The AI data center boom looks like it's running into serious trouble. Projects are being delayed, canceled, or abandoned. Electricity shortages are holding everything up.
But there's a twist: A lot of these data centers were probably never going to get built in the first place.
Bernstein Research analyzed thousands of planned US data centers and concluded that only about 35% of the announced capacity is likely to become reality.
The industry has a wonderful name for some of the more dubious projects: "Bragawatts."
These are enormous data centers announced by companies that often have little experience building them. Some haven't secured electricity, construction permits, or even customers.
Then there are the "ghost projects." Developers submit multiple requests for electricity connections, hoping at least one location works out. In Texas, these requests have reached more than five times the state's existing electricity supply.
No wonder the grid looks overwhelmed.
This doesn't mean the AI boom is fake. Far from it.
But there's a big difference between Amazon's very real problems and an inexperienced developer announcing a gigantic project that may never happen.
The AI data center boom is real, and so are the challenges of building all these facilities. But the sheer number of speculative projects may be making those challenges look bigger than they truly are.
Cybersecurity leaders talked with BI about the rise in demand for workers in the field.
MASTER/Getty Images
All hell broke loose this week after a security flaw in 70% of the world's websites was made public.
It was supposed to be kept under wraps as a fix was deployed, but one researcher jumped the gun.
Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc told POLITICO why he decided to go public.
The exposure was immense, with AI multiplying the risks — and yet time-tested global cybersecurity procedures appeared to be functioning. Then suddenly, it all broke down.
The decision by a cybersecurity company on Wednesday to prematurely release information about a flaw in the popular PHP computer programming language left much of the web exposed to hackers, triggering a panic that brought to life months of warnings of how the AI-powered era could cause widespread damage.
The flaws in PHP, discovered using AI tools through a monthslong process coordinated by OpenAI, caused cyber agencies across Europe, the US, the UK, Australia and Canada to post urgent warnings Wednesday. Numerous governments took websites offline as a precaution.
While no major hacking damage was immediately apparent, the way the incident unfolded over 72 hours showed how easily cybersecurity processes can break down and the outsized consequences of cyber risks in the AI era.
The man who set off the chain reaction with the early release — Chainguard's CEO Dan Lorenc — quickly apologized in a LinkedIn post. But on Thursday, in an interview with POLITICO, Lorenc said he'd shared the information ahead of time because the flaw was already being exploited. Though others disputed that, Lorenc said he believed he'd seen enough evidence to invalidate an embargo set up to allow time to find a fix for the flaws.
While he disputed that his actions would have caused problems for other defenders, Lorenc said that the evidential threshold in these coordinated cyber defense systems is a "grey area."
The revelation of the PHP flaw brings out into the open what cyber officials have been bracing for since the arrival of the most powerful tools of artificial intelligence, which not only can be used to discover vulnerabilities but also to exploit them at scale.
The cybersecurity world's long-established protocols helped prevent disaster scenarios in which hackers would have successfully exploited the vulnerabilities to take control of numerous websites and access their data. But the scale and end-of-days potential of AI-driven cyber risks are now visible for the world to see.
This "is what happens when AI turns up a flaw that's been hiding for years," said Eylam Milner, cofounder and chief technology officer at cybersecurity startup Echo. The vulnerabilities, he added, are "about as serious as it gets for the web."
Origin story
Understanding how this week's emergency unfolded offers a glimpse at how companies and authorities are working to stave off attacks — and how much risk they face going forward.
The origins of the incident can be traced back as far as April, when leading frontier AI firm Anthropic unveiled Mythos, leading some in the cybersecurity world to worry that systems would quickly be overrun by advanced artificial intelligence, with potential for catastrophic events to ensue.
But while researchers did find more flaws in computer systems in the months after Anthropic and other AI firms like OpenAI released those models, they had little impact in the real world. Even the Hugging Face incident, a widely discussed hack that saw OpenAI's autonomous AI agents go rogue during an internal security evaluation, related more to the level of control AI companies exert over their models than their power to break into systems worldwide.
That changed this week after researchers unveiled the vulnerability in PHP, a coding language estimated to be integrated into some 70% of the web.
The process by which information about flaws is released among cybersecurity officials and affiliated companies is crucial. Through a long-standing practice known as coordinated disclosure, researchers and companies that identify flaws can find a fix and share it confidentially with agencies and others before releasing it to the public, meaning they don't hand malicious hackers the gift of a hole without a fix.
In the case of the PHP flaw, that process worked well, but not perfectly. Information about the bugs started to circulate ahead of the planned release time. Then, according to the PHP Foundation, Chainguard "unilaterally broke the embargo," which "disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure." PHP Foundation executive director Elizabeth Barron told POLITICO by email that while it was "disappointed" with Chainguard, it hopes to "rebuild trust with them in the future to ensure we can continue to collaborate effectively."
After the leak — which meant information about the bugs was in the open before the fix was ready — confusion quickly ensued, with government bodies and private companies choosing to temporarily shut down their websites rather than risk potentially damaging breaches to their data and the sites themselves.
Early Thursday, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, an internet services company widely used by websites to block cyberattacks, which gives it a high level of visibility into what hackers are doing, said in a post on X that it had seen "millions" of attempts to exploit the flaw.
Cloudflare saw thousands in the 10 hours before the flaw was publicly announced, then tens of thousands in the 45 minutes after the announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and now millions, Prince said.
Amazon's cloud division also said the flaw is "now being broadly exploited in the wild."
One senior US government cyber official said that federal authorities have been overwhelmed — and not just by PHP. The same day the world was racing to address PHP, they were also dealing with bugs in node.js, a widely used JavaScript framework, Fortinet, GitHub and Oracle.
