The sanctuary state of California released an illegal alien drug trafficker from jail after he was arrested for car theft, Breitbart News has learned. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents lodged a detainer, but it was ignored.
Instagram is offering some creators six figures to help make it a long-form video hub.
The Meta platform is reviving its IGTV ambitions, allowing horizontal videos of up to 90 minutes.
Creators are required to cross-post their long-form YouTube content to Instagram as part of nonexclusive deals.
Instagram wants what YouTube has — and it's willing to pay up to get it.
In an effort to persuade content creators to post long-form video on Instagram, the company is paying a select number of creators hefty sums, according to people familiar with the deals.
Not every deal is equal. The Meta-owned platform has offered select creators $50,000 to post long-form video to its new "Features" product, while others have been offered six-figure deals, some of which have reached $500,000, Business Insider exclusively learned.
"We've been public about the fact that we are funding Features content directly with some creators right now to support them," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider. "The details of those deals are confidential, but we're excited to see the content going live."
On Monday, Instagram unveiled an overhaul of its video formats. Most importantly, it's resurrecting IGTV — a long-form video product Instagram launched in 2018 and sunset in 2022 — in the form of Features. The horizontal, wide-screen videos will exist within the Instagram app, and can be as long as a feature film: 90 minutes.
Instagram is expanding its offerings for long-form video content.
Meta
Long-form video isn't exactly what people are used to watching on Instagram. Reels, the platform's answer to TikTok's meteoric rise, has redefined the Instagram experience and is driving time-spent and revenue across Meta's apps.
YouTube, however, reigns king as the internet's destination for sit-down, longer-form videos.
Instagram knows this. The deals do not require exclusivity to Instagram, multiple people familiar with the agreements said; one person familiar with the offers said it's asking creators to post to Instagram any of the long-form content they publish to YouTube that same day.
Reza Izad, partner at Underscore Talent, which reps clients like "Subway Takes'" Kareem Rahma and Noah Beck, called the deals an "exciting opportunity" for creators.
"Every time there's a new feature in these apps that the company's promoting, people will have more opportunity to be seen because there's going to be algorithmic preference to this kind of content," he said. "And unlike short-form, there's not a lot of abundance."
Money, money, money
This isn't the first time Instagram has inked paid deals with creators to lure them to post more on Meta's apps.
Last year, Meta was paying creators thousands of dollars to post short-form videos to Instagram and Facebook in the midst of TikTok's potential ban. The company has tested several bonus programs paying creators for the performance of their Reels on Instagram, though those programs have dwindled.
Back in 2021, when IGTV was still part of Instagram's big video bet, it inked deals with creators, funding long-form episodic shows from creators like TikTok's "Sway Boys" and "Dance Moms" alum Nia Sioux. Briefly, IGTV had its own monetization program, too, which let some creators earn a cut from ad revenue on the format.
While Instagram is paying some creators directly, a big question looms over the creator economy: What about the rest of them?
A major draw of YouTube is its long-standing Partner Program, which pays eligible creators a share of the ad revenue generated by their videos. Even though YouTube has increased its eligibility requirements, the potential to turn a hobby or passion project into a cash-earning career has kept YouTube on top as the go-to video platform for creators.
It's no surprise, then, that when Instagram announced its video overhaul, creators immediately had questions about monetization.
"We understand the economics matter a ton, and are exploring multiple options to help long-form creators get paid," Instagram's top executive, Adam Mosseri, wrote in an X post on Wednesday.
Kathy Villalba sent an "urgent" memo asking residents for financial support.
Suy SE / AFP via Getty Images
The boss of Villa Vie Residences sent passengers an "urgent" appeal for financial help in August.
Three months before the cruise halted in Cambodia, CEO Kathy Villalba warned of soaring fuel costs.
"We have now reached a critical point," she wrote. Read the full message to residents below.
Almost three months before Villa Vie Residences suspended operations on Tuesday, leaving residents of the "never-ending" cruise stranded in Cambodia, the company had already warned the Odyssey's residents that it was running out of money for fuel.
In an August 1 memo to residentslabeled "urgent," Villa Vie CEO and founding partner Kathy Villalba asked residents for financial contributions to buy fuel.
The memo, which Business Insider reviewed, said the company needed to make"immediate and creative operational decisions to preserve the voyage."
The company behind the 509-cabin ship had promised a permanent life at sea and a voyage around the world every three-and-a-half years for its residents. That came to an abrupt halt on Tuesday, when residents were told to disembark with only a few hours' notice.
In a Tuesday statement announcing it had halted operations, Villa Vie said it had taken "significant steps to reduce fuel consumption" after prices rocketed following the onset of the US-Israel war with Iran in February, but that these steps had not been enough.
Villa Vie founder Mikael Petterson told Business Insider in a phone call on Wednesday that the fuel price surge triggered a "cascading effect" that culminated in the suspension of operations.
Financial pressures became clear to residents in April, two months after the war in Iran began, when Villa Vie asked residents to loan the company money, offering interest rates of 12% to 24%, according to a separate letter viewed by Business Insider.
And by August, Villa Vie had reached a "critical point," according to Villalba's message, which you can read in full below.
Villalba, Petterson, and Villa Vie did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Business Insider.
URGENT OPERATIONAL UPDATEConfidentiality Reminder: This communication contains confidential and proprietary information intended solely for current Residents and authorized participants of the Villa Vie community. It is being shared through Circle as part of our commitment to transparency and open communication. We respectfully ask that you do not repost, forward, or otherwise distribute this information outside of Circle without the prior written consent of Villa Vie Residences.Dear Residents,We want to provide you with a direct, straightforward update regarding Odyssey's current operational realities.When the fuel contribution was requested several months ago, participation was not universal. The contributions received helped some, but they covered only part of the extraordinary increase in fuel costs. Since then, the company has exhausted its available reserves covering the remaining shortfall and keeping Odyssey moving.We had hoped that improving conditions in the region would begin to stabilize fuel prices. Unfortunately, the continued conflict and renewed market disruption have caused prices to rise sharply again. This is not simply an itinerary issue. It is an immediate cash-flow challenge that directly affects our ability to purchase the fuel required to continue the voyage.Odyssey currently needs approximately 650 metric tons of fuel. Under normal market conditions, that fuel would cost approximately $450,000. At today's prices, the cost is nearly double ($800,000).We have now reached a critical point. The lack of full participation, combined with the unprecedented increase in fuel costs, means we must make immediate and creative operational decisions to preserve the voyage.We are working toward receiving a partial fuel delivery as early as Monday. Our berth is available until Friday, August 7 at 4:00 p.m., subject to final confirmation from the port agent and Singapore Port Authority. The current recommendation is to remain alongside until August 7 and then sail at a slower, more economical speed to Nha Trang for our scheduled arrival on August 12.We are asking every Resident who did not previously contribute to please do so now. We are also asking those who are able to provide additional support to consider helping with this immediate fuel requirement.While every Resident has a contract with Villa Vie, this international crisis has created costs far beyond the circumstances contemplated when those agreements were made. The financial need is real, immediate, and necessary to keep Odyssey moving. This is a moment when preserving our home and continuing the voyage requires support beyond contractual minimums from those who are able to provide it.To conserve fuel and reduce operating costs, we will cancel Brunei and proceed directly from Singapore to Nha Trang. This will help reduce the expense, but it does not eliminate the need to fund the required bunkering.We will provide another update as soon as the fuel, berth, and departure arrangements are confirmed.Thank you for your understanding and support.— VVR Management."
From the high-stakes action of "Lioness" to the holiday adventure of "A Very Arctic Christmas," Jill Wagner is taking on two very different worlds.
But off camera, the actress has traded Hollywood's hustle for a quieter life raising her two daughters on a Tennessee farm in a town of just 800 people — where horses and buggies are still a familiar sight.
"First of all, I love Tennessee … I'm from the South. I'm from North Carolina," she told Fox News Digital. "I love the people here but especially love the small-town mentality."
"I was at the post office this morning and one of the Mennonites was in front of me … I got to look at their horse and buggy," she said.
