a single direct flight departing at 7:45 p.m. on Saturday night. I booked it immediately, snagging one of the final three open seats — and crossed my fingers that the snowball effect would slow by then and my flight would actually take off.

Hotel rooms disappeared almost as quickly as flights were canceled

Still trapped on the tarmac, another problem emerged: finding a place to sleep.

Around me, passengers were frantically refreshing booking apps as airport hotels sold out in real time. I barely managed to book a room at the Hyde Hotel in Midtown Miami, about 15 minutes away.

It wasn't cheap — $621 for the night, to be exact.

The airline wasn't required to help me out in the uncontrollable flight disruption, and I'm not sure my travel insurance will reimburse me, so I've accepted I may eat that money.

When I finally deplaned around 8 p.m., cleared customs, and arrived at the lobby, the front desk agent told me the hotel had surged from about 40% full at 5 p.m. local time to sold out by 9 p.m. — filled to capacity by displaced flyers in under four hours.

Even in a major hospitality hub like Miami, inventory evaporates quickly when thousands of stranded travelers are competing for the same beds. Despite the pain in my wallet, knowing I wasn't spending the night on an airport terminal floor felt like I had won the lottery.

I was reminded that no matter how much I prepare, I'm at the whim of the air system

Once I reached my hotel, I refreshed my news app to see that the FAA had lifted the nationwide ground stop, allowing departures to slowly resume, but the effects had already disrupted the whole country.

Air travel is notorious for its snowball effect: a single thunderstorm in Dallas or Atlanta can trigger cascading delays thousands of miles away as planes and crews get displaced. A simultaneous shutdown of the entire US airspace system was a whole other beast.

A friend scheduled to fly to Las Vegas had his trip canceled before he had even left for the airport. But another friend flying from Panama to Denver ended up stranded in Houston — her second overnight stall in 48 hours after weather disruptions the day before.

For someone who flies regularly, the unexpected chaos was a reality check. I can build buffer time into my schedule, book early-morning departures and pack carry-on only, but none of that will protect me when a backbone of the national airspace system goes offline.

Lying in my hotel room in Miami, I'll admit I felt a flicker of hesitation about stepping back onto a plane Saturday evening. The thought of pilots losing clear communication with the ground is terrifying.

But that fear is merely one of the trade-offs we accept every time we board a flight to see the world — and I know the pilots are highly trained to deal with emergencies like lost comms.

• While testing places to retire, I ruled out Malta but wanted to try its sister island, Gozo.
• I love Gozo's sunshine, weather, and vibes, but I don't think I could thrive there long-term.
• The prevalence of certain bugs, lack of an international airport, and slow pace aren't ideal for me.

Although I'm happy living in Ireland, I sometimes long for warmer weather and a slower pace of life.

So when I travel, I'm always wondering if my destination could become more than a vacation spot — maybe a place to retire to someday.

In 2023, I spent a month seeing if Malta could be a potential forever home. Unfortunately, it wasn't a match for me, but it had so much going for it that I decided to try its charming sister island, Gozo.

Gozo lies a few miles northwest of Malta and belongs to the same archipelago. It's just 26 square miles (roughly the size of Manhattan) and home to around 40,000 people.

I first visited Gozo in 2012 and have returned a handful of times since then. On my most recent trip this September, I stayed in a gorgeous little villa in Xagħra, a small, historic town with a population of about 5,400.

As much as I adore the Maltese island, my most recent trip there made me realize it might not be the perfect spot for me to retire.

Gozo has great Mediterranean vibes and feels ideal for slow exploring

Gozo seemed to have many of the same draws as Malta, but with slightly fewer crowds and a slower pace of life.

For one, English is widely spoken in both Malta and Gozo, which I appreciate. Gozo has lovely weather with about 300 days of sunshine a year and mostly mild temperatures.

The island really does feel Mediterranean, with limestone buildings, beautiful churches, and endless sea views.

It had a nice balance of rural beauty and bustling shops and eateries. People were friendly, the villages I've explored so far have all felt safe, and life seemed to move at an unhurried pace. The Visit Gozo website describes the island as "developed just enough but not too much," which I think defines its charm.

There are many things to see and do in Gozo, but the island didn't feel super aimed at tourists with a massive list of must-see attractions.

Gozo has world-class diving, swimming at Ramla Bay, and leisurely boat rides along the coastline. There's also the ancient Ġgantija Temples and the Rotunda Church in Xewkija.

I loved exploring the Citadel in Victoria, and I spent happy days taking lovely long lunches, some with waterfront views.

While staying in my small villa in Xagħra, there was something idyllic about having so many restaurants and shops within walking distance and taking a five-minute stroll into the village square for groceries or dinner.

I was especially impressed by the small island's impressive dining scene, which consists of well over 100 restaurants and dozens of snack bars and coffee shops.

I enjoyed alfresco dining, local wine and seafood, Gozitan cheese, Maltese specialties like rabbit, and a superb range of delicious pasta dishes.

On this past trip, I also attended the annual Fontana Wine Festival, where I got real community vibes. There were a handful of local wineries, live music, and a food truck. There were no pulsing crowds, no huge lines, and plenty of room to wander.

It felt intimate and local rather than a huge event aimed at tourists.

Sadly, I found there were some downsides …

Despite being a small island, it didn't feel as easy to get around Gozo as I expected.

There aren't sidewalks everywhere, so walking between villages isn't always possible. There are buses, but I found they didn't run very frequently — sometimes just once an hour in each direction. (Thankfully, ride-hailing services such as Bolt and Uber were relatively affordable.)

Then there were the bugs. Mosquitoes are to be expected in the Mediterranean, but the Asian tiger mosquito is especially aggressive and bites during the daytime as well as around dawn and dusk.

They're very present in the Maltese islands, and insect repellent only went so far. I'd sometimes find five new bites a day.

I also found the relentless presence of Oriental hornets, a large native species that becomes particularly active in late summer and early autumn, to be off-putting. Their stings are notoriously painful.