"The fire department is fighting multiple fires at once," the official said, adding: "The good news is they're all one-story structures on fire, which the fire department deals with all day, every day."
More to come
Dauntingly, OpenAI said there's more on the way. "These bugs are among several significant vulnerabilities we've already found and are working to fix, and we expect similar findings to increase sharply in the coming months," the company said Wednesday in a statement.
Matthijs van Amelsfort, head of the Dutch cybersecurity agency, said in an interview that the job of keeping computer systems safe has been transformed by the advancement of AI. "As soon as the frontier models came out, that's exactly what we said: This will be the trend," he said. "And actually that's happening now."
Thomas Caspers, vice president of Germany's cyber agency BSI, concurred: "We expect that [to be] happening more and more during the coming months."
AI also ramps up the risks once the flaws are out in the open. Cyber agencies' recommendation that organizations take their websites offline was "really a drastic measure," Caspers said. "We wouldn't have done that a few years ago or so." But because AI has made it quicker and easier to exploit flaws, "we had to do that," he said.
At the same time, the use of advanced AI to detect the flaws may create a new level of protection against malicious hackers looking to take advantage of them. Caspers said that though his German agency has also seen attacks, it has not seen any successful use of the flaw by hackers.
"It seems a little bit more complicated than expected to exploit," he said.
Despite the fact that AI offers a new way to discover flaws, the work involved in keeping systems protected is more quotidian, with cyber agencies urging organizations to install the fix shared by the PHP Foundation, in a process known as patching.
"There are three things that you have to do right now," said van Amelsfort from the Dutch agency. "And that's patch, patch, and patch."
John Sakellariadis contributed to this report.
The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network 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, The Telegraph, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.
Vercel's Tom Occhino, left, with Tools for Humanity's Tiago Sada at an event in San Francisco in April.
Kimberly White/Getty Images for Tools for Humanity
Everyone complains about AI-generated junk.
But decades of sloppy human-written software may be a much bigger problem.
This week's "Black October" freakout was caused by human slop, not AI.
The internet has a slop problem. And for once, we can't blame AI.
Most of us spend hours online every day without thinking much about the software holding everything together. We assume somebody, somewhere, has made sure it all works properly.
So it probably came as a shock this week to discover just how vulnerable some of that software is.
The cybersecurity freakout dubbed "Black October" has inspired warnings about AI-powered hackers, digital catastrophe, and even advice to stockpile cash and canned food.
At first glance, AI looks like the villain. But this is largely a human-made mess.
Here's the problem.
The internet runs on decades of software, some of it containing security weaknesses that have been overlooked, tolerated, or simply left unfixed.
For years, that was a manageable gamble. Fixing software takes time and money. Exploiting obscure weaknesses often required considerable expertise. Companies could convince themselves that the risk wasn't worth worrying about.
AI is changing that calculation. Someone who once needed years of training to hunt for weaknesses can now get help from an AI model. These tools can also examine software at speeds that humans can't match.
Suddenly, all those problems we've been ignoring look more urgent.
"Over the last 10 years the risk acceptance process has morphed from a way to accept risks to enable the business, to a way to justify never fixing security issues," Joel de la Garza and Zane Lackey, partners at a16z, wrote on Friday.
That's quite an indictment. The result is a recent surge in published vulnerabilities.
This looks like AI is creating new security problems. But it's actually AI exposing weaknesses that humans left behind.
Slop irony
The irony is delicious. We've spent the past couple of years complaining about "AI slop." Turns out human slop can be pretty consequential, too.
"The funny thing is everyone was saying AI slop code will cause a cyber crisis but it's actually all the old human slop causing it and the AI is just cleaning it up," software engineer Ben Kaufman wrote on X on Thursday.
"Humans have been the ones writing and reviewing each other's code for decades," tech founder Anant Jain wrote on X. "If we're being intellectually honest and holding ourselves to the same bar we hold AI to, we'd have to admit that we haven't been all that good at it either."
Humans are sloppy
Anyone who's worked with other humans for a decade or two knows exactly how this happens.
It's Friday afternoon. You've almost finished a project. You could spend another few hours making it perfect, or declare it 90% done and head off to that dinner party. We've all been there.
AI agents don't have dinner parties. They don't get tired on Friday afternoons. They can keep searching, testing, and trying again. That persistence is now colliding with an internet built by busy, imperfect humans who often settled for "good enough for now."
A tragedy of the commons
There's another wrinkle here, though, and it's an important one.
Much of the software underpinning the internet is freely available for anyone to use. Some of it is maintained by volunteers or small groups of experts, even as enormous technology companies depend on it.
In 2020, the cartoonist Randall Munroe captured this absurdity in an xkcd comic. Modern digital infrastructure still rests precariously on tiny foundations.
It's funny because it's uncomfortably close to reality. Take the specific PHP problems from this week. These flaws have existed for years, and the PHP Foundation acknowledges that limited resources and disagreements over fixes contributed to delays in fixing them.
Tom Occhino, chief product officer at Vercel, brought up Munroe's cartoon during my recent interview with him.
He explained that AI is finding weaknesses even in software that the industry has treated as dependable for decades.
This is partly a version of the tragedy of the commons: Everyone benefits from a shared resource, but no one has sufficient incentive to take responsibility for maintaining it.
And let's be clear: The volunteers keeping essential software running aren't the villains here. The companies benefiting from their work have a much greater responsibility.
Occhino thinks AI could help solve the problem it is exposing.
He described an idea being discussed at Vercel: Create a foundation or coalition that funds efforts to identify vulnerable software and replace it with safer alternatives.
