Author: Editor

At 22, I had big dreams.A recent college grad, I wanted to write for a magazine and embrace the glitz and glam of Manhattan while living in a stylish loft fit for Carrie Bradshaw.In reality, my overpriced apartment was more “shoebox chic” with a galley kitchen and the smallest closet imaginable. Though it was tiny and sometimes had the aroma of weed wafting through the walls, it was adorable.And, throughout my 20s, I did create the life I’d imagined, complete with boozy brunches, rooftop parties, and coffee dates on the steps of the Met that felt like a scene from…

The three wealthiest people on the planet are worth a combined $1 trillion, or about as much as Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had net worths of $419 billion, $349 billion, and $265 billion as of Friday’s close, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.Together, they’re worth $1.03 trillion, rivaling Berkshire’s $1.07 billion market capitalization and comfortably surpassing the $800 billion-plus market values of JPMorgan, Walmart, and Oracle.It’s striking that three individuals are worth almost as much on paper as Berkshire, a corporate behemoth that generates around $370 billion…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tannu Jiwnani, a 33-year-old principal security engineer at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. It has been edited for length and clarity.In June, after seven and a half years at Microsoft, I became a principal security engineer. When people ask what I do, I tell them, ‘I fight threat actors.’I respond to threats like credit card fraud or phishing scams. As thousands of people get phishing links in their inbox every day, I work at scale, taking the scams down.Whenever something critical goes down, I run the incident response. I make sure the…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 45-year-old Sripriya Balasubramaniam, from Chennai, India. The following has been edited for length and clarity.When I had my son in 2009 at age 30, I’d been working in IT at Oracle India for close to seven years.Two weeks into returning to work after five months of maternity leave, I couldn’t stop calling my husband to check in on my son.I was fearful of missing out on milestones in his life — his first words, crawling, and walking.Instead of leaving our son in daycare, my husband and I decided he would work,…

At 5:30 a.m., while the rest of Los Angeles sleeps, Bozoma Saint John is already in conversation with God. It’s the practice she credits with keeping her steady as she balances running a hair care company, being a single mom to her sixteen-year-old daughter, filming Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, hosting a new reality show with Jimmy Fallon, and steering her career after Netflix.Nearly a decade ago, Saint John, then a marketing chief for Apple Music and iTunes, became an internet sensation at Apple’s 2016 World Wide Developer conference, where she led the crowd in a rendition of “Rapper’s Delight.”…

Royalties from artists like Fleetwood Mac or Justin Bieber have become big bets for investors. Althera42 wants to copy that playbook for the tech world.The new fund, launched by former BlackRock executive Caspar Macqueen and Christian Czernich, who founded private credit firm Round2 Capital, plans to provide working capital to companies building Europe’s digital infrastructure — think data centers and cloud computing — without taking a stake in companies.”Althera42’s royalty investments allow companies to access capital without diluting equity or taking on rigid debt obligations,” a factsheet on the new firm published last week states.Focused on late-stage private companies, Althera42’s…

Artificial intelligence is transforming corporate America, yet the boom remains understated in government growth statistics, according to Goldman Sachs.Analysts at Goldman pointed to the scale of the boom in a Saturday note: “Revenue at US companies providing AI infrastructure has risen by $400bn since 2022, which at first glance seems to suggest that AI has been a meaningful driver of economic growth recently.”But official numbers tell a different story.AI technology has lifted real US economic activity by about $160 billion since 2022, or 0.7% of GDP, the analysts calculated. Yet only around $45 billion, or 0.2% of GDP, of AI-spurred…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lambert Liu, a software engineer. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified his employment and academic history.For most computer science graduates, it’s a no-brainer to work for Big Tech.Most of my classmates were drawn to Big Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon because they promised prestige, stability, and a structured career path.But I found myself falling into a second group of college students, one that actively seeks job opportunities at startups for the steep learning opportunities and potential equity upside if the startup goes…

Dmitrii Stepanov arrived in the Philippines in 2018 with plans for a one-month adventure. Seven years, a marriage, and two kids later, the country has become the place he calls home.Back in Russia, where he grew up, Stepanov worked as a videographer. But a growing passion for scuba diving and underwater photography led him to Dumaguete, a coastal city in Negros Oriental, famed for its rich diving scene. Dmitrii Stepanov and Nivt Mondaya are raising two kids in a tiny house in the Philippines. The Stepanov Family. The low cost of living made it easy to adjust to life in…

Like so many others, I moved to New York City chasing success, reinvention, and the fantasy of living in a Nora Ephron movie.But after the 2024 election and the rise of anti-Latino sentiment, I felt lost as a woman of Hispanic descent. Suddenly, the US didn’t quite feel like home — beyond that, life in New York was becoming unbearably expensive.Even as DINKs with decent incomes, my fiancé and I still felt the financial strain of living in a high-cost-of-living city that was only getting pricier.Then, while doom-scrolling one night, I came across a video of a couple who had…