Wagner said the small-town atmosphere has become an important part of the childhood she and her husband want to give their girls.
The actress explained why she hopes her daughters will eventually appreciate the slower pace, even if they someday follow in her footsteps and move to bigger cities.
WATCH: JILL WAGNER TRADES HOLLYWOOD HUSTLE FOR TENNESSEE FAMILY LIFE
"In some ways, going back to a simpler, slower pace … I think as we get older, or at least I know I can speak for myself, as I get older, I really value that," she added.
Wagner knows the pull of Hollywood firsthand. She left home at 17 to pursue a career in entertainment and suspects her daughters may one day be eager to spread their own wings.
But she hopes they'll always remember what their upbringing gave them.
"And I'm sure they'll do the same, but I hope what it does is bring them back to the simple-ness of life and what it can be … That's a gift that my husband and I gave them, and they probably don't even know it yet," she said.
Away from the action of "Lioness," Wagner is embracing the holiday spirit in "A Very Arctic Christmas," reuniting with Cameron Mathison for a festive adventure.
Wagner plays Jane, a wildlife conservationist who helps a father and daughter navigate an unexpected Arctic adventure after their holiday cruise goes off course.
The actress said working with Mathison brings plenty of laughs to "A Very Arctic Christmas" set.
"There's never any dull moment when you have Cameron Mathison and I on set together. In fact, it's hard for us to get through a scene without laughing, I'm sure. Robin Dunne, the director, is always rolling his eyes, like, ‘Oh, guys, guys, guys, guys, bring it in,'" she laughed.
WATCH: JILL WAGNER DISHES ON THE ON-SET CHAOS WITH CO-STAR CAMERON MATHISON
For Wagner, the holiday films also have a personal connection.
The actress has found ways to include her daughters in her Christmas-movie tradition.
When Wagner's daughters were younger, she included them in one of her films as extras, giving them a chance to sit on Santa's lap.
Now that they're older, Wagner said they understand that Christmas movies are a genre of their own — and she hopes the experience becomes a lasting family tradition.
"And I just hope that one day when I'm long and gone, that is a tradition with each other's families is that they get on Christmas, and they get to watch that movie and just kind of laugh at the fact that we're all in a movie together at Christmas," she added.
While Wagner's career continues to take her between intense action roles and feel-good holiday projects, she values sharing those experiences with her daughters while giving them a childhood rooted in small-town life.
When Fox News Digital asked whether her daughters were becoming the Tennessee farm girls she had envisioned, Wagner admitted there's still some work to do.
"So, I don't know about farm girl. I know that … they love outdoors. They don't necessarily like doing farm work. So, we're trying to still work on that," she laughed.
"They do love running around barefooted in the dirt, and they can play outside all day long, which I love for them," Wagner said.
The family hopes to add chickens and goats when Wagner's work schedule allows more time at home.
"Maybe one day we'll get a horse or a pony for them," she added.
But for Wagner, the biggest perk of small-town life isn't just the farm — it's the neighbors who show up when it matters.
Her family owns Scott Mansion Farms, where they host charitable events benefiting the Special Operations Warrior Foundation and Dolly Parton's Children's Hospital. Wagner said the community's support has been especially meaningful.
"But the fact that people just show up at the gate and say, ‘What can we do to help?’ I think it just reminds me of how amazing humanity is … and how very special it is to have good neighbors," she said.
Wagner also hopes her daughters inherit her love of local festivals and community traditions.
Zach Reitano, co-founder and chief executive officer of Ro.
Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Telehealth company Ro is launching an AI agent trained on customer data.
The agent can recommend prescription changes, schedule deliveries, or write memos to a doctor.
Eventually, Ro hopes to make it a "quarterback" for care. Will it improve outcomes?
Wouldn't it be great if we all had a little, digital minion handling all the small back-and forth chores of our medical care?
On Thursday, Ro is officially announcing the launch of its new AI health agent, designed to do more than a health inquiry on ChatGPT. It's the latest in a long lineup of healthcare agents — from insurers, telehealth providers, electronic health record systems, and regular chatbots — promising to cut down patient wait times, increase access to care, and improve personalized health recommendations with AI.
Ro CEO and co-founder Zach Reitano gave Business Insider an exclusive preview of Ro's new agent, called Robin, showing us how the tool could be used to perform routine tasks like managing side effects, meal planning, or making medication changes.
Ro's new AI agent, named Robin, is like a "quarterback" for healthcare, Reitano said. Will it work?
Ro
A founder's mission: disrupt healthcare delivery with AI agents
Reitano said this isn't just about making life more convenient for Ro's current subscribers, though that is the starting point. His long-term goal is to identify pain points where Ro customers need to seek out specialists for common conditions or prescriptions, then start offering more and more of that care in-house, becoming your go-to "quarterback" for the entire American healthcare system.
"I think it's very unlikely to me that one provider or one system handles 100% of someone's care, but I do think it is quite likely that there is one place in someone's life that serves as that quarterback and helps them navigate the rest of the healthcare system," he said. "We hope to be able to just continue to increase those concentric circles, where instead of saying you might be better suited outside of the Ro ecosystem, we would want you to be better suited in it."
When I asked him if his "ultimate goal" is to become a full-service virtual clinic, he said yeah, that's the hope.
For now, Ro's AI agent uses information that's already stored in the app, including notes from doctors, patient feedback, prescriptions, and Apple Health data to try to personalize recommendations for medication changes, dosing tweaks, or habits that might improve side effects.
It's meant to be more instinctively knowledgeable about your health than ChatGPT — requiring less prompting or uploading health data, since it already has information about patients on file. It can suggest a change in medication, and then go ahead and write a first draft of a note to your doctor, if you want it to.
"The underlying premise is: If I have your underlying health information, I can provide more informed and better things, better recommendations," telehealth researcher Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, chair of the health policy department at Brown University, said.
Only issue is, we don't yet know if that's true.
"People are giving up a lot of data for this, and so you really have to say that it truly is going to give you something," Mehrota added. "It sounds cool in theory, I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I would love some evidence before millions of Americans start doing this."
Personally, Mehrotra says he'd be much more likely to try out one of the AI agents embedded into an official electronic health record system, which has access to everything he's told his regular doctors and specialists within a specific hospital system and which — critically — has to abide by strict privacy rules. (Business Insider did not see Ro's privacy policy for Robin.)
"My health system doesn't have the weird financial incentives that we're worried about with Ro," he said. "More data, less financial incentives, I might use that."
Reitano says ultimately, it's not in his company's interests to go after short-term profits at the expense of a good patient experience.
"We fight for patients, and we serve you, and if we don't, then we go out of business," he said.
Charles Lamanna, head of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, just took over Office and Teams.
Teams within his new combined unit have adopted flatter structures amid the rise of AI agents.
He's also enforced a stricter RTO for senior staff, and offered employees relocation to major hubs.
Microsoft's head of the Copilot platform, AI agents, and now Office is making good on his promise to reshape how his teams work.
"The most important thing my team will do this year won't be any single product or feature we ship: instead, it will be changing how we work," Charles Lamanna, the new boss of this key Microsoft unit, wrote in August.
Lamanna has started requiring senior staff to work in offices four days a week, and he's offering relocation to major hubs, according to people familiar with the changes. Teams within his organization have also reorganized to a flatter structure removing middle managers in line with Lamanna's views about how agentic AI is changing engineering.
"We're rethinking where managerial layers are critical and where flatter structures can enable faster decision-making, clearer ownership and greater autonomy," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
The moves offer an early look at how Microsoft is reworking its software empire for the AI age. Lamanna, who already oversees the company's Copilot and AI agent platforms, now controls the Office productivity software and Teams workplace chat service that are used by millions of workers.
Lamanna took over those groups earlier in October when the previous boss, Ryan Roslansky, announced plans to leave at the end of the year. Roslansky was seen as a successor to Microsoft veteran Rajesh Jha, who retired in July. Roslansky and Lamanna were two of the three executives who made up the new Copilot leadership team.