"We need a consortium. We need a coalition," he told me.
He suggested companies could contribute computing resources and AI tools to the effort. Nothing has been formally announced, but the idea is compelling.
Indeed, OpenAI's Patch the Planet effort is an example of what's possible.
Rather than simply using AI to create more software, the industry could use it to repair what already exists.
Occhino put it nicely: Companies need to spend less time chasing new ideas and more time asking how to make existing systems "just work really, really well."
That's a better response than panicking about the imminent collapse of the internet.
AI didn't create decades of neglected software. We did. Perhaps it's time to clean up our own slop.
Meta's AI gamble is suddenly looking like a win for Mark Zuckerberg.
That was far from a given. Even the Meta CEO was doubting himself. His company had poured hundreds of billions of dollars into AI investments with largely unproven results.
"Are you sure this is going to work?" he asked his 29-year-old AI chief, Alexandr Wang, at the end of last year, he recalled on a recent episode of the "Cheeky Pint" podcast.
Those risky AI bets — which one analyst compared to throwing spaghetti at the wall — as well as the massive layoffs and reorganization that came with them, are now starting to pay off. Meta beat its AI rivals to the punch with its new AI assistant, Muse, and it finally released a frontier AI model. Although Muse is bleeding cash amid high compute costs, analysts are excited by its moneymaking potential.
Zuckerberg is riding high, too. Sipping a Guinness alongside Wang during a recent podcast interview, the pair extolled Meta's AI prowess.
"You never know when you launch something how it's going to be received," the CEO said. "There's always the case where you get a home run, which in this case it was, right? And it's just like extremely well received right off the bat."
And Meta seems to believe in Zuckerberg's leadership more than ever. His latest coup: Convincing the company to issue a new class of shares after he threatened to list his Palo Alto compound and leave California as voters weigh a billionaire tax.
The big question is how long the good vibes will last. Meta is still spending gobs of money on AI without a concrete financial payoff. Some remain skeptical.
"The bill is huge," David Wagner, a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, told Business Insider.
"He's won the narrative. He hasn't proven the return yet."
Meta's social reckoning era
Zuckerberg is no stranger to public discourse. He's undertaken multiple personas: the nerdy wunderkind in hoodies, the jacked wife guy, the unapologetically masculine Trump ally.
At the beginning of this year, it looked as if he was headed for a new reckoning, and it wasn't just because of the aptly named sequel to "The Social Network."
Zuckerberg was on trial, taking the stand in a landmark lawsuit that alleged Meta's platforms harmed the mental health of young people. (Meta was found negligent and is appealing.) It was one of three major lawsuits this year that put the company on the defensive against claims that its technology posed safety risks to children.
In February, Mark Zuckerberg appeared at a Los Angeles courthouse to defend the company in a landmark social media addiction trial.
Jon Putman/Anadolu via Getty Images
And there were the more typical Zuckerberg cringe moments, too, like his front-row appearance at a Prada fashion show that raised eyebrows across the internet.
On the inside, employee morale was waning. Though the billionaire CEO had called 2026 "the year of AI," Meta had little momentum, and unpopular decisions — including a program to track employee keystrokes — amplified the discontent.
Also, Meta had one of its largest rounds of layoffs, ever. Meta began trimming staff in March, followed by a huge round in May, when it laid off about 10% of its workforce.
Separately, Meta reshuffled another 7,000 workers as part of an AI-focused reorganization of its tech and product teams. Many engineers were relegated to individual contributor status. Meta later asked some of the employees it had demoted to return to their managerial roles.
The AI push didn't seem to be paying off: In the second quarter of this year, 98% of revenue came from its traditional advertising business — not AI.
Morale was "maybe not the worst it's ever been in 20 years here, but it's probably up there," Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, said during an internal call in June.
The groundwork for Meta's comeback
Amid the chaos, Zuckerberg laid the groundwork for a comeback. Wang and Meta's elite AI researchers moved their desks to sit near Zuckerberg.
Starting last year, Zuckerberg and Wang also went on a talent-hiring spree, dangling pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to poach top researchers.
Zuckerberg empowered key lieutenants, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, to go ham on any vision they had, including on his pet project, an AI assistant. It all fit into Zuckerberg's longtime playbook of embracing small teams and overseeing reorgs until something works — move fast and break things, as he has infamously put it.
It worked.
Muse, the long-awaited Meta AI agent, became a breakout hit. A week after it launched, it shot to the top of the app store, and has since achieved more than 10 million downloads in North America. The team was stunned to have beaten OpenAI to market, a person familiar with the matter said. OpenAI's rival product, Dots, launched three weeks later.
Jolly is the mascot for Meta's Muse AI agent, which launched successfully last month.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Meta also threw unprecedented compute and talent at building a series of frontier AI models, called Muse Wonder, that could keep up with those from giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.
On Meta's third-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg was optimistic that Meta's AI and hardware investments could soon become cash cows, as people shop through Muse and buy more virtual-reality glasses powered by the company's growing AI chops.
Meta, meanwhile, views Zuckerberg as more critical than ever to its long-term fortunes.
Key board members abruptly excused themselves from a dinner with Zuckerberg in September after he told them he was going to sell his Palo Alto estate in response to California's proposed billionaire tax, Meta disclosed in a filing on Wednesday.
Four days later, a special committee returned with a deal that would give Zuckerberg $20 billion in "immediate liquidity" to cover the tax — if it passes — without reducing his controlling stake in Meta. Meta also made plans to ensure that billions in fresh AI fundraising wouldn't dilute Zuckerberg's control.