When looking closer at long-term considerations, I also didn't love that Gozo doesn't have its own airport.

The nearest international airport is in Valletta, Malta's capital, and can be reached by a 45-minute ferry that runs several times a day. However, this meant each time I wanted to fly, I'd need to take a taxi to a ferry terminal, then a ferry, then another taxi to the airport.

As someone who loves to travel and would need to fly home to visit family, I could see that becoming a frustrating hurdle and grind over time.

In addition, I enjoyed the two commercial centers and dozens of shops along the main streets in Gozo's capital, Victoria. They sold just about all of the basics and essentials I could want, plus some lovely local handmade jewelry and ceramics.

However, if I were to live here for an extended period, I think I'd start to miss having access to more big-name retailers, high-end brands, and even luxury department stores, like Brown Thomas in Dublin.

Gozo may not be a perfect retirement spot for me, but I can see why it may be for others

I can genuinely understand why people would want to retire in Gozo. It's gorgeous, and I could picture having a wonderful life there — however, it would come with trade-offs.

Although I sometimes fantasize about a slower-paced life, this trip also made me realize it might not suit me in reality. I worry the peace and quiet that makes it a perfect holiday destination would end up feeling limiting over time.

I personally need a bit more buzz and glamour day-to-day — lively bars, glitzy restaurants, and high-end shopping. Although Gozo has outstanding food, too, I love Dublin's ever-evolving dining scene and its vibrant bars.

With all that in mind, I think I need to look into a larger European city next, definitely one with its own international airport.

I'd definitely return to Gozo for vacation, but not for forever. In the meantime, the search for my retirement location continues …

• I grew up as the youngest of five kids, and our parents relied on strict routines to manage us all.
• We each had assigned days for chores, cooking, walking the dog, and even sitting in the front seat.
• I used to resent all the rules, but now I appreciate the teamwork and patience they taught me.

The ringing bell had the same effect as a break horn blowing in an industrial factory. Doors would slowly open along the corridor, and disheveled bodies stumbled out. At our house, 6:30 p.m. was dinner time. I can't remember when the bell was introduced, but it proved the most effective way to call five young teenagers down to the kitchen to eat.

Despite regularly being called the Brady Bunch when out in public (particularly when in a line on moving escalators), five kids is actually quite a convenient number. Five weekdays were perfect for each person to have an allocated day for duties: to cook, to walk the dog, even to sit in the front seat of the car (an honor every teenager in the early 00s fought for).

I'm the youngest, and so my day was Friday, which was a clear injustice because I was convinced I had to wait longer than everyone else.

We all had a job to do

Five children and two adults meant eating dinner was "feeding time at the zoo," according to my dad. Yes, there was a one-serving-only policy in place, and messy plates were inevitable, but once we finished eating, we became a well-oiled machine. Someone collected the dirty dishes, someone washed up, someone dried, someone put items away, and someone cleaned the table.

I remember an adult family friend joining us for dinner one evening, their eyes widening as we all stood in sync to start our jobs, rolled up our sleeves, and discussed the unfair compensation.

We'd mumble that one day we'd form a union.

Birthdays had a similar efficiency. In the morning, the person celebrating would have breakfast, then wait patiently in the lounge while we all mysteriously disappeared upstairs. In hushed tones, resentful about the gifts we weren't getting, a parent would hand each of us a present to carry. We'd then queue up in age order and slowly descend the stairs singing happy birthday in different pitches, the person in the lounge overacting their surprise as we finally came into view.

Christmas was another meticulous affair. We'd watch as a parent burrowed through piles of presents, handing each of us one and instructing us not to open it until everyone had theirs. We'd then unwrap our assigned gifts one by one in front of the family, acknowledging who they were from and muttering well-rehearsed "thank yous". The rounds were strategically ordered so the "main" gift would be handed over last, and so, throughout the event, we kids would keep one eye on the remaining presents, processing by elimination to see if what was left could be what we'd asked for.

There were processes and workflows

We were a family, but we were also an organization. The sheer mass of us turned basic processes into workflows. If I'd been born today, I think my parents may have developed data-tracking tools and KPIs to report to board members (my grandparents) to optimize family dynamics and returns.

My dad once told me a story about when he took us five children for a dog walk with his friend. Two of us were in the stroller, one was walking beside him, and each adult had a child strapped to their front. A golden retriever and cocker spaniel floated through the crowd of bodies. Two people passed them in the street and my dad overheard one whisper to the other "They even had dogs".

I loved the comedy our family attracted; it was like starring in a sitcom. Things that seemed mundanely routine to us always amused outsiders. The ordeal of buying clothes got particular interest. We'd be taken into town, given a budget, a time limit, and pen and paper, and we'd be set free to go to the shops. When we found an item we liked, we'd have to write down what it was and how much it cost. When our time was up, we'd rush back to the meeting spot and have to present our cases to the bank of Dad.

Having such a big family felt like being both anonymous and constantly noticed. Our internal structures made the busyness of life smoother, if you complied with them. Being out in public felt exposing: we suddenly weren't a well-oiled machine but a large, disruptive force interrupting paths and restaurants. Our chaos was more real when we were off shift in the real world.

It took a while to appreciate the ways our big family moved — I assumed other families were more fun and had more space. But as an adult, I miss the proximity those systems gave us. We were colleagues, teammates, and citizens of a (not-so-little) island nation, constantly striving for a decent GDP and a sense of peace.

I definitely had my protests and times of exile, but ultimately, I learned to share; I developed an idea of fairness; I had to be patient; and I got really good at drying the china.

• A riverboat was struck by a tanker in New Orleans on Friday, causing the ship to tip over and sink.
• Tamara Carrasco said the collision knocked her to the floor and water gushed into the ship.
• "What was going through my mind was: we're going to die," she said.