The changes come as CEO Satya Nadella reshapes the company around AI. Microsoft has been consolidating responsibility for its AI products, and a wave of senior executive departures has made way for a new generation of leaders.
"Span of control"
Lamanna's expanding responsibilities make him a key player in this leadership transition, giving him oversight of Microsoft's flagship workplace software and the AI tools that could change how customers use its products.
Recently, the Teams unit now under Lamanna reorganized by increasing the "span of control" for managers in engineering, according to two of the people familiar with the changes.
This refers to the number of employees who report to each manager, and it's become common for tech companies to flatten engineering organizations like this in the AI era, as coding tools and agents write more software.
The reorganization included converting managers to individual contributors, the people said. The idea is that agentic coding capabilities mean Microsoft needs fewer managers, according to one of the people. The team will now have a ratio of one manager per 12 individual contributors.
"Agentic coding capabilities have changed every level of the engineering function," Microsoft's spokesperson said. "Software engineers are no longer hand-assembling every line of code. Instead, they are now designing and directing the 'agentic coding machine' that helps build the product."
As AI makes it easier to build software, skills like making sound technical decisions, designing systems, ensuring quality and security, and understanding customer needs become more valuable.
"At the same time, some tasks that traditionally required managerial coordination, such as managing handoffs and orchestrating work across teams, become less central," the spokesperson said.
Other teams have implemented similar restructuring, the spokesperson confirmed.
RTO and relocation
Lamanna has also started reshaping where employees work. Last week, Lamanna's Copilot, Agents, and Platform (CAP) organization offered select US employees the option to relocate to offices at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington headquarters, San Francisco, or New York, according to three people familiar with the plans.
The people who spoke with Business Insider for this story asked not to be identified discussing internal matters.
Lamanna has also asked employees at the "partner" level and above — some of Microsoft's most senior staff — to start working in physical offices at least four days a week. The companywide standard is three days a week.
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Microsoft is offering buyouts to about a quarter of its workforce.
In an internal memo, Microsoft's finance boss said the company expects "very few people" to accept.
Employees had been questioning the rationale behind the offer, the memo said.
Microsoft expects 3,000 or fewer employees to accept the buyout it offered this week to more than a quarter of its workforce, a spokesperson told Business Insider.
The point was reiterated on Wednesday by Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood, who wrote in an internal memo that employees have been questioning the rationale behind the buyout.
"I know there have been some questions on the rationale behind the voluntary exit offer that we announced this week," Hood wrote. "Our intent is to offer employees agency if they choose to leave the company on their own terms. We expect very few people to select this offer because of the growth opportunities here at Microsoft."
The memo statement was part of a quarterly earnings email Hood typically sends internally to employees every quarter when Microsoft discloses its financials.
These memos mostly repeat what the company reports publicly, but this time Hood went out of her way to address the buyout offer, which caused quite a stir across the tech industry this week.
Earlier this year, Microsoft offered a different retirement buyout. In that situation, about one-third of eligible employees took the offer, and that helped Microsoft cut fewer employees in subsequent layoffs.
This week's buyout is getting a lot less uptake, according to the company.
Read the CFO's full memo
Team,
This afternoon, we announced our first-quarter financial results. We exceeded Wall Street expectations, growing revenue 19% and operating income 21%.
With the start of FY27, we also made an important change to how we report our business. We announced that we changed our reporting structure for the first time in 12 years, moving from three segments to two: Agents and Infra, and Devices and Consumer. This change better reflects how we are running the business today — from how we build products and allocate resources to how we create value for customers across the connected layers of our platform. To give you a sense of the two segments, looking back to last fiscal year, Agents and Infra would have represented about 81% of our revenue while Devices and Consumer would have been 19%.
A few highlights from the quarter across our two new segments:
Agents and Infra grew revenue 23% this quarter
Microsoft Cloud revenue was $63.9 billion and accelerated to 30%. Azure revenue increased 48% reflecting accelerating Foundry demand.
Microsoft 365 commercial cloud revenue increased 18% in constant currency driven by growth in our premium seat offerings like Copilot and E7 as well as usage-based services across M365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot.
Microsoft 365 commercial seats increased 5% and the number of customers with more than 50,000 M365 Copilot seats increased 8x year-over-year.
Microsoft 365 consumer cloud revenue increased 17% with subscriber growth of 7%.
Industry solutions cloud revenue increased 10% with growth in Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn Talent Solutions.
Devices and Consumer declined 3% this quarter
Search and advertising revenue ex-TAC increased 12%, with growth across LinkedIn, Bing, and Edge.
Windows OEM and devices revenue decreased 22%, reflecting the prior-year benefit from Windows 10 end of support, inventory drawdowns by OEM partners, and weaker PC market demand. XBOX content and services revenue decreased 2%. Last week, we launched Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, as we continue to bring great games to more players across more devices.
Thank you for everything you did to deliver a strong start to the year. In particular, I want to thank our engineering and capacity delivery teams who are working to help us deliver more capacity faster and with high reliability. These teams are also using the capacity we have more efficiently to create room for us to better meet customer demand for the Azure platform, which continues to exceed our supply.
I know there have been some questions on the rationale behind the voluntary exit offer that we announced this week. Our intent is to offer employees agency if they choose to leave the company on their own terms. We expect very few people to select this offer because of the growth opportunities here at Microsoft. We'll continue to provide a broad set of options for employees to learn, gain new skills, and advance their careers here.
We have tremendous opportunity ahead of us. To meet the moment, we are focused on delivering great products and solutions that help our customers to achieve their many goals — security, innovation, growth — to name a few. Thank you for keeping positive, value-creating outcomes for our customers at the top of the list.
To hear more details about the quarter and our outlook for Q2, you can join live today at 2:30PM Pacific Time, listen on-demand, or read the transcript on the Investor Relations website. Finally, mark your calendars for Microsoft Ignite, on November 17-20, where we'll show how our innovation across AI, cloud, data, security, and Copilot is coming together to help customers transform their businesses.
AI coding startup Cogniton is fielding offers for a new funding round.
The round could value Cognition between $70 billion and $80 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The new offers come weeks after the company announced a $2 billion round at a $48 billion valuation.
Just weeks after announcing a new round of funding at a $48 billion valuation, AI coding startup Cognition is fielding new investor interest at a much higher price.
The startup has received offers valuing it at between $70 billion and $80 billion and is seriously considering a round before the end of the year, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The talks around the financing are still early, and valuation targets could still change.
Founded in 2023 by Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan, Cognition is best known for Devin, an AI coding agent designed to automate software engineering tasks. The San Francisco-based company's existing investors include a16z, Accel, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Elad Gil, and Pear VC.
Cognition's rapid valuation climb underscores the investor frenzy around AI coding, one of the hottest and most competitive corners of the AI market. As companies race to sell AI coding agents that can take on more of the work engineers do, investors are placing increasingly expensive bets on the few startups they think could emerge as leaders.
Last month, Cognition was drawn into a public feud with rival Factory AI, which accused Cognition employees of posing as job applicants to seek product information and faulted a former Factory adviser for meeting with Cognition executives. Cognition and the former adviser denied that confidential information was sought or shared.
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Andrew Morse ran digital for CNN, then spent more than three years running The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Now he's cofounded Phareo, a platform aimed at creators and people who like them.
Andrew Morse
The startup world is littered with companies that tried to become the next YouTube.
Andrew Morse is trying it again, anyway.
Morse's pitch: a curated app that gives creators incentives a reason to give it exclusive content.
Are you sick of the algorithms that serve you video on giant platforms like YouTube and TikTok?
Or are you a video-maker who's sick of the algorithms that don't serve your stuff to would-be watchers?
Andrew Morse would like to talk to you.
Morse, who spent years working in big media (Bloomberg, CNN) and most recently in local news (The Atlanta Journal-Constution), is building Phareo, a startup he hopes will one day rival internet media heavyweights. The secret sauce, he says: his own AI-powered discovery engine that will make both video-watchers and video-makers happy.
This is, to put it politely, a very tall order.