"Meta's track record of significant value creation for its shareholders is in large part due to his strong leadership, unique and creative vision, and exceptional management abilities," the company said in a press release.
The personal win comes as some of his other problems have blown over. Meta settled a major lawsuit brought by attorneys general across states, Washington, DC, and US territories. As part of the settlement, the company committed to make changes to its apps, such as daily time limits and pausing notifications overnight. The agreement was part of an August settlement, a move that allowed Meta to call out its competitors such as YouTube and TikTok.
"All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another," the company said in a blog post at the time.
Big questions still loom. The day after Meta reported strong earnings and Muse adoption, its stock fell 7% as investors absorbed the scale of the company's hundreds of billions of dollars in future spending commitments.
And the legal troubles keep on coming. This week, a New Mexico jury also ordered Meta to pay a staggering $25 billion over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a case that Meta plans to appeal.
Whether Zuckerberg's strategy is sustainable or not, the vibe shift has been notable — and may have proven naysayers wrong, at least until the next period of chaos erupts.
"Meta is cool again," Jesse Cohen, an analyst at Investing.com, said in a note. "That's the Muse effect."
Christophe Fouquet, the CEO of Dutch tech firm ASML, said last week that the company will incorporate employee satisfaction into its compensation strategy for top executives in an effort to quell discontent over a major reorganization, per a memo to employees obtained exclusively by Business Insider.
Fouquet was responding to the results of an annual survey that polled more than 38,000 of ASML's roughly 44,000 employees.
The survey results, seen by Business Insider, show that ASML's employee engagement index — a measure of worker satisfaction — fell from 78% last year to 73.5% this year.
In the memo, Fouquet said that the declining employee engagement scores "reflect a period of significant change" and acknowledged that it had been a "disruptive and emotional year" for the company.
He added that ASML's executive team had highlighted six questions in the survey and combined them into a new Workplace Experience Index, which would be incorporated into the company's Long-Term Incentive plan for executive compensation.
"In the coming years, it will directly influence the remuneration of senior leaders, including the Board of Management," Fouquet wrote, adding that strengthening the company's culture and reinforcing its values would be a personal priority in the coming year.
ASML's lithography machines are a critical part of the semiconductor supply chain.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
The six questions include whether employees feel they can share their opinions without fear of retaliation and if they have confidence in ASML's senior leadership team.
Employees will also be polled on whether they have a clear understanding of their role, whether they think their teams are operating efficiently and are well organized, and whether they feel their direct manager shows they care about them as an individual.
"We recognize the role that leaders play in creating a good workplace, and we now strengthen our commitment by including the workplace experience index in the remuneration of senior leadership, including our Board of Management," an ASML spokesperson told Business Insider.
It comes as ASML, the only firm on the planet capable of building the advanced EUV lithography machines critical for chipmakers like TSMC and Intel, attempts to slash bureaucracy with a sweeping org chart reorganization.
ASML announced in January that it could cut 1,700 jobs to reduce management layers and focus on engineering. Leaked documents previously reported by Business Insider show that these ongoing efforts have focused on reducing the number of managers at the company. The company later said it expected to cut fewer jobs than initially planned.
The ASML spokesperson said that its organizational changes were "necessary to strengthen ASML's ability to innovate" for its customers, but it also recognized they were "disruptive" for staff.
Going against tech's 'hardcore' trend
Major companies tying executive pay to employee satisfaction is uncommon, but not unheard of.
Companies like IBM and Aviva have previously included employee engagement in their compensation targets for top executives.
ASML's decision, however, runs counter to the cultural winds of Big Tech, which have seen some companies embark on relentless layoffs and push employees to work longer hours as part of a "hardcore" working shift.
Meta was an early, prominent leader of this push, with a series of layoffs that began in 2023 during Mark Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency" and, last year, cutting "low performers." CTO Andrew Bosworth at one point suggested that employees who disagreed with the company's direction should "consider working elsewhere."
Executives have since acknowledged internally that Meta went too far with its efficiency push, with Bosworth telling workers that morale at the company was almost the worst it has ever been.
Fouquet's memo to employees came days before ASML raised its 2026 sales forecast and pledged to accelerate production of its unique lithography machines as the AI boom fuels surging demand.
The company's machines are vital for producing the advanced semiconductors used to train and run AI models, and the rapid buildout of AI data centers has pushed ASML's shares up 45% this year.
One major prospective customer for the Dutch firm is Elon Musk, who is racing to build a massive semiconductor factory dubbed "Terafab" in Texas. Business Insider previously reported that Musk gave a virtual presentation to a private ASML employee conference in June to pitch Terafab, which is a joint project by Tesla and SpaceX.
Editor's note: October 23, 2026 — This story was updated to include a statement from ASML.
George Brett Olson (right) said his joke was taken by an AI account (left).
George Brett Olson via Instagram
George Brett Olson is one of a set of comedians who've called out AI accounts for ripping off their work.
Olson said he was upset with Meta for allowing the situation to persist on its platforms.
Instagram's top exec said the platform is invested in promoting original content and would look into the issue.
This as-told-to essay is based on an interview with George Brett Olson, one of several comedians who have lately called out AI accounts for ripping off their jokes. It's been edited for length and clarity. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said he would look into what could be done about the issue and that the platform was invested in driving traffic to original content.
I started doing stand-up in 2021 after getting burned out from being a winemaker. I'd been doing live shows, and this joke I made about, ironically, AI stealing jobs went viral. The whole joke was about AI stealing jobs and people still blaming immigrants, which is very silly when the most powerful people were saying, "We're literally coming to take all your jobs."