Tamara Carrasco was in the dining room of the American Heritage cruise ship, docked in the Port of New Orleans, when she spotted a tanker heading straight toward them.

Carrasco, a retired elementary school teacher from Atlanta, was seated at a table by the windows so she could look out at the Mississippi River. She saw the tanker crossing under the bridge nearby and noticed it was lowering its anchor.

"I thought, 'Why would they be anchoring here?'" she said. Her friend turned to her: "It's not stopping. It's going to hit us."

Carrasco was skeptical, until she saw the crew running across the tanker's deck "like ants."

"What was going through my mind was: We're going to die," she said.

The tanker, Atlantic Asphalt, crashed directly into the American Cruise Lines riverboat on Friday, causing the ship to topple over and sink as passengers rushed to evacuate. Several people ended up in the river and had to be pulled out by first responders. Of the nearly 200 people on board, 32 were transported to hospitals. None were critically injured, officials said.

"We have zero people unaccounted for, which truly is a miracle on the Mississippi," New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno said at a press conference.

Carrasco, 65, said when the tanker approached the riverboat, she ran to the opposite end to get as far away from the glass windows as possible. She found a nook on the other end of the ship where she braced herself.

"It hit so hard I flew to the ground," she said.

After the collision, she ran to the stairwell in the middle of the boat and could see into the dining room. The tanker, she said, had broken through the glass windows and water was pouring in.

"Seen the movie 'Titanic'? There was a big gash and water is flying in, and I said, 'Oh, this is going down,'" she said.

She ran up to the next floor and exited the cruise ship usinga gangplank. The crowd gathering on dry land was in shock. Carrasco said it was like after 9/11.

"We're all just kind of wandering in a daze," she said.

They were checked for injuries. Carrasco said she has back issues and her friend has neck issues, so they both wanted to get checked out to be safe.

She was in the waiting area in the emergency room at University Medical Center in New Orleans, fielding calls from friends and family, with a blanket wrapped around her. It was "patriotic day" on the boat, so she was wearing a red, white, and navy blue Ralph Lauren shirt.

"This is the most memorable Friday the 13th I've ever had," she told her older sister over the phone.

This story relies on reporting from the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which harnesses the resources of the company's newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces, and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms.

• A version of this story originally appeared in the AI Insider newsletter.
• Sign up for Business Insider's weekly AI Insider newsletter here.

Nine days before Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO, I sat near the front row at a San Francisco conference and watched him discuss the future of AI.

Two things struck me that day. Both seem more significant now.

First, Huang wasn't wearing his famous black leather jacket. Instead, as you can see in the photo I took, he wore a dark fabric zip-up. At the time, I thought it was funny. His jacket had become such a recognizable part of his image that seeing him without it was a bit jarring.

Now, with revelations about his extramarital affairs and allegations involving a possible Chinese spy, I wonder whether the wardrobe change meant something. The initial allegations were already public by November 3.

Of course, that's hindsight talking. Maybe a jacket is just a jacket.

The second thing was more consequential.

Near the end of the conversation, Fireworks AI CEO Lin Qiao asked Huang about his unusual management style. He had 60 executives reporting directly to him.

Huang explained that he'd designed this structure more than 30 years ago, when personal computers and email were transforming business. Rather than a traditional hierarchy, he wanted information flowing freely among executives empowered to make decisions.

Then came the obvious question: What should a company's leadership structure look like in the AI age?

"I don't know the answer to that," Huang replied.

At the time, I thought that was a bit odd. Nvidia is leading the AI revolution and Jensen leads Nvidia. Wouldn't he be thinking of how best to run this company in the future?

Today, that exchange seems especially relevant.

With Huang gone, Nvidia faces an extraordinary succession challenge. Sixty direct reports may have worked brilliantly under its founder. But it also means there isn't an obvious deputy to take the reins.

If he'd had two or three direct reports, those people would have had more experience with more responsibility. But 60 direct reports, by definition, means that each one of those execs only had a small piece of Nvidia to oversee.

Does this mean Nvidia is doomed? I'm not sure. The way Jensen described Nvidia's structure back on Nov. 3 provides some hope.

Huang said he gave executives considerable freedom to make decisions and work together, rather than taking orders from the top. Instead of a rigid management hierarchy, Nvidia organized itself around projects, with teams forming and changing as needed.

"Irrespective of whatever internal or external threats and opportunities, the company will naturally adapt itself, it should adapt itself to new opportunities," he said. "That was the organization I created."

The talk ended on a poignant note. Again, with hindsight, I can't help thinking he knew something was coming.

"I'm super proud of you," he told Fireworks' Qiao. "Don't forget us little people someday."

Sign up for the AI Insider newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com

• My wife and I had dreamed of raising our two kids abroad after learning about worldschooling.
• When our daughter's school introduced active shooter drills in kindergarten, we decided to leave.
• We moved to Malta, where our kids feel safe and experience new cultures and history every day.

In the fall of 2024, our local school district in Delaware moved the mandatory ALICE drills to start in kindergarten, my daughter's year at the time. These are intense quarterly drills where the school simulates a shooting, training children to hide in case of an active shooting.

My wife and I had talked about world schooling before this, and had a lot of discussions about what would work for our family. We decided it was time for our family to leave.

We moved to Malta

In April, 2025, following four months of intense paperwork, my son and I arrived in Malta as part of the digital nomad approval process. We had never set foot on the islands and honestly knew very little about the country we'd chosen based on internet research. We were there to secure a rental and finalize the paperwork. And two months later, my full family of four had sold nearly every possession, including our house and car. We boarded a plane, with just suitcases in hand.

Life in Malta is very different. And by extension, parenting here is different too. Malta is a tiny archipelago between Sicily and Tunisia. The bulk of the population, including us, lives on the island of Malta, which is a densely populated stretch that feels like a city-state. The country's population is only a bit over 500,000, but 5 million tourists pass through annually, mostly in the summer.