But it's still worth talking about, since Morse is homing in on a problem you hear a lot about in creator circles these days: the sense that people who make content are getting increasingly bad deals from platforms, because they can't control who sees their stuff.
Phareo (the name is an allusion to Pharos, the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria) says it can solve that problem by giving creators real incentives to make exclusive stuff for the company, via levers like revenue share and options. Morse plans to launch in January with an initial group of 25 creators. The app will start out as a free, ad-supported service, but he hopes to eventually offer a paid tier.
I talked to him this week about his plans, the shifting media landscape, and why he's increasingly worried about the creator economy — at the same time he's launching a creator economy app. This is an edited excerpt of our conversation:
Peter Kafka: You have a classic chicken/egg problem: Consumers are not going to use a new app unless it has compelling content they can't get somewhere else. Content-makers don't want to put their stuff there unless there's a big audience.
Andrew Morse: It is the most important question we have to solve. It starts with dissatisfaction, and it starts with a belief from consumers and creators, that they're not being currently served as well as they could be. So we're working with creators who believe that there has to be a better alternative.
We don't really have anything to lose, given the direction that the platforms are taking and given the overreliance that their creative work has on algorithms that don't serve them. We're going to build with creators and try to build a super-passionate core and grow from there.
But YouTube, TikTok, Reels, etc do a great job of giving me tons of video. And they have unlimited content. How do you move me over from the platforms I'm already using?
It's an ironic conundrum — we're trying to solve the discovery problem, but we have to be discovered ourselves.
Over the years, I've seen many companies say they're trying to solve a discovery problem. But it doesn't seem like consumers have a discovery problem. It's the content owners who have a problem getting their stuff in front of consumers. What's the incentive for consumers to move to a platform content-owners like?
There's an inherent assumption that consumers are satisfied with the platforms. I don't think that that's true. I think consumers are on these platforms because they have to be. Whether they're getting what they want in an efficient way is an entirely different story.
Any advice for your former CNN colleagues who are now working for David Ellison?
Stay focused on the work. It's always the journalism that matters. And the truth and the facts and great storytelling will always rise to the top.
We have seen a steady stream of journalists leaving places like CNN and starting their own thing. Do you think that trend accelerates or stalls out as people realize how difficult it is to do solo media for a living?
I'm concerned about this creator economy — which is really about about businesses that have built themselves on the back of YouTube. If you go back to 2016, 2017, a number of really clever, really creative businesses were built on the back of social platforms. When the algorithms changed, it became almost impossible for these businesses to stay afloat. It was hard for us at CNN, but we had a big enough business that we were able to mitigate and ride the wave. For these other companies, it was disastrous.
I think you're going to see more and more people trying to go out on their own — and that's what scares me. Because I think that the sands may begin to shift a little bit.
Dalet Labs, an AI commerce startup, is coming out of stealth mode with a $7 million pre-seed round.
It's launching a new app called Scene, where you can scroll through shoppable, AI-generated images.
Read the 5-page pitch deck the startup used to raise capital — months before finalizing its product.
Would you shop from a feed of AI-generated images?
The startup Dalet Labs is betting you will.
The AI-commerce company exclusively told CMO Insider that it raised a $7 million pre-seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and is launching its first product, a shopping app called Scene.
Founded by Omer Bar-Tal in 2025 after he left the AI video startup Runway, Dalet Labs recently came out of stealth mode. The startup raised its pre-seed in late 2025, before finalizing its product road map. In addition to Lightspeed, venture capital firm SV Angel and individual angel investors participated in the round.
Lisa Han, the Lightspeed partner who led the round, said that Bar-Tal has a combination of "video AI research expertise" and a "deep understanding of what consumers want."
Scene, which became available on the Apple App Store in the US on Wednesday, lets people scroll through a feed of shoppable AI-generated images. The app will be invite-only at launch, and isn't yet available on Android. While the images of people or scenes are AI-generated, the products themselves come from real brands across categories like fashion, home decor, and sports.
Scene is a feed of AI-generated images that link directly out to actual products.
Dalet Labs
Bar-Tal envisions Scene as a tool people can turn to when they want to buy something but are still uncertain about exactly what they have in mind. It's similar to scrolling through Pinterest or TikTok in hopes of being inspired to buy something, but Bar-Tal said there's a key difference: You come to Scene to shop, not be entertained.
Bar-Tal sees Scene as a virtual "mall" where users can window-shop, save items to their cart, and make purchases.
Commerce has become an increasingly attractive use case for AI tools like chatbots and agents (including Meta's Muse). However, Bar-Tal argues that AI shopping tools are missing something.
"AI is amazing when you know what you want, but it's really important to actually have an ability to discover and to see things," Bar-Tal said. Agentic commerce, he added, "misses the point in shopping — which is essentially a delightful experience."
As a Scene user scrolls and interacts with products linked in the app, the feed adapts to what type of brands or items the user is interested in. Then, Scene uses AI to generate scenes with people wearing or using those items.
Bar-Tal did not comment on which third-party models Dalet Labs uses.
Bar-Tal said Dalet Labs doesn't see its product as replacing influencers, but rather as "complementary."
"The content here is AI, but it is not aiming to replace creators because we are not aiming to create entertainment," he said.
However, even if Scene isn't competing with influencers for entertaining content, it's still competing with their business model: making money by promoting brands' products and ultimately driving sales.
Scene has a catalog of hundreds of brands and retailers, Bar-Tal said, and is making more partnerships. The company did not share further details on what brands Dalet Labs has already established relationships with.
Bar-Tal said the company is also leveraging affiliate marketing to monetize the app early on, working with affiliate networks to earn from each in-app transaction.
Dalet Labs' Scene is entering a crowded market of apps offering people ways to discover brands and goods, like TikTok's growing Shop presence in the US or Pinterest's visual search prowess. Startups like Doji and Alta have also raised millions on the promise of tech that lets people try on clothes using AI-generated versions of themselves.
How will Dalet Labs get people to download an entirely new app?
Using influencers and social media to promote the app will be a core part of Dalet Labs' user acquisition plan. It also plans to roll out a coupon campaign during the holidays, offering new users discounts on purchases made through the Scene app. Bar-Tal didn't share whether the discounts would be funded by Scene or by brand partners.
The New York-based startup, meanwhile, is using its pre-seed funding to hire more engineers and researchers to build out Scene.
Read the 5-page pitch deck Dalet Labs used to raise its $7 million pre-seed:
Courtesy of Dalet Labs
The deck starts with background on the technology
Courtesy of Dalet Labs
Here's what the slide says:
For over half a century, every major shift in computing has been driven by an interface revolution.
The move from terminals to graphical user interfaces (GUIs) transformed computers from expert tools into mass-market products.
The rise of the web and mobile extended that pattern: each new medium made digital interaction more visual, intuitive, and consumable.
Text, by nature, demands active cognitive effort; Visual interfaces go a step further by allowing users to grasp high bandwidth information almost instantly with minimal cognitive effort.
Then it explains Dalet Labs' thesis
Courtesy of Dalet Labs
Here's what the slide says:
Today, artificial intelligence represents the most profound computing shift since the PC. Yet, paradoxically, our interface to AI remains stuck in the terminal era.
We converse with models through text prompts and receive text streams in return in synchronous manner. Our product thesis is simple and inevitable: AI requires a native GUI.
We believe the GUI to AI will not be code-based, but rather generated by media models.
It then outlines the competition
Courtesy of Dalet Labs
Here's what the slide says:
The core product of AI consumption platforms is inseparable from their textual chat interfaces.
For example, the OpenAI brand is strictly associated with the chat interface of ChatGPT.
Moreover, by decoupling the user interface from any specific model provider, we can integrate multiple frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or open-source systems) and focus our innovation on the new media generation GUI platform. This modularity becomes increasingly valuable as AI models are commoditized. In addition, their technical stacks are anchored in the code generation paradigm, in contrast to our focus on Media Models.
Finally, it introduces Dalet Labs' founder
Courtesy of Dalet Labs
Here's what the slide says:
Omer Bar-Tal
Research experience from Weizmann Institute.