Then a friend sent me the video of this lady doing the joke. He's like, "AI is for real, for real, stealing your jokes." It was basically me, in my clothes, but it's a 42-inch butt. It's just the pornification of women online. It was very strange.
I'd been doing that joke for a year. I thought of it after working out with my buddy, and we were talking, walking. It takes a lot of work to get a joke stage-ready. It's a lot of repetition, tweaking, driving from place to place to perform. Comedy's not easy. So it's pretty sad to see it happen, especially when the AI comedians who are stealing jokes have more followers than the people they're stealing from.
I asked the account behind the joke if she was real. She said yes. Then I asked, "Did someone help you do this?" And she just left me on read. She also left a comment saying, "Sorry, won't happen again," and removed a bunch of videos.
I've had a bunch of followers try to report it. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, replied and basically said, "Not all AI's bad. We don't know how we're going to stop it, but people shouldn't be able to steal. Seems like we should do something about that."
[This was Mosseri's exact comment: "I don't think it's practical for us to try and ban AI content from the platform. It's gonna be harder and harder to identify, and it's not all bad content (though yes, there is plenty of slop). But we are very invested in trying to drive more traffic to original content creators, and if an AI creator is ripping off content wholesale, it would be good for us to work out what we can do about that. I'm not sure what it would be, but I'll make sure to talk to the team and look into it."]
George Brett Olson is one of several comedians who have lately called out AI accounts for copying their jokes.
Max Brandt
I blame Meta, not the AI
I don't blame someone for stealing. That's just someone trying to make a buck with the tools they have available. We want to hold people responsible that do not have the mechanisms of power because we can't hold an institution accountable.
I feel demoralized more by Meta's response. The language that's coming from all of them is that we're powerless, and this is inevitable, and there's nothing we can do. And it's just not true. And you just have to sit, be powerless, which is demoralizing.
As a comedian, you just want to sell tickets to your shows, engage with live people. That's why most of us post on social media — so people see that you're funny so they come to your live shows. I do live shows every week.
If we flood the internet with agents, and we don't know the difference anymore between what's real and what's not, this could be the death of the internet. Hopefully more people come to live shows. Because the one thing about AI comedians is: You can't see them live.
School of Hard Knocks founders, from left, Jack Dumoulin, James Dumoulin, and Josh Smith, want to be the "Barstool Sports of business."
School of Hard Knocks
James Dumoulin has turned street interviews with moguls into a business on track for $37 million in revenue this year.
School of Hard Knocks uses staged drama to hook viewers and sells consulting services and memberships.
Dumoulin and his partners aim to expand and become the "Barstool Sports of business content."
As James Dumoulin approaches a private equity investor in Lagos, Nigeria, there's an ominous moment when a bodyguard holding a rifle puts his hand up and demands the content creator stop.
"I have a channel with 24 million followers," the School of Hard Knocks cofounder responds, and then asks if he can interview the investor, Adesuwa Rhodes, for one minute about how she got rich.
Rhodes steps forward, dressed in a vibrantly patterned suit, and begins answering Dumoulin's questions, explaining how she broke into the business, the importance of persistence, and her faith in God.
The video's formula — mixing a high-drama street interview with advice from the wealthy and successful — has been distilled down to a science by 24-year-old Dumoulin, and helped him create a company that's on track to do $37 million in revenue this year, profitably, according to copies of financial documents he provided to Business Insider. The initial set-up is also, as Dumoulin readily explains, partly scripted.
"They're screaming at me, and it looks like a war is about to break out, and then I get her to calm them down," he said of how he blocked out the Rhodes scene. "And she gave some incredible sound bites and advice."
Street interviews, which have their predecessors on radio and TV, have been reborn as one of social media's hottest formats. Standout stars of the genre include Kareem Rahma of "Subway Takes," who gets opinions on hot topics from strangers, and TikToker Caleb Simpson, who asks people what they pay in rent and tours their apartments. As the format has grown increasingly lucrative, it's also become more orchestrated. Rahma and Simpson have both leaned into celebrity appearances, for example.
In Dumoulin's case, the upfront drama of the street encounter is contrived, a way to draw the viewer in and hook them so they'll listen to the interview, which is where he says the valuable information actually resides. He asks his subjects how they made their money, what their leadership principles are, and for advice for future entrepreneurs. The conceit is that they're lessons not taught in school.
"People love tension," Dumoulin said. "They want to see that conflict, they want to see what's going to happen, and then the payoff is a great interview on the back half. That's why I think our videos do really, really well."
Dumoulin's success in the creator economy — where the term "authenticity" is employed like a sacred totem — raises a host of questions about what it means to be "real," and how much it truly matters if you're entertaining and informing your audience. Any questions of authenticity haven't seemed to hamper the growth of School of Hard Knocks, though, which has nearly 11 million Instagram followers and over 7 million on TikTok, plus several million more on YouTube and other platforms.
Dumoulin said he'd consider a video a failure if it got under a million views.
The 'Barstool Sports of business content'
The videos serve as the center of an operation — run by Dumoulin, his brother Jack, 26, and their childhood friend Josh Smith, 28 — that contains a slew of businesses. The partners say they expect their media revenue to double over the next six months.
"One of the long-term visions of the School of Hard Knocks is to create the Barstool Sports of business content," James Dumoulin said.
The team poses with Tom Cruise, one of several celebrities they've interviewed.
School of Hard Knocks
The brand has done long-term sponsorships with companies including Shopify, ZipRecruiter, and Alibaba, but advertising isn't the most lucrative part of the business. The core moneymaker is School of Content, which provides social media consulting to small businesses.