To some, Malta is a cruise stop. To others, a party destination. It is a country that is remarkably young: having just celebrated its 50^th anniversary of independence from Britain. And it is a land that is deeply, deeply old. The second-oldest human freestanding structures are Neolithic temples here on the island. History and modernity combine in every direction.

Parenting in Malta feels different

As a parent, the most obvious difference comes in a feeling of safety. I never worry when my kids are at school. Everywhere we've been on the island, whether at a local festa, a beach, or a historic site, we've found many other children, and my kids have made many friends.

And for a small island, there's a remarkable amount to do. Every week seems to host another unique event. There is a wonderful children's museum, many playgrounds, and of course the sea is everywhere. The Mediterranean itself is not the same ocean we knew in the mid-Atlantic. It is stunningly teal and nearly always warm to swim in.

Parenting in a new continent meant adapting on the go to an entirely new way of life. Everything's close, but traffic is heavy. We lived car-free entirely for seven months. We quickly adapted to no dryer for our clothes (not too bad with nearly nonstop sun) and recognized some things we took for granted in the US simply don't exist here (Amazon deliveries and Pumpkin Spice Lattes). Life is slower, with a school year that only starts in October, and summer work is meant to be half-serious, half at the beach.

We have explored and learned so much

On the way back from a prehistoric cave (Ghar Dhalam) filled with pigmy hippo bones, my son turned to me and said: "Dad, I feel so grateful to see the world as we do."

We have taken family trips to Neolithic temples, walked the kids through the gilded halls of the Baroque masterpiece St John's Co-Cathedral, where 450 of the Knights of Malta lay entombed, and love the children's museum Esplora, which is built in what used to be a hospital during the Knights' Era and WW2. There are shrapnel holes from the war, and it overlooks the walls of Valletta, which we also overlook from our house.

We can walk to Paceville, the party area that feels like mini-Manhattan. We can walk to the sea. And of course, when the kids are good, fresh gelato arrives by delivery. Not ice cream, mind you.

The kids don't always appreciate it. We returned from the Alps with the kids "bored of mountains" and not caring about returning to the ocean they "always see". But we appreciate that this is the life they live.

Malta is a different world from the one we left. I don't know how long we'll be here, or what other parts of the world await us on our adventure, but I am grateful to be here now, parenting the kids in a way I never imagined.

• The Pentagon research arm DARPA tested autonomous ground robots in GPS-denied environments.
• The robots mapped out the area and located enemy targets.
• Once the targets were identified, the human operator overseeing the process decided next steps.

The Pentagon's research arm tested how ground drones could be sent out in groups to look for and hunt down targets while keeping a human operator in the loop to make decisions.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, program examined how uncrewed ground vehicles, or UGVs, could quickly drive, map out terrain, and gather information on their own in contested environments. Lessons will inform ongoing developments in uncrewed technologies across the US military, officials said.

Last month, DARPA experimented with four autonomous UGVs at an exercise at Fort Knox, Kentucky, as part of its Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency, or RACER, program. During the exercise, the ground robots conducted surveillance of the surrounding area, independently searching for enemy forces for an operator located away from the action.

Jason Gregory, technical advisor at DARPA, told Business Insider that "we're moving sensors and effectors forward to the tactical edge while keeping the operator in safety out of harm's way," but humans still "maintained control and custody and situational awareness at all times."

Once launched, the UGVs went off on their missions. Gregory said they could work together or independently depending on the scenario. Meanwhile, the human operator supervised the UGVs, assigned them tasks, checked their findings, and then decided how best to engage enemy targets.

At the Fort Knox demonstration, the operator used satellite imagery to task the robots. One UGV stopped in place once it spotted a potential target — a closed box holding a drone inside — and then the human operator decided to launch a simulated rocket at the target.

An important part of the recent RACER robotic testing program was ensuring that the UGVs could perform their tasks without GPS. Instead, the robots built the map as they moved. The US military has said it needs to be prepared to fight through contested or denied environments where GPS isn't readily available, and is looking into alternative precision navigation and timing solutions, as well as more traditional tactics.

The military is also considering other possible disruptions, such as terrain interference or loss of signal.

"We developed this new software so that ground vehicles could use only their onboard sensors to make decisions to move as fast as possible," Gregory said. The software was tested on four-wheel, all-terrain UGVs as well as tracked UGVs to ensure it could be deployed on different hardware.

While teams worked to build systems using commercial technologies, the RACER program also involved five years of research to better understand the scientific and technical challenges of autonomy, artificial intelligence algorithms, and ground mobility.

DARPA's work also relied on observations from Russia's war in Ukraine on the distinct role of ground robots and how operators employ them in different situations.

Autonomous UGVs face distinct challenges depending on the terrain, environment, and climate. In the desert, for example, robots might need to navigate sand, rocks, and other obstacles, while extreme heat might strain the batteries and communications systems. Swamplands, forests, muddy fields, and snow can also make operations more difficult, requiring robots to be able to adapt to very different conditions.

RACER's demonstration offers lessons for the broader US military. While some are specific to autonomous ground robots, others — including operating without GPS, teaming humans with machines, and maintaining human oversight in robotic operations — could apply to uncrewed systems across the military. It's also sharing the lessons with industry.

• I live in Fort Collins, Colorado, a city often considered one of the best places to live in the US.
• Surprisingly, Fort Collins doesn't attract as many visitors each year as other places in Colorado.
• I always recommend the city's scenic outdoor spots, community events, and the historic Old Town.

I've lived in Fort Collins, Colorado, for the last four years, and it doesn't surprise me that this city is regularly included on lists of the best places to live in the United States.

What does surprise me is that it gets roughly a million visitors each year, which is far fewer than other destinations in Colorado.

The city has the tight-knit community of a small town but many of the amenities typically found in a larger city. Just 65 miles north of Denver, it has a population of roughly 170,000 people and is about an hour away from Rocky Mountain National Park.

With friendly people, a historic downtown, and nature all around, there's always something to see or do here.