Built the first method for editing real-world videos using text
Papers in CVPR, ECCV, ICML, ICLR etc.
Trained video foundation models (Google, Pika, Runway)
Built creative applications with media models (eg video editing, reference-to-video, etc.)
Hugo Veiga and Diego Machado — the former AKQA global chief creative officers — spent two decades building brands at some of advertising's most storied creative agencies. Their next bet: a new type of agency that wants to be paid not just in cash, but in a share of the businesses it helps build.
Veiga and Machado exclusively told CMO Insider this week that they have launched !F Creative Capital, a company that combines conventional commissions with equity partnerships and revenue-sharing arrangements tied to clients' sales.
Rather than charging an upfront fee alone, !F Creative Capital offers creative consultancy in exchange for equity in companies it believes can grow. For example, it took a stake in the superfoods brand Authentic Fruits in a deal that includes a three-year creative engagement, a share of sales, and additional equity tied to sales performance. It has equity in CheckMy.Music, an AI platform that scans songs for plagiarism, and an equity partnership on a new project led by former Chelsea FC and Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti.
A long-held complaint on Madison Avenue is that agency holding companies prioritize businesses such as media buying — and, increasingly, data, technology, and AI services — because they are easier to package, measure, and sell repeatedly than bespoke creative work. Veiga and Machado said that !F Creative Capital was born out of a desire to create a model that more effectively ties the value of creative ideas to business results.
"In many of the creative industries, everyone is too busy doing decks, doing keynotes, and losing the connection with the final thing," Machado said.
!F Creative Capital has also launched its own brands, including SNIFF, a pet company that lets dogs smell food before their owners buy it, and Baitts, a toothpick brand.
Elsewhere, the company is coproducing a feature film set for release next year, and it's preparing to launch an eight-week "School of Creative Entrepreneurship" to help people turn their ideas into businesses.
While !F Creative Capital has taken on commission-based creative work for brands including Corona and Cristiano Ronaldo's Globe Sports Award, Veiga and Machado said they are reinvesting that money into the equity-focused side of the business and their in-house projects. !F Creative Capital is self-funded and has a team of around 15 people spanning seven countries, along with a broader network of contributors.
'You have an idea, and you give it for free'
Veiga said the long-term vision is for !F Creative Capital to become independent from commission work as it builds its own brands and effectively becomes its own client. The result might look more like a holding company for brands than the creative agencies where the duo made their name.
"A lot of times you have an idea, and you give it for free, or you push to make it happen without owning that," Machado said of the agency business.
Adland's creative agencies have explored similar equity-focused business models in the past. Uncommon, the London-based studio in which Havas acquired a majority stake in 2023, took equity in the compostable coffee pod company Halo and the finance app Communion. In 2010, former Deutsch exec Mike Duda cofounded the hybrid early-stage venture firm and creative agency that later became Bullish. Anomaly, now owned by Stagwell, began incubating and acquiring stakes in brands in the 2000s.
Brian Wieser, CEO of the advisory and consulting firm Madison and Wall, said that while the equity model still persists in the agency industry, the practice isn't common and mostly ties to the individuals running those companies because the skill sets are different.
"Most people who can do venture well focus on venture capital," Wieser said. "But the right person with the right relationships can make this happen."
Two associates of Sam Bankman-Fried invested in Anthropic. After they were sentenced for fraud, their shares entered a legal black hole.
ANGELA WEIS/Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
Sam Bankman-Fried's Anthropic stake was liquidated in bankruptcy court two years ago.
The feds seized shares belonging to two co-conspirators, Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh.
The government quietly sold those Anthropic shares last year. It's unclear where the money will go.
A little over a year ago, the federal government acquired a stake in Anthropic without paying a penny.
The shares were seized from associates of the crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. From there, they disappeared into a legal black hole.
As Anthropic rockets toward what could be the biggest IPO in history, those shares could now be worth billions of dollars.
Bankman-Fried's own Anthropic stake was liquidated in the bankruptcy of his failed cryptocurrency exchange. The Anthropic equity owned by Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, two associates who invested alongside him, took a different path. The government seized those shares and sold them to existing Anthropic shareholders, according to a person familiar with the sale.
It's still unclear whether the proceeds will be paid out to victims of the $11 billion fraud case, or if the feds will just keep the money.
It also remains a mystery which investors bought Singh's and Ellison's stock and how much they paid, but Anthropic shares have been on such a dizzying climb that it's likely those investors made a killing on them.
Bankman-Fried was convicted in 2023 on fraud and money laundering charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison after the collapse of his cryptocurrency empire. Prosecutors said he used his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, to siphon billions of dollars from customers of FTX, his crypto exchange.
The story of the crypto criminals' Anthropic shares is a tale with extraordinary elements, including one of the biggest financial frauds in modern history, a messy bankruptcy docket, and a company that experienced one of the fastest appreciations in business history as the world suddenly realized AI's existential importance.
An intelligent investment
Bankman-Fried, Singh, and Ellison each invested in Anthropic's 2022 Series B funding round. Bankman-Fried bought $500 million worth, which according to court records represented 13.56% of Anthropic at the time. Singh acquired $40 million in shares, and Ellison acquired $10 million in shares, court records reviewed by Business Insider show.
The Anthropic shares purchased by Singh and Ellison could together be worth between $4.17 billion and $5.03 billion today, based on the $965 billion valuation the company announced this May, according to Olav Sorenson, who teaches venture capital strategy at UCLA. Harrison Rolfes, an analyst at PitchBook, put the combined figure at $2.62 billion. If Anthropic went public at a $2 trillion valuation, the shares would be worth about $5.44 billion, Rolfes said.
Among Sam Bankman-Fried's many investments was a sizable stake in Anthropic, the AI company that has since soared in value.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Four of Bankman-Fried's close friends and executives at his companies pleaded guilty as co-conspirators. Three of them, including Singh and Ellison, testified against him.
After the collapse of FTX, Bankman-Fried's Anthropic shares — which were owned by Clifton Bay, an entity affiliated with Alameda Research — ended up in bankruptcy court along with the other dredged-up remains of his companies. His Anthropic shares were liquidated to pay FTX's creditors.
The estate in 2024 sold Bankman-Fried's Anthropic shares to a few dozen buyers for a total of $1.3 billion, more than double what he paid. The largest stake went to an entity affiliated with a United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund, bankruptcy court filings show.
The feds take a stake in Anthropic
As part of their sentences, a judge required Singh and Ellison to forfeit their Anthropic shares, which prosecutors said could be considered proceeds of their crimes.
At Singh's sentencing hearing, one of his attorneys, Andrew Goldstein, said Singh purchased his shares before participating in the criminal conspiracy and "he actually may have had a legitimate legal claim" to the shares but agreed to give them up as part of his plea agreement "because it was the right thing to do."
Reached for comment for this story, Goldstein told Business Insider that Singh hopes the government is able to quickly distribute proceeds of the sale to FTX victims. An attorney for Ellison declined to comment.
Nishad Singh was required to give up his shares of Anthropic as part of his sentence.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
A federal judge ordered Ellison's and Singh's Anthropic shares to be transferred to the federal government, which took ownership of Ellison's shares in February 2025 and Singh's in April of that year, according to previously unreported court records.
Ordinarily, victims of crimes are compensated through a restitution process, which is overseen by courts. But the number of potential FTX victims could be in the millions, prosecutors said in court filings. As a result, the judge ruled, victim compensation would be handled through a process called remission, which is overseen by the Justice Department.
During Ellison's sentencing hearing, Justice Department prosecutors told the judge that the DOJ would either set up its own claims administration process to compensate victims, or work with the FTX bankruptcy process to identify victims and provide forfeited funds to them.
At the time, FTX's bankruptcy process was in full swing. A Delaware court appointed Sullivan & Cromwell, the elite Wall Street law firm, to untangle the company's assets, figure out who was owed money, and pay them.