The other two contributors are Hard Knocks Agency, a short-form video production and social media management agency for business owners, and School of Mentors, a membership community for aspiring entrepreneurs. Members pay $19 or $49 a month for live calls, workshops, and training with founders and operators.
Jack Dumoulin said the subscribers to its Mentors community are people who want to connect with successful entrepreneurs and learn from them, while the agency's clients are established businesspeople who want to build their personal or company brands.
"Founder-led brands are becoming a really, really big thing, where we're seeing more and more founders become the face of brands, their product, their service, or their company," Jack Dumoulin said.
Monica Khan, CEO of Creator Revolution, which helps creators build businesses and advises companies on influencer strategy, said she sees strong demand from execs and founders for help building personal brands, and business-to-business (B2B) creators are stepping up.
School of Hard Knocks took a smart approach by building a media brand first by interviewing entrepreneurs, then turning that credibility into a service, Khan said.
"We're going to see a lot more of that," she added.
The School of Hard Knocks cofounders have also invested in real estate, including a portion of an apartment complex in San Antonio and commercial properties.
The founders went through several pivots
The Dumoulin brothers grew up in a military family in Northern Virginia and became friends with Smith while serving in the same Boy Scouts troop. All went on to become Eagle Scouts.
James Dumoulin attributes some of their success to the mentoring they got from the military dads who ran the troop. He recalled the especially long conferences they'd have with scout leaders evaluating them for advancement to the next rank, and the scoutmaster who used to say, "There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it again."
"That resonated with us," he said.
Mark Cuban gave School of Hard Knocks its first big break.
Shafkat Anowar/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images
The three reconnected in Austin in 2020. Josh Smith had gotten into digital marketing, and Jack Dumoulin, who had won a trophy in a worldwide Microsoft Excel competition, had become a junior analyst at Buc-ee's. James Dumoulin was in college, making TikTok videos. They combined their skills to make online content.
School of Hard Knocks was by no means an overnight success. They experimented with several approaches, including giving their own business advice. People didn't care about a 20-year-old kid's perspective on business, James Dumoulin said.
"Ultimately, we were like, 'What if we tried doing interviews?'" he said. "'What if we were the ones that were able to go seek advice from the most successful people?'"
They started approaching people cold on the street, asking them for interviews, and more often than not, getting blown off.
"It was just constant rejection after rejection," James Dumoulin said. "You'd probably have to go to 100 people before you get anybody to even look at you in the eye."
Their big break came in 2022 when they intercepted Mark Cuban outside the South by Southwest festival and asked for an interview. The gregarious entrepreneur obliged.
"That one interview was so powerful for us, because I leveraged it in so many other interviews," James Dumoulin said.
Eventually, PR agents were calling them to have their clients be featured on the channel.
The videos are carefully planned
School of Hard Knocks videos have a spontaneous feel that belies the meticulous planning behind them.
They start with a cold open, often creating tension by involving a security guard or other bystanders. For an interview with Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, James Dumoulin roped in a few employees from a store on Rodeo Drive where he met Siminoff and asked them to stand in a group, chatting. Dumoulin asked the group who the richest of them was. As briefed, they pointed to Siminoff, who said he was an inventor who made "something on your front door."
James Dumoulin reshoots the opening several times until he's satisfied with the result. The rest of the interview is shot in one take. He approaches his subjects with hearty enthusiasm and said he does minimal research on them, to preserve a certain amount of natural surprise in his reactions. All told, he takes five to seven hours to edit videos that are between a minute and a half and two minutes long.
"He's got unbelievable guests," said Josh Suggs, founder of StreetTalk, an ad agency built around impromptu street interviews. "He has real A-list celebrities. So I think people naturally want to hear what an A-list celebrity is going to say. At the same time, he asks a question people want to hear: How much money do you make? It's very scroll-stopping questions."
Some subjects — like Shaq and Tom Cruise — are household names. Most are not. James Dumoulin said the best-performing videos are unknown moguls because they create a curiosity gap.
He doesn't press his guests on controversial topics. Convicted felon "Wolf of Wall Street" Jordan Belfort and streamer Adin Ross, who has hosted far-right creator Nick Fuentes and self-described misogynist influencer Andrew Tate on his stream, get the same treatment as everyone else.
A platform reality check
The cofounders said that when their content started to take off, around 2022, they got a reality check about dependence on platforms.
They said their content was making about $30,000 a month, mostly from Facebook, when they were unexpectedly demonetized by the platform for what James Dumoulin said was an "unoriginal content violation." (They've since been reinstated.) Their monthly revenue dropped to $5,000. They said it was a wake-up call that they had to find other, more predictable sources of income. They started their first offshoot, the Hard Knocks Agency, in 2023.
"Sometimes you're not in control, because you don't own the platform," James Dumoulin said. "It made us realize, 'We've got to create a media company.'"
The School of Hard Knocks founders are also aware of the risk they run of being dependent on a single person. That's why they're adding new brands like Hard Knocks Business and Hard Knocks Women, with Hard Knocks Sports to come. The goal is to get to eight channels by the end of the year.
"If it is all really relying on one person, if something happens to that person, the whole company's kind of screwed," James Dumoulin said. "And so I think that's why it is very, very important to have that distribution beyond just one channel."
E.l.f. Beauty hosted an influencer activation at Coachella.
VALERIE MACON / AFP via Getty Images
Influencer marketing can be messy and unpredictable.
We asked top creator marketers about the main challenges they face when running campaigns.
Marketers said choosing talent, approving content, and forecasting reach create the most headaches.
Influencer marketing has ballooned into a $12 billion industry in the US. And yet, running campaigns can still feel unpredictable.