Here's why I think Fort Collins is a must-see city that deserves more attention.

There's easy access to nature throughout the city.

Fort Collins is famous for its easy access to nature.

One of my favorite scenic spots is Horsetooth Reservoir, which is just west of the city and tucked against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

I've hiked in the surrounding Horsetooth Mountain Open Space and Lory State Park year-round, but I especially love paddling around the reservoir's hill-framed inlets in the summer.

Fort Collins is also home to Cache la Poudre, Colorado's only nationally designated "Wild and Scenic" River protected by the US Forest Service.

Whenever I have visitors, I love driving them up the winding Poudre Canyon for beautiful views of the river, and stopping to hike or picnic along the way.

The area is also a popular destination for fishing and whitewater rafting.

Community events are a highlight.

There's always something interesting going on in Fort Collins, from concerts and happy hours to Colorado State University football games.

Throughout the summer, I head to the weekly City Park Food Truck Rally to sample a wide variety of cuisines and listen to live music, all in a picturesque neighborhood park.

Another annual highlight is Tour de Fat, a bicycle parade each August where riders don costumes and pedal to New Belgium brewery for drinks, food, and live music.

Later in the year, I love attending the Downtown Holiday Lighting Ceremony, when the city's Old Town is illuminated with thousands of LED lights.

Old Town Fort Collins is full of local gems.

Old Town, a historic part of the city, is located in the heart of Downtown Fort Collins and features a variety of restaurants, shops, and bars.

I never get tired of strolling around this area, which is said to be one of the places that inspired Disneyland's Main Street USA.

That small-town charm is what makes Old Town feel especially memorable. Not only is it home to small businesses, cafés, independent bookstores, and quirky thrift shops, but it also hosts a year-round ghost tour that highlights local history and legends.

There are also lots of interesting dining options, from American comfort food at The Regional to the best housemade gluten-free pasta I've had outside Italy at Rare Italian.

In the warmer months, I love going to The Exchange, an open-air food court and gathering space featuring restaurants, bars, an ice-cream stand, and an indoor mini-golf course.

On the weekends, I'll meet up with friends at classy speakeasies like Ace Gillette or Social, both located in Old Town. We also usually stop by my all-time favorite dive bar, Trailhead Tavern, for pickle shots.

This city is known as the craft-beer capital of Colorado.

If you love beer, Fort Collins is the place to be, since it's known as the craft-beer capital of Colorado.

We have big-name breweries like New Belgium and Odell Brewing Company, as well as many smaller, locally owned alternatives with dog-friendly patios and regular community events.

To me, there's nothing better than spending a summer evening with friends in the beer garden of Stodgy Brewing Company, located in a building that looks straight out of a Western movie. I also love that many breweries offer gluten-free and non-alcoholic options.

Whether they're beer drinkers or not, I think visitors can find plenty to love about Fort Collins. No matter the time of year, I always recommend checking it out and discovering why I think it's Colorado's best-kept secret.

• Ukraine's naval drones have been hammering Russian warships.
• Now, the drones, including UFORCE's Magura, are threatening Russian ground targets.
• The naval drones "pose a threat to the Russian occupiers on land as well," a commander said.

Ukrainian naval drones that have hammered Russia's navy are now coming for Russian targets on land.

Magura drones made by Ukrainian-founded defense company UFORCE played an important role in Ukraine becoming a formidable force at sea even without a conventional fleet of warships.

Naval drones have damaged and destroyed numerous Russian vessels, pushing Moscow to move much of its Black Sea Fleet away from occupied Crimea.

Ukraine's Main Intelligence Directorate, the GUR, revealed in August that it had used Maguras as FPV drone carriers to strike Russian targets on land, leveraging a control vehicle equipped with the "Podlyot" radar complex, which detects aircraft, missiles, and drones, and a Parol-4 IFF interrogator, used to distinguish between friendly and hostile aircraft.

The Maguras "pose a threat to the Russian occupiers on land as well," the commander of the GUR's "Group 13" said. "This marks a fundamental shift in the nature of the conflict," said the commander, who uses the call sign "Thirteen."

Oleg Rogynskyy, the founder and CEO of UFORCE, told Business Insider that he couldn't comment on the operational specifics, but he said that "it's not hard to imagine" a Magura launching something like the company's heavy Nemesis drone, which could then fly inland to target Russian air defense systems.

The Russian air defense systems, he said, were built to take out missiles, not incoming heavy bomber drones flying low at night.

In other August wins, the GUR said that drones launched from Maguras destroyed a Russian Pantsir-S1 air defense system, and then later that month, they hit two S-400 launchers and a ground-based antenna used to control Orion drones. A month earlier, a naval drone used by the 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade dropped a ground robot off on the Kinburn Spit for an unusual combat mission.

And Ukraine is training for more operations like these. Rogynskyy said that Maguras were used in a September exercise to launch drones, drop off amphibious ground drones for a beach assault, and deliver supplies. He said he expects to see more creative uses as time goes on.

In March, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spotlighted the growing capabilities of Ukraine's naval drones in an address to the UK Parliament.

"We started with simple kamikaze sea drones. Then we built drones with turrets that can shoot down helicopters," he said. "Now we have drones that can shoot down Russian fighter jets from the sea. We have developed boats that carry other drones. We also have boats that strike targets on land from the sea."

The GUR said in October that after destroying ships in Russia's Black Sea Fleet, "the Magura drone was significantly improved." It explained that now "it is a multifunctional platform capable not only of sinking surface objects, but also of carrying missile weapons, as well as aerial drones for striking ground targets."

Before they became drone carriers, Magura drones were armed with alternative weaponry for engaging non-naval targets. In 2024, for instance, one shot down a helicopter with a missile. Last year, the GUR said that Maguras had been used to shoot down Russian fighter jets.

Rogynskyy said some of these uses were a surprise to the company. "I didn't expect it. It's the ingenuity of Ukrainian engineers and Ukrainian soldiers that really drives this," he said.