The creditors in the FTX bankruptcy, prosecutors noted, largely overlapped with FTX's victims. They were generally depositors, lenders, and investors who were defrauded by Bankman-Fried and other executives. Prosecutors said the Justice Department could work with the bankruptcy estate's lawyers to get money back to them, as it had in previous large-scale financial frauds such as Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
There was an unusual twist that set the FTX bankruptcy apart. Bankman-Fried's investments — especially the Anthropic shares, along with some cryptocurrency — had grown substantially in value since FTX's collapse. Earlier in 2024, the Sullivan & Cromwell lawyers who'd taken over FTX projected that all the creditors would be repaid in full, with interest.
The Marshals take control
While prosecutors said they intended to use Singh's and Ellison's Anthropic shares for remission, the Justice Department could technically do whatever it wanted with them, according to Duncan Levin, a white-collar defense attorney who teaches a course on forfeiture at Harvard Law School.
"It's a very opaque process," he said. "It's completely at the discretion, by law, of the attorney general of the United States."
Typically, when the feds seize shares of private companies through criminal asset forfeiture, they send the shares to the US Marshals Service Complex Assets Unit for liquidation. The unit tries to value the shares as any other investor would, said Michael Bachner, a white-collar criminal and securities litigation attorney.
"They may look to: What would an institutional purchaser pay for these securities?" Bachner said. "Are there funds that are valuing the securities? Is there a secondary market already out there?"
For the sale of the Anthropic shares, timing was crucial. The Marshals Service is supposed to preserve as much value as possible, Bachner said. By the time the feds got hold of the shares, Anthropic had become an economy-shifting AI giant. In its March 2025 Series E fundraising round, Anthropic was worth $61.5 billion. By its Series G round at the start of 2026, it was worth $380 billion.
At the same time, each fundraising round diluted the Series B shares. The FTX estate told the bankruptcy court that Bankman-Fried's shares, which in 2022 represented 13.56% of Anthropic, represented 7.84% of the AI company in January 2024.
Sunil Kavuri, a victim of Sam Bankman-Fried who has advocated for FTX creditors, said it would be "diabolical" for the government to hold onto the proceeds.
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
The Marshals Service sold Singh's and Ellison's shares to existing Anthropic investors sometime last year, according to the person with knowledge of the sale.
It's not clear when exactly the agency sold the shares, to which investors, how those investors were chosen, at what price the shares were sold, or how much money the government made in the sale. Depending on when they were sold in 2025, the combined shares could have been worth between $300 million and $1.1 billion, according to Sorenson, the UCLA professor. Rolfes, the PitchBook analyst, estimated a range between $250 million and $630 million, depending on the timing.
The Marshals Service declined to comment. A representative for the Justice Department said information about asset sales and victim compensation is confidential.
The revenue from the sale of Singh's and Ellison's Anthropic shares doesn't appear to have been transferred to the FTX estate as of the end of June this year, according to bankruptcy court filings from the estate, which continues to compensate victims and creditors.
The FTX estate received $638 million last year from assets seized by the Justice Department, according to the estate's annual report for 2025. It's not clear from the filings where those funds came from. The estate expects to receive about $400 million more from the government at some point in the future, according to the annual report. That would include proceeds from cryptocurrency and other investments made by Bankman-Fried.
One of Bankman-Fried's victims, Sunil Kavuri, told Business Insider that the Justice Department should use the proceeds of Ellison's and Singh's Anthropic shares to compensate victims. It would be "diabolical" for the government to hold onto the proceeds, he said.
Victims haven't actually been made whole, he said, because the bankruptcy court calculated the losses of FTX depositors using the time of FTX's bankruptcy declaration, when crypto prices were at a low ebb. Kavuri previously argued in bankruptcy court that the FTX estate should have held on to its Anthropic shares for longer to take advantage of the company's swift growth.
Representatives for the FTX estate declined to comment. The Justice Department spokesperson said the matter was ongoing, and that the DOJ "prioritizes victim compensation from forfeiture and takes all steps to ensure forfeited funds are provided to victims."
The government could end up just keeping the money, Bachner said.
"They've invested millions and millions and millions of dollars in prosecuting Bankman-Fried. And they want to get at least reimbursed for their costs, so sometimes they'll do that," he said. "It's really a unilateral government decision."
Jack Newsham and Katie Roof contributed reporting for this story.
Correction: August 31, 2026 — An earlier version of this story misstated the number of co-conspirators who testified against Sam Bankman-Fried. It was three.
Update: August 31, 2026 — This story has been updated to reflect Singh's role in the FTX fraud case.
Correction: October 27, 2026 — FTX bankruptcy court filings don't make clear where the Justice Department obtained the $638 million it transferred to the estate. A previous version of this story mischaracterized the filings.
Machenta cofounders Edward Johns and Vitalis Vosylius
Oscar May
Machenta raised $40 million in seed funding led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures.
It says robots can learn tasks from one demo using a model trained entirely in simulation.
The startup remains focused on research as it takes on multibillion-dollar rivals.
A London-based robotics startup is betting it can teach robots new tricks without collecting the mountains of real-world data its much bigger rivals are chasing.
Machenta, founded by researchers from Imperial College London, has raised a $40 million seed round to build an AI model that can teach robots new physical tasks after seeing them performed just once, the company exclusively told Business Insider. Venture capital firms Creandum and Union Square Ventures co-led the round. Machenta declined to disclose its valuation.
While rivals building general-purpose AI models for robots are scrambling to amass real-world data, Machenta is taking a contrarian approach. Edward Johns, the startup's CEO and cofounder, and an Imperial professor, said the company trains its model in computer-generated environments that mimic how objects move and interact, without using a "single pixel of real-world data."
Once trained, the model can direct a robot to perform a new task, such as tidying a table or putting objects into a box, after watching it done just once, without further training, Johns said. In a video shared with Business Insider, three robots pack and close a box on an assembly line, a task Johns said they learned this way.
The startup has 11 employees and remains focused on research, with no near-term plans to commercialize its technology. Its model can learn some tasks immediately, but more precise tasks and complex movements remain challenging.
Machenta faces rivals with multibillion-dollar valuations in one of robotics' most competitive and well-funded fields. Its California-based competitors include Physical Intelligence, valued at roughly $11 billion, and FieldAI, which is raising funding at a $10 billion valuation, Business Insider reported this month.
Another rival, Skild AI, which is valued at over $14 billion, is already selling technology with similar capabilities. In August, Skild unveiled a model that it said could perform previously unseen tasks lasting up to 10 minutes after a single video demonstration. Last month, it said that it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue from more than 60 customers.
From research lab to startup
Six years ago, Johns began investigating whether robots could learn new physical tasks as quickly as humans at his Imperial College lab.
In the lab's early experiments, researchers physically guided a robot through a task, such as picking up a spatula and scooping an object. The robot then spent about 30 minutes collecting additional data about the object and its surroundings before it could perform the task on its own.
Johns and former Ph.D. student Vitalis Vosylius spent the next few years working to eliminate that extra step, founding Machenta late last year after seeing early signs that their model could perform new tasks immediately after a demonstration.
Machenta's team
Oscar May
Companies are increasingly buying and collecting data to teach robots how to interact with the real world. But Johns believes simply collecting more data isn't the answer. It also remains unclear how much training data will be needed to make general-purpose robots a reality. Johns said that Machenta is taking on the harder challenge of designing algorithms that can generate synthetic data useful for teaching robots physical tasks.
Machenta plans to use the funding to expand its team and train its model with more computing power and simulated data, hoping to teach robots to perform more precise and complex tasks.
Have a tip? Contact Rya Jetha via email at rjetha@businessinsider.com or Signal at rjetha.07. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.
Panos Panay, head of Amazon's Devices and Services team
CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images
Amazon launched a series of new devices this month, including Alexa tablets and Bee AI wearables.
Rising memory costs forced "difficult trade-offs" on Amazon's device prices, sales, and profit.
Amazon is seeking more Alexa revenue from enterprise sales, licensing, and ads.
Amazon launched a flurry of new consumer devices this month. Behind the scenes, rising memory costs are adding pressure to its already money-losing hardware business.