Business Insider asked more than a dozen executives at top brands like Poppi, E.l.f. Beauty, and the National Football League what challenges they face when working with creators. Three common pain points emerged.
First, it's tough to find relevant talent amid a growing pool of content creators. It can also be tricky to agree on content copy when balancing a brand's messaging goals with the creator's own voice. Lastly, campaign performance can be erratic as social-media algorithms become more personalized and harder to crack.
Buying influencer ads, unlike TV spots or display ads, requires a human touch. It's tough to automate (despite some attempts to do so). Forty-five percent of brands said they relied on manual processes like spreadsheets, emails, and DMs to run creator campaigns, according to a June survey of 209 executives conducted by Northwestern University and LTK.
"We're dealing with people, and making content is their time and their business, and it's hard," said Lindsay Burstein, senior director of integrated social and communications at Keurig Dr Pepper. "We're always looking for ways to do it faster and in a way that feels more real-time so that we're keeping up with the pace and the culture of the internet. But also knowing that these are people. They have lives. They have other commitments."
Read on for more details on the common pain points that emerged from our conversations with marketing executives at 14 brands. These execs were recently featured in Business Insider's 2026 list of innovative influencer marketers.
1. It's hard to find the right creators for your brand when there are so many
"The landscape of the influencer, creator, and affiliate model is changing every single day, and new people are coming in and identifying as an influencer," said Patrick O'Keefe, chief integrated marketing officer at E.l.f. Beauty. "I would love a model or a plan or a program that would capture all the new people coming into this space in real time."
"We've just seen this space get so much more saturated than it ever has before," said Kiara Kempski, vice president of global consumer marketing at The Knot Worldwide. "The game of scale is totally changing."
2. Breaking through the noise
"The feed is so loud right now," said Anna Doré, Rothy's vice president of brand and communications. "In this AI-driven algorithm world where we're all being served the same content on the feed, we, more than ever, are going to be looking to great tastemakers."
"There is a ton of content that's just content for content's sake that's out there," said Ian Trombetta, the National Football League's senior vice president of global social, creator, and content marketing. "The creative bar is going up in order for us to drive that organic reach and engagement."
Ninety to 95% of the content that we see in our own feeds is not from accounts we follow, Keurig Dr Pepper's Lindsay Burstein said. "Followership matters a little, but not nearly as much as I think it once did because the algorithms just don't favor it the way that we used to."
3. Agreeing on content that works for both a brand and a creator's audience
Some brands "are a little bit too prescriptive and don't allow the creators to do what it is that they really are good at, which is understanding their audience and how to create great content and formats that work for their audience," the NFL'sTrombetta said.
"Overbriefed" projects are "not the business that we want to be in," said Sophia Sesto, Poppi's vice president of culture. "We want to take these opportunities and work with the talent to make something special" and "lean into their personalities and let them carry the brand forward with us."
"For a long time, the industry treated creators as ad placements," said Samim Sadrzadeh, director of creator content and partnerships at Disney. "We think that significantly undersells the value they actually bring."
"We start from a pretty simple place, which is creators know their audiences better than we ever will," said Stacy Martinet, Adobe's chief content and creative officer. "The most effective approach has been to treat creators as creative partners, first and foremost."
Led by Chris Balfe, Red Seat made its name running sales and production services for podcasters including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Nancy Grace.
Now, as the lines between creators, podcasters, and writers continue to blur, it's adding newsletter functionality to its stack. The newsletter feature will live under Supercast, a company Red Seat bought this year that offers a menu of subscription options like livestreaming for creators. They can now build free and paid newsletters and track their performance on a dashboard. The newsletter feature is included in Supercast's base pricing of $0.59 per subscriber per month, with custom pricing available for big networks and media companies.
"We want to be a one-stop shop for creators," Balfe told Business Insider. "Whereas Substack has done a really good job going after written-first creators, and then adding podcasting capability on top of that, we're going at it from the other direction and saying, for most of the creators that we work with, their audio and video is their main business. So, let's add other features like email and livestreaming."
Balfe pointed to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe of "Kill Tony" as an early example of Red Seat's success in using a multifaceted approach. Since launching a subscription, Kill Tony+, Hinchcliffe has signed up thousands of people who get his uncensored, ad-free show and bonus content.
Hinchcliffe plans to create another, super-expensive tier where people would pay to get roasted by him, Balfe said.
"It would be like $10,000 or something like that to roast you," Balfe said. "We will sell out of these so bad."
He also pointed to an early pilot of Supercast's livestreaming with "This American Life," which drew more than 1,700 paying audience members.
Red Seat is aiming for 10 big deals
Balfe wants to make Red Seat a creator-economy juggernaut, with some 200 shows. The company has around 30 shows now and is looking to do a lot more deals quickly, especially in sports, lifestyle, entertainment, and tech. Red Seat's top creator deals generally pay a minimum guarantee against projected sales.
"We really want to accelerate our rate of dealmaking," Balfe said. "I think if we did 10 big deals in the next 12 months, that would be big."
Balfe disagrees with industry insiders like iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman, who say podcast distribution deals are getting too expensive. He said there was strong advertiser demand and that hosts have the ability to branch out into other areas. Balfe said he's doing deals where the show itself accounts for as little as 60% of the revenue, with the rest coming from other projects.
Balfe also sees the potential for creators to make longer deals. YouTubers are often used to getting short-term ad deals, while Red Seat is pushing for 12-month partnerships for its clients, he said.
"We're trying to do annual deals," he said. "YouTubers are attracted to that sort of consistency that the podcast business model has allowed."
Podcasts are TV now
Podcasting has become more of a video-first medium as it has evolved from its audio roots.