UFORCE, which also makes ground drones, AI software, and command-and-control systems, is one of Ukraine's biggest defense companies. Founded in Ukraine and headquartered in London, with major hubs in Kyiv and Washington, DC, it has also attracted significant international interest.

The company's Magura drones have been involved in multiple multinational military exercises. UFORCE has also developed a new MV7 model for UK waters and is partnering with RECONCRAFT, an American special-operations boat maker, though no new production runs, customers, or contracts have yet been announced.

UFORCE announced on Thursday that it raised $700 million in a Series A funding round from investors, including the UK government and Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms, bringing the company's total valuation to $6 billion.

The company wants to scale its manufacturing both in Ukraine and in partner countries to strengthen their defense.

Talking about this round of investment, Rogynskyy told Business Insider that "it's time to scale."

He said that the future of naval warfare "is all about fully unmanned navies and autonomous patrol presence, et cetera, as well as autonomous standoff." In the near term, he said, many navies want a hybrid approach, coordinating operations between classic crewed assets and drones.

He predicted that "pretty much every navy on the planet is going to be scaling itself using cheap, attainable, unmanned assets that are AI-controlled."

• Catherine Zeta-Jones recalls how she was discovered by Steven Spielberg in the late 1990s.
• Spielberg saw her in the CBS miniseries, "Titanic."
• He had her screen test for "The Mask of Zorro," which he was producing.

Catherine Zeta-Jones was in her 20s when she made a decision that would change her career forever.

At the time, the Welsh actor was famous to UK audiences for starring in the popular early-'90s British series, "The Darling Buds of May." But she yearned for more, so she decided to move to California and see if she could make it in Hollywood.

With six months on a visa, Zeta-Jones had to get work quickly, and auditions were a bit of an ego check.

"I'd been in this business since I was 9 years old, professionally in theater and in television, and a few films in Britain at that point," Zeta-Jones told Business Insider. "But I'd go into casting agents, and they'd be asking me what I had done."

She ended up taking a role on the 1996 CBS miniseries "Titanic." Though it wasn't a "huge leap" for her, it led to something even better: attention from Steven Spielberg.

The director happened to be watching the show one night and liked what he saw. He suggested she screen test for "The Mask of Zorro," which he was producing. A week later, she was "shipped down to Mexico to screen test with Antonio Banderas."

The rest is history.

See the full clip below:

Or read the full interview with Zeta-Jones.

• This post originally appeared in the BI Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Belle Burden 2.0

The original cheating scandal of 2026 didn't involve a leather jacket and possible espionage. It was Belle Burden, in her now-viral book, "Strangers," who revealed that her husband of 20 years left her for another woman without any explanation.

In the book, Burden — who calls herself a "cautionary tale" — also said that in her marriage, she trusted her husband with the family's financial decision-making, even signing their joint tax returns without reading them.

Slowly and gradually, the former corporate lawyer writes that she didn't realize that her husband was putting his investments and bonuses in his name alone, while using her once sizable trust to buy homes for their family — an important point if you know how their pre-nup was set up.

Entrepreneur Emma Grede, who encourages women to not be afraid to talk about money in her book "Start With Yourself," sat down with Burden at the Washington Post's Global Women's Summit, held in New York City, earlier this week.

Burden explained that she took her hands off of managing her finances because there was a voice in her head telling her that even though she was smart enough to pass the bar, she "couldn't understand the complexities of my financial life, investments and assets, and I think that is cultural conditioning."

Grede asked the New York Times bestseller what she's doing differently now that she's begun the next phase of her life, which includes her book being adapted by Netflix. Burden said she's now "fully in control and understanding all of my investments and assets. And I read my tax returns."

"I'm fully capable of understanding it … and that the knowledge is so much better than the not knowing, even though that was very comfortable," Burden continued, "it's actually quite joyful to understand and claim your financial life."

Even though she knows people cringe when they read about the financial mistakes she made in her marriage, Burden said hearing and reading how women have smartened up after reading her book makes it worth it.

"I did not expect that it would be prescriptive in this way or inspire women to change their behavior on money," Burden said at the Summit. "But … if that's my purpose on the planet, I'm really good with that."

• Nearly 9,500 flights were canceled or halted after a nationwide air traffic control outage on Friday.
• This is considered an uncontrollable disruption, so airlines aren't required to provide freebies.
• Here's what you can do if your flight is delayed or canceled.

US airlines are canceling thousands of flights after a rare air traffic control outage affected the US.

As of 10:30 p.m. ET, nearly 9,500 flights scheduled to depart the US on Friday and Saturday had been canceled or did not take off, according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics firm. More than 8,200 of those flights were scheduled for Friday; another 1,200 were Saturday flights.

Collectively, nearly 20% of scheduled flights out of the US on Friday and Saturday were canceled, per Cirium.

The cancellations came after the Federal Aviation Administration issued a nationwide ground stop around 3:45 p.m.

The stop was lifted around 8:30 p.m., but after so many cancellations, flight chaos is nearly guaranteed to stretch into the weekend.

If you're wondering what your options are as the terminals pile up with people frantically trying to get a hotel or food voucher — don't rely on your airline to help out.

According to the Department of Transportation, certain delays and cancellations caused by, for example, an ATC outage, are considered "uncontrollable" disruptions.

That means airlines are not required to provide freebies such as hotel stays or food vouchers. Don't confuse the rules with the DoT customer service dashboard, which shows passenger compensation for flights disrupted by controllable factors, such as maintenance or crew scheduling. Pilots or flight attendants timing out due to the outage would not fall under crew scheduling.

Airlines may offer goodwill vouchers to help out affected customers, but don't bank on it. Customers who book their own hotel or other transportation, such as a rental car or train, may be able to get eligible expenses reimbursed by their credit card.

Here's what to do if your flight is disrupted.