An internal planning document obtained by Business Insider shows Amazon forecasting a $612 million gross loss this year for its first-party devices business, compared with a leadership target of a $438 million loss.
The document said rising memory costs were "putting pressure" on the business's profitability, forcing "difficult trade-offs" among sales volumes, average selling prices, and gross profit.
The projected $612 million loss was at the gross profit level, meaning it did not account for all operating expenses, such as R&D, sales and marketing, and administrative costs.
The figures offer a rare glimpse into the pressure on Amazon's hardware business as it absorbs rising component costs. Other tech hardware companies, including industry leader Apple, face similar pressure from surging memory chip prices.
An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.
A new wave of AI devices
Despite the pressure, Amazon continues to expand its consumer hardware lineup. Even if the company loses money on device sales, it can make money in other ways, such as subscription services, as more customers use its gadgets.
In October alone, the company introduced new Kindles, Alexa-powered tablets, Ring smart locks, and AI wearables under its Bee brand. The August planning document identified Bee and new smart glasses as strategic products still in an investment phase.
Amazon has historically used low-cost hardware to pull customers into a broader ecosystem of shopping and digital content. Rising component costs could make that strategy more expensive, forcing the company to raise prices.
The clearest shift is in Amazon's tablets. Earlier this month, the company phased out Fire tablets after 15 years and replaced the budget-friendly lineup with pricier Alexa Tablets powered by Alexa+. The new devices cost between $229.99 and $499.99, a notable increase from previous generations.
Not just Amazon
The planning document was prepared in August, the same month Amazon raised prices on products including Echo speakers, Kindle e-readers, and Fire TV devices.
The pressure extends beyond Amazon. Apple has raised prices on some Macs and iPads, while Microsoft and Sony have increased console prices. Dell, HP, and Lenovo also face higher memory costs.
The AI boom is helping drive the squeeze. Huge data center investments have increased demand for memory chips, while manufacturers have devoted more capacity to high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers. That has tightened supplies and raised prices for components used across consumer electronics.
Amazon is experiencing both sides of the boom. It expects roughly $220 billion in capital expenditures this year, largely to expand AWS data centers for AI demand, while higher component costs squeeze its consumer hardware business.
The rising cost of Alexa+
The August planning materials show Amazon reassessing both Alexa+ revenue and operating costs. They called for updated forecasts, expansion through enterprise sales and advertising, and more detailed AWS cost modeling.
Amazon is now confronting the cost of operating Alexa+ at scale. Business Insider reported in July that internal forecasts put Alexa+'s AWS cloud costs at roughly $1.7 billion in 2026, nearly triple the prior year's figure. Amazon was working to lower those costs by relying less on Anthropic's AI models and routing more requests to its own, cheaper systems.
A separate project called Moonraker, intended to give Alexa more advanced AI-agent capabilities, was projected to require more than $100 million in GPU spending this year. Amazon internally considered delaying or scaling back the initiative as one option for easing cost pressure, Business Insider previously reported.
Trump’s relentless campaign schedule in the home stretch before the midterm elections is something the White House says gives Republicans their best shot at emerging victorious.
Microsoft is offering buyouts to about 60,000 employees.
The offers are individualized to each employee based on their level, location, and tenure.
Business Insider reviewed offers to show what employees get when they leave the company.
As Microsoft sends out its buyout offers to more than a quarter of its workforce, specific offers reviewed by Business Insider reveal exactly what employees get if they choose to leave the company.
The offers are individualized for each employee based on their level, location, and tenure. Those reviewed by Business Insider confirm that the US buyouts align with the company's US standard severance offers. A Microsoft spokesperson said about 60,000 employees would be eligible for the buyout.
Microsoft uses a levels system to represent seniority, from entry levels starting at 59 to senior levels at 70, or vice president. The company offered buyouts to employees on select teams in the US, Canada, India, and the UK at level 70.
Offers reviewed by Business Insider show employees at internal levels 64 and below were offered one week of base pay per six months of service, and employees at levels 65 to 67 were offered two weeks of base pay per six months of service.
Buyout offers also include continued regular stock vesting and health insurance. The standard stock-vesting severance offer is six or 12 months for levels 67 and below, based on years of service.
Eligible employees will have until early December to decide whether to take the offer and exit at the end of the year, and there are no plans for another buyout at this time, a Microsoft spokesperson said.
Standard severance is capped at 39 weeks of base pay for levels 67 and below, while the standard severance offer for level 68 includes 12 months of salary.
Earlier this year, Microsoft rolled out a voluntary retirement program for employees. About 7% of Microsoft's US workforce, or about 8,750 people, were eligible at the time. As Business Insider previously reported, Microsoft's voluntary retirement program offer also aligned with the company's standard severance offer, including continued regular stock vesting for six or 12 months, based on years of service.
Earlier this year, another tech giant, Google, offered buyouts to staff in its business unit, Business Insider previously reported.
As more tech companies offer buyouts, some human resources professionals previously told Business Insider that this approach could soften job cuts, and also that when they're made available to workers of all tenures, companies risk losing talent.
Skydance has called more employees back to the office under CEO David Ellison.
NYSE
Skydance, formed by the merger of WBD and Paramount, told employees to return to the office five days a week or take a buyout.
Many Paramount employees had been working fully in person, while WBD staffers were generally at three days a week.
Read the memo from Skydance's HR team detailing the standard buyout offer.
David Ellison's Skydance just shared its buyout offer for employees who don't want to return to an office five days a week.
Staffers across the company, which was formed by the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, were told on Monday that they'd soon have to work fully in person. The company didn't say if there were any exceptions to its new RTO mandate.
Eligible employees who aren't willing to work in person can opt to take a standard buyout package of two weeks of severance for every year they've been at Paramount or WBD, two people familiar with the offer told Business Insider.
Most eligible employees will receive that offer, a person familiar with Skydance's proposal said, though there could be exceptions on the timing or the amount received.
Staffers who've been offered severance must decide whether they're leaving the company by 11 p.m. ET on November 8, an HR email viewed by Business Insider said.
Paramount staffers assigned to an office had been required to work from an office five days a week since earlier this year, while WBD workers had been working in an office at least three days a week.
"We recognize that as we bring our teams together, not everyone will see their future here," Skydance's HR team said in an email to staffers.
Skydance's HR email said this buyout "is a one-time offer" and told employees that there are "no additional" offers planned.
Read the full email Skydance's HR team sent below:
As David and Ynon shared earlier today, we recognize that as we bring our teams together, not everyone will see their future here. For some, it may be the in-office policy or the pace of change. For others, it may instead reflect personal or professional goals. To give employees the option to decide what is best for them, we are offering a one-time Voluntary Buyout (VBO) Program to eligible employees.A VBO gives an eligible employee the opportunity to volunteer to leave the organization in return for a separation package. You are receiving this email because you meet the eligibility criteria and may choose whether to participate in this program. We recognize this is an important personal decision. Please carefully consider the opportunity and notify us of your decision to accept or decline no later than 8:00 p.m. PT on November 8, 2026.Before you decide, please keep the following in mind:
Participation is entirely voluntary.
This is a one-time offer; no additional BO programs are planned.
If you do not respond by the deadline, you will be considered to have declined the offer.
Once submitted, your decision may only be changed during your opt-in window.
You may wish to consult a personal financial, tax, or legal adviser before making your decision.
Please click here to indicate your decision and to review additional information, including an estimate of your severance and benefits.We value your contributions and we want you to feel supported and informed as you consider your decision. For FAQs related to the VBO and our return-to-office policy, please visit the Skydance Integration Hub. For additional questions about the program or your individual offer, please visit My Paramount.
Film producer Tommy Harper has sought to bring a Hollywood sensibility to verticals.
Kayla Oaddams/Getty Images for Warner Brothers Pictures
Film producer Tommy Harper is shutting down his micro drama app VeYou after about six months.
Harper, who sought to build the "HBO" of the genre, said he would still produce for other platforms.
The micro drama space has shifted as tech giants push in.
The app that wanted to be the "HBO" of micro dramas is shutting down.
