The must-read story in the $5 trillion hedge fund industry used to be about who made the biggest trade or launched the biggest fund. Now it's about who made the biggest hire or got the biggest guaranteed payout.
As the increasingly institutional space has veered away from star funds run by a single genius to sprawling investment platforms with dozens of investing teams, the industry has grappled with a shortage of talent.
It's now such a finite resource that top portfolio managers are commanding deals that resemble those of professional athletes, and top managers accustomed to poaching their choice of talent by paying top dollar are now developing more talent in-house to cut expenses.
Business Insider has closely covered the evolution of hedge funds. See our stories below on the state of play, how the industry is changing, and who the new stars are.
The state of play
The numbers are staggering, with guaranteed nine-figure payouts and years-long non-compete clauses, but the anecdotes of what it's like inside the biggest funds are just as startling.
Firms dangle the prospect of relocating to tax havens like Puerto Rico and Dubai to entice top traders. Recruiters are being pushed into ethical gray areas to determine the truth about potential hires. While white-collar career ladders are collapsing in other industries, hedge funds are accutally building them.
How it's changing the industry
Whenever this much money is flowing, there's bound to be ripple effects. Within hedge funds, this means the introduction of both new industry players and new roles within the largest firms.
As with any gold rush, people are picking up an ax in the hopes of carving out a little piece for themselves. It's up to the powers-that-be of the industry to decide what's real and what's fool's gold.
The competition for the top PM talent scouts
One subset of the industry that has been thrust into the spotlight during the talent shortage is the group of individuals who find top PMs.
Recruiters and business development professionals at the industry's biggest managers have seen their own worth soar in recent years. With a steady flow of fresh capital into hedge funds, this cohort is likely to remain in demand for years to come.
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Zhao Xintong will attempt to defend his title at the World Snooker Championship.
George Wood/Getty Images
The World Snooker Championship returns to the famous Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England, for the 50th time as 32 of the world's best players compete to be crowned the world champion. In this guide, we'll explain where to watch World Snooker Championship 2026 live streams, with information on free channels and platforms.
And there's great news for snooker fans in the UK, as every frame will be shown absolutely free thanks to the BBC and its iPlayer streaming website and app. Elsewhere, the entire tournament will be available on the dedicated WST Play platform, including in the US, Canada, and Australia.
This time 12 months ago, Zhao Xintong walked out of the Crucible having made history as the first ever player from China to win the World Championship. He was superb throughout, but really stamped his authority on things