1. Know your rights as an airline passenger in the US

According to the Department of Transportation, there is no law requiring US airlines to compensate passengers for disruptions caused by uncontrollable events, such as weather. That also includes air traffic control delays.

The only rule carriers must follow is to refund customers for cancellations, even in cases of uncontrollable events. And that does not mean travel credits or vouchers — it must be to the original form of payment, and includes any add-ons, such as bags or seats.

If you choose to travel but your flight is delayed or canceled, ask the airline for the reason — ideally in writing — so you know what you're entitled to. Airlines have different policies for disruptions they can control.

The DoT's Airline Customer Service Dashboard — launched in 2022 — shows what the 10 largest US airlines promise in those cases, including rebookings, meal vouchers, and hotel accommodations.

2. Monitor your airline's app for rebooking options

When a flight delay or cancellation is announced, expect people to flock to the nearest customer service line for assistance, and for the phone lines to clog.

Wait times can be painfully long, and the best alternatives will likely go quickly. However, some airlines offer the option to rebook on their website or mobile app and waive any fees, making it sometimes easier to make changes online than in person.

If all available options are exhausted, have a plan B, such as waiting to speak with a live agent, contacting the airline through social media, or booking a hotel for the night.

Direct messaging on Facebook or Twitter can actually serve as a virtual placeholder, and you may hear back via chat before speaking to a live agent.

Here are the phone numbers for each airline:

• Alaska: 1-800-252-7522 or text 82008
• Allegiant: 1-702-505-8888
• American: 1-800-433-7300
• Avelo: 1-346-616-9500
• Breeze: No phone number to call, but you can text the airline at 501-273-3931. If you call this number, it'll tell you different ways to contact Breeze, like via email or Facebook Messenger.
• Delta: 1-800-221-1212
• Frontier: No phone number. The best way to contact Frontier is via online chat or email.
• JetBlue: 1-800-538-2583
• Southwest: 1-800-435-9792

• United: 1-800-864-8331

3. Ask for a hotel or meal voucher

For controllable delays or cancellations that result in a customer waiting at least three hours for a new flight or requiring an overnight stay, several airlines will offer meal or hotel vouchers. 

Carriers offering both are Alaska Airlines, Allegiant Air, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines, and United Airlines, per the DoT dashboard.

Frontier Airlines is the only carrier that does not offer accommodations in the event of an overnight delay or cancellation, but it will provide a meal voucher.

For US airlines not listed on the dashboard, or in cases where the disruption is uncontrollable (like because of a winter storm), or if the compensation is unclear, simply ask.

It never hurts to request a meal or hotel during flight disruptions, and you might get lucky with a goodwill gesture from the carrier.

4. Check if your credit card company offers travel insurance

Several major banks offer credit cards with travel insurance, such as Chase's Sapphire Reserve and American Express' Platinum Card. Both offer trip protection, meaning customers who purchased their flights with those cards can benefit.

For example, during a major storm system, many passengers are likely to end up stranded in random cities across the US.

However, banks with travel insurance included can reimburse cardholders for unexpected expenses outside their control, including hotel, meal, and transportation costs. 

Travel insurance does not apply in all circumstances, like short delays, so be sure to check your policy before making a claim — but it also doesn't hurt to make the claim anyway, even if the answer is no.

5. Know when to walk away

Delays and cancellations are inevitable. Don't spend all day sitting around waiting — set a cutoff time. Once that moment passes, consider alternative ways to reach your destination, such as driving or taking a bus or train (which may also be covered by travel insurance).

If you are stuck in another city and have no other option but to stay in a hotel or wait at the airport, decide how you want to spend your time and make a plan.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in 2023 and most recently updated in November 2026.

• The Nvidia scandal holds key reminders for business leaders about how to prepare for a crisis.
• Boards should imagine and discuss as many scenarios as possible, said McKinsey chief Bob Sternfels.
• When crisis does strike, thinking about long-term outcomes during the chaos is key, he said.

As they watched Nvidia's chaotic week unfold, many board members and executives may have found themselves wondering: "What if our CEO has an affair that gets us embroiled in a reputation-shaking scandal?"

Bob Sternfels, global managing partner at McKinsey, has some advice for them.

The Nvidia crisis has highlighted the importance of corporate governance, Sternfels said in an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday.

It's a reminder to have these discussions and prepare for all imaginable situations so that they're not on the back foot when they arrive, he said.

"Having a playbook, even if it's close, is much better than figuring it out in the heat of that moment," Sternfels said.

McKinsey, which Sternfels has led since 2021, is one of the world's leading consultancies and advises clients on improving operations, offering guidance on everything from choosing the best technology to implement to handling the unexpected.

Sternfels said the best responses to any crisis are long-term rather than knee-jerk reactions to the immediate situation. It's about finding a way to stay steady during the chaos, he said.

"There's an immediacy to respond, and you have to cauterize and make a decision, but it also has to be: what are our longer-term objectives? Where are we trying to go?" said Sternfels.

On Thursday, Nvidia's board announced Jensen Huang's resignation as CEO. His departure followed days of reports about his personal life, including accusations of a close relationship with someone US officials suspect to be a Chinese intelligence asset and an extramarital affair with an Nvidia executive who reported to him.

Huang's downfall will have ripple effects across the AI industry and raises questions about the impact a single leader can have on a company's success.

Since co-founding Nvidia in 1993, Huang has spent more than three decades nurturing the chipmaker into a $4 trillion giant. He is known for embracing a flat leadership model, an approach he has credited as key to the company's success.

Also crucial has been his geopolitical reach: Huang's Taiwanese roots and deep personal ties to Taiwan's technology sector have been instrumental in building Nvidia's AI supply chain, and he has the US president on speed dial.

Many are now asking how Nvidia will fare without its leather-clad, celebrity leader.

Sternfels told Bloomberg that navigating the influence of a well-known, public-facing CEO comes down to leadership development, meaning systematically developing generation after generation of leaders so a company is more robust.