Forty-four percent of US podcast consumers watched a video podcast in the past week, up from 40% in 2025, according to a report from trade group Sounds Profitable released this month. YouTube is the top podcast platform, used by 63% in the past 12 months, ahead of Spotify (33%), Netflix (21%), and Apple Podcasts (15%).
Balfe thinks video will continue to grow its share of the pie. People are watching more podcasts on YouTube, especially on TV screens. Spotify is making the case that video consumption outperforms audio on its platform.
Major streamers are also hungry for podcasts, and linear TV players like Versant's MS NOW are looking for lower-cost programming to fill their schedules. Red Seat's shows aren't running on Fox's linear networks today, but Balfe said it's only a matter of time before that happens.
"I look at the next phase of video opportunities, and we have every streamer that wants our content now: Hulu, Peacock, and Amazon Prime, and Paramount Plus," Balfe said. "We also have the linear guys that are starting to come to us and say, 'Actually, what you're producing looks kind of like a talk show. Maybe we should just put it in late night or daytime.'"
This week's cyber freakout explained: AI is making software weaknesses easier to find and exploit.
The message from Cloudflare's Stephanie Cohen and Vercel's Tom Occhino: Don't panic!!!
Do we need everything connected to the internet? Paper bank statements work well.
A few weeks ago, I heard a strange story about a friend who works at one of the Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley.
She'd recently ripped out the connected devices in her home, ordered paper bank statements, and stocked up on canned goods in her basement.
Now, she's a very sane, experienced person, and quite senior at one of the largest internet companies on earth. Why was she disconnecting so much? Just to be sure, my family ordered paper bank statements, too. It was still a head-scratcher, though.
Fast forward to this week, and her actions look a little less crazy.
The digerati have now entered full freakout mode. Much of the internet meltdown is happening on, well, the internet, my colleague Alice Tecotzky noted.
On X and Reddit, warnings of a looming “Black October” spiraled into visions of AI grinding civilization to a halt. One lengthy post on X warned of a potential “global cyberattack/AI swarm” and offered a survival checklist: Stockpile cash in small bills, print out your neighbors' phone numbers, download maps, buy a hand-crank radio, and stash a gallon of water per person per day.
Oh, and don't forget the manual can opener. You don't want to survive the AI apocalypse only to be defeated by a tin of beans.
Nikita Bier, a prominent app developer and former head of product at X, best captured the mood.
"The world is a little bit scary right now," she told me on the side of Cloudflare's annual conference in San Francisco this week.
Here's the problem. The internet is built on decades of software, much of it riddled with security holes.
Some of these weaknesses have been known for years. However, fixing them takes time and money, and hackers often lacked the skills to exploit them anyway. So they were left alone.
AI changesthat calculation dramatically. Someone who previously needed years of training to break into a computer system can now get help from an AI model. And these tools can search for weaknesses at a speed humans simply can't match.
Now, there's a frantic race between people trying to break into systems and those trying to protect them.
Don't panic about AI
Cohen's message, though, was surprisingly reassuring.
AI helps the good guys find and fix these problems. Cloudflare, for instance, released protections for the latest vulnerability to customers, including those using its free service.
And there's a bigger effort underway.
OpenAI has launched an initiative called Patch the Planet, working with Cloudflare and other security professionals to use AI to find weaknesses in widely used software and help repair them.
Tom Occhino, chief product officer at Vercel, told me recently that his company has been talking with partners about launching a nonprofit that would fund a swarm of good AI agents that go out on the internet to find and fix software flaws.
Amazon is joining the fight, too. Its new Continuum service, available Thursday, uses AI agents to find security holes and propose fixes. Amazon said that people maintaining freely available software can use it to help protect the wider internet.
Humans may still have to check and approve these repairs, but the prospect of AI helping clean up decades of neglected software is encouraging.
The irony of this is not lost on some in the industry.
"The funny thing is everyone was saying AI slop code will cause a cyber crisis but it's actually all the old human slop causing it and the AI is just cleaning it up," software engineer Ben Kaufman wrote on X on Thursday.
Either way, Cloudflare's Cohen thinks these AI-inspired freakouts will push the industry to do better — by exposing issues and adding urgency to get them patched.
"We may end up in a world where actually we've become significantly more secure at the end," she said.
The trouble is getting there.
A fundamental question about the internet
Tom Occhino (left), chief product officer at Vercel, talks with Meta executive Prashant Ratanchandani at Vercel's Ship SF conference.
Alistair Barr/Business Insider
When I ran into Occhino recently at a Vercel conference in San Francisco, he described a world in which software that everyone assumed was safe suddenly looksvulnerable because increasingly capable AI models are scrutinizing the basic systems that underpin the internet.
That led to a more fundamental discussion between us: Why did we connect so many things to the internet in the first place?
For years, the technology industry has raced to put everything online. Thermostats. Refrigerators. Doorbells. Cars. Bank accounts.
We assumed that connecting something to the internet automatically made it better.
Perhaps we should reconsider.
Before the internet
I remember the world before the internet. It worked pretty well. We managed to buy groceries, pay bills, heat our homes, and generally get through the day without every appliance talking to a computer somewhere.
That doesn't mean abandoning online banking or throwing your smartphone into the sea.
Occhino, for one, isn't particularly worried about hackers wiping out his bank account. Modern banks have sophisticated protections, and he recommends everyone turn on additional login security.
Maybe the cybersecurity crowd, which spends its life immersed in online threats, is missing something obvious.
Not everything needs to be connected.
Occhino put it neatly: "There's certain things that don't make sense to be on the internet in the first place."
Perhaps that's the lesson from this week's panic. We don't need to turn off the internet.
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