Prolific film producer Tommy Harper is shutting down his app, VeYou, after about six months. A message on VeYou said the service would end November 6.
Harper told Business Insider he would continue producing series, distributing them via TikTok's micro-drama app PineDrama, YouTube, and other partners.
Harper, whose credits include "Star Wars" and "Top Gun: Maverick," is one of several Hollywood vets trying to bring their prestige sensibility to micro dramas, the soapy, low-budget series that got their start in China and have exploded in the US.
The move shows how fast the space is changing as Big Tech companies lean in. Micro dramas — also called "verticals" — cost a fraction of a traditional feature-length movie, but apps often lose money because of the high cost of marketing, and VeYou didn't have massive financial backing.
"In the past year, TikTok, Meta, and YouTube all moved hard into short drama," Harper emailed. "When the three biggest attention platforms commit to a format, distribution is decided. The opportunity for an independent company is to be the best supplier to those platforms, not to compete with them for installs. So we're focused where we have the edge: making the shows."
Harper raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding for VeYou from investor S32, a venture firm started by Google Ventures founder Bill Maris, who's also backed 23andMe, Impossible Foods, and Nest. VeYou has made a handful of originals, starting with "Love Under Fire," a romance drama starring Kasey Esser, who wrote the series alongside Harper.
The micro drama market is changing fast
The micro drama space has changed dramatically in recent months.
In the past year, AI-generated characters have increasingly taken their place alongside human actors, and free, ad-supported offerings are competing with the "freemium" apps that had dominated the landscape.
A report by media consultancy Owl & Co. found two-thirds of films released by leading apps in the third quarter of this year outside China were AI-generated, up from 3% in the first quarter.
TikTok's free app PineDrama rolled out in January, and by the third quarter, it accounted for more than half of all micro drama views across 16 leading apps, according to the Owl & Co. report.
Other tech giants have also moved quickly into the space and made themselves bigger viewing destinations for micro dramas.
YouTube released a new feature that allows creators to bundle their short videos in a series of episodes or seasons, designed to be viewed sequentially.
On Meta, the dominant platform used by micro drama apps to acquire customers, some apps are running portions of their films lasting 20 minutes or more as ads to get people to subscribe.
Lori Golden-Stryer, the CEO of RIVR Media, a producing partner for VeYou, said VeYou's films set themselves apart through their scripts, acting, and direction. She said she was encouraged to see its series perform well on TikTok, based on platform data and her company's monitoring.
"People want live characters," she said. "I don't think they want AI. I've seen a lot of different verticals, and I'd like to think ours were a little cut above."
Nvidia's sales and marketing leadership is changing as its sales pitch evolves.
Veterans are retiring, opening the door to internal succession and outside hires.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's daughter Madison is also gaining influence.
Nvidia's sales and marketing organizations are seeing a changing of the guard as the AI boom reshapes demands on leadership.
Veterans at Nvidia are retiring, opening the door for longtime employees. And CEO Jensen Huang is tapping talent from outside the company — and outside the chip industry — to meet new challenges.
Nvidia's sales pitch has evolved. It has already convinced companies to choose its chips. To keep growing, it has to convince more businesses to adopt AI. These customers care less about hardware specifications than how Nvidia's AI can be put to work.
Leadership changes are most visible in sales and marketing, said former vice president of corporate marketing Greg Estes, while other areas of the company, such as finance, legal, operations, and software and hardware engineering, have remained relatively stable.
In marketing, Nvidia tapped Google Cloud executive Alison Wagonfeld to become its first chief marketing officer earlier this year, while Microsoft veteran Nick Parker became its new sales chief in August. Neither comes from the chip industry, though both bring years of experience helping businesses adopt software and cloud services.
Nick Parker, Nvidia's EVP of worldwide field operations.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
At the same time, Huang's daughter Madison has gained influence beyond her formal marketing role, two former employees said.
Huang regularly reshapes Nvidia as the business evolves, said Scott Baker, a sales VP who retired in July after 26 years.
"It's truly a battleship spinning on a dime, and everyone gets aligned," he said.
Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
A 'deep bench' of younger Nvidia talent
Retirees this year include former sales EVP Jay Puri, VP of enterprise marketing Laura Fay, SVP of enterprise business Shanker Trivedi, and sales VP Kevin Connors.
Fay said Huang doesn't want to lose longtime executives, many of whom he personally recruited. But as they move on, the next generation is getting a chance.
Before leaving in April after 17 years, Trivedi made mentorship part of his mission. He was ready to pass the baton after years of grueling travel and seven-day workweeks.
"Time stops for nobody," the 69-year-old said.
Trivedi said Nvidia has a "deep bench" of younger sales and marketing talent who know its culture, market, and partners inside out, including Raj Mirpuri in AI cloud infrastructure, Kimberly Powell in healthcare, and Kari Briski in AI software.
When he retired, the company divided Trivedi's responsibilities among multiple leaders. As Nvidia's revenue soared during the AI boom, his job had ultimately become too big for one person.
"Better to flatten the structure and gain velocity," he said.
Another Huang is gaining influence
One insider bringing an unconventional background to Nvidia's marketing ranks is Jensen Huang's daughter, Madison Huang.
Madison formerly worked at French luxury conglomerate LVMH in hospitality marketing before joining Nvidia as an MBA intern in 2020. She has quickly ascended to senior director of product marketing for physical AI.
One former employee said Madison's experience working on luxury brands brought a fresh perspective to a marketing team traditionally staffed by semiconductor veterans.
Madison Huang, senior director of product marketing for physical AI at Nvidia.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Job titles can be fluid at Nvidia, and a second former employee said Madison's remit extends beyond physical AI marketing. They said she exerts authority across multiple parts of the company and directs teams at all levels on strategy and business decisions.
Madison is also among a small circle of executives known to travel with her father. And their close relationship gives her the ability to anticipate his needs during high-level meetings and appearances, the first former employee said.
"She 'speaks Jensen' very well," the former employee said, "so he doesn't have to explain himself to her."
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Skydance announced new leadership in its ad business in a memo to staff.
Adam Gray/Getty Images
Skydance announced new leadership for its ad business weeks after the Paramount-WBD merger.
In a memo to staff, Jay Askinasi, chief revenue officer for advertising, named the leadership team.
The announcement was the latest leadership shake-up following the merger earlier this month.
Skydance has announced new leadership for its combined advertising business following the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, according to a memo viewed by Business Insider.
Jay Askinasi, Skydance's chief revenue officer for advertising, outlined the new leadership structure for the "unified Skydance Advertising organization." Following the completion of the $110 billion merger this month, Skydance's portfolio includes Paramount and Paramount+, Warner Bros., HBO and HBO Max, CBS, CNN, and more.
Askinasi said going forward that the leadership team would include:
Danielle Carney, head of US sales
Jill Steinhauser, head of ad partnerships
Christine Hong, head of revenue operations
Chris Brady, head of Skydance Media Labs
Ed Romaine, head of ad marketing
Evan Giamanco, head of product strategy and measurement
Askinasi said Steve Ellis would continue as chief operating officer for advertising, a position he has held at Paramount since 2022, and integration lead. He also said Lee Sears would continue to lead Paramount's international advertising business as part of its leadership team while execs "evaluate the WBD international business and determine the right structure for the new Skydance group."
Askinasi also thanked Ryan Gould, president of ad sales and go-to-market at Warner Bros. Discovery, and Bobby Voltaggio, president of ad sales and platform monetization at Warner Bros. Discovery, and said they would "continue to partner" with him "throughout the fourth quarter."
"This team reflects how we intend to work: with clear ownership, fewer layers, and leaders who are close to the work," Askinasi told staffers in the memo. "We will organize around how clients plan and buy, elevate our strongest IP and creative capabilities, and use shared data and intelligence to make faster, better decisions."
A representative for Skydance did not respond to a request for comment.
Several other leadership moves have been announced since the merger's completion. Another leaked memo on Thursday revealed changes to Skydance's product and tech team, which included the departure of four Warner Bros. Discovery executives.
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