McKinsey has found a gap in that kind of planning among clients, he said: "Not many companies are really focused on leadership development. They're focused more narrowly on succession planning."

Leadership development doesn't just happen at the CEO level, but at multiple levels in an organization, Sternfels added.

Whether the board CEO or the CEO of a top team, it's good practice to have people in leadership who can serve as an independent, objective voice in governance decisions and present a counter viewpoint, he said.

• Parents are rethinking how to save for their kids' futures, as AI complicates the value of degrees.
• Some parents are shifting away from tax-advantaged 529 education savings plans.
• Others keep funding 529 plans, betting the rules will change in an AI future.

When Nataliya Konovalova's sons were babies, she set up tax-advantaged 529 savings plans for them. On their birthdays, she'd tell relatives: no gifts, just contributions.

As the boys got older — they are now eight and 10 — she began to change her mind about the value of a college education. Konovalova read stories about degree-holders working at McDonald's, and prestigious fellowships that take students straight out of high school.

AI was the final straw.

Konovalova had long discussions with her husband, who works in tech, about how AI is tightening the entry-level job market. Ultimately, the couple halved their contributions to the boys' 529 plans. "I honestly don't think they will go to a traditional four-year college," she said.

For decades, these tax-advantaged plans have been the bread and butter of education savings. Parents can spend investment gains tax-free, provided the money goes toward qualified education expenses like tuition, textbooks, laptops, room and board, and more. The number of 529 plans across the US has grown 80% since 2010, with the average balance more than doubling since then.

But AI is putting higher education to the test. Students use it to cheat and currently face an entry-level hiring crisis after graduation, which many blame on AI. Tech execs say chatbots are better than human teachers, and Silicon Valley-types are pitching AI-ified college alternatives.

As AI makes the value of a college degree harder to predict, some parents are changing how they save for their children's futures. Business Insider spoke with six families who are reducing their 529 contributions, moving money into more flexible accounts, or continuing to save while questioning whether traditional college will provide the best return on their investment.

Of the 921 K-11 parents polled by Intuit Credit Karma/Harris, more than a quarter said they're rethinking how much they need to save for education, and 15% have already reduced their savings.

Even AI's biggest names seem unsure. A mom of two asked Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman whether she should save for college in 2025. "Probably not," he laughed off, before correcting the record. "I don't know. It's really hard to judge."

The parents waving goodbye to 529s

David Graham thinks college might still be worthwhile by the time his 12-year-old son finishes high school — but not by the time his 8-year-old twin girls graduate.

The 52-year-old retired physician from Billings, Montana, set up multiple savings accounts for his kids. Two years ago, he chose to stop funding their 529s entirely.

It wasn't an easy decision. Graham thinks that colleges will struggle financially thanks to declining birth rates. He's watched "learn to code" turn from salient advice to an ironic jab. He likes the hybrid Alpha School model, which leans heavily on AI instruction, and believes that AI tutors will drive down the cost of education.

At this point, Graham estimates that his son has $50,000 in his 529, and his twin girls have $15,000 each. While he bets that his kids aren't college-bound, he has the money to fund their degrees if they choose otherwise — and is willing to sacrifice the tax benefits. "If he wants to go to school, I'll just write a check," he said.

Michael Reynolds, a certified financial planner from Indianapolis, said that about 30% of the parents he worked with were redirecting some funds away from 529s as they doubt the future value of college. "More and more conversations are happening around: Do we put all our eggs in this basket?" he said.

Omar Khan is one doubter. Instead of a 529, the millennial father of two is investing for his children via taxable brokerage accounts, knowing he'll pay tax on the gains. He believes the value proposition for brand-name colleges may fade.

Khan wants the flexibility to use that money for whatever his kids' futures look like. Should they go into a technical field, buy a house, or bootstrap a company, they'll be set, he said.

To save or not to save

Matthew Crowson isn't abandoning his 529 — but he's hoping it'll loosen up.

The 39-year-old physician is saving for his two sons, aged 3 and 5. He also has a front-row seat to higher education's AI transformation: Crowson is on the faculty at Harvard Medical School.

Crowson said some of his best students don't need to show up for class at all; they can learn on their own using AI tools and then come to him with questions. He expected students to start questioning the high cost of tuition, especially compared to the low cost of a chatbot.

Should the college-pocalypse come, the government will need to change the 529 rules. Crowson is anticipating this: He hopes the government will expand the definition of "school" by the time his kids grow up (apprenticeships and continuing education are already qualified 529 expenses). Better yet, he's hoping for a "get-out-of-jail-free card" that lets parents draw down all their funds tax-free, no matter where they spend it. "That's a very cautiously optimistic take," he said.

The rules have bent before. In 2018, the government allowed parents to use some 529 funds for private high schools. Six years later, the government allowed parents to roll over some money from a 529 into a Roth IRA tax-free. Parents can now use the funds tax-free on post-graduate courses and certificates, too. "Even if you're not saving exactly for college, there are still other ways to be using that money," said Eric Reale, a New York-based financial advisor.

Some AI-enmeshed parents still see the value of a 529 plan. Matthew Seeger, who oversees AI strategy for a software company in Chicago, has been saving thoroughly for his three- and five-year-old kids. He wants to spare them the financial burden that college can be. Even so, he's getting worried about AI's longer-term impacts, especially on jobs.

But a whole other group of parents are certain AI abundance is coming — and that college is getting the chop. Yet many of their kids loathe the tech. While 9 in 10 kids have used AI, according to a Common Sense Media report, only 26% think the technology will have a mostly positive effect on their lives.

While Business Insider spoke with Graham, the Montana dad who had stopped 529 contributions entirely, his 12-year-old son arrived home. Graham asked: Do you use AI? "No," his son responded quickly, before amending his answer to "every once in a while" and running upstairs.

"They actually hate AI," Graham said of his kids. "And I don't let them use the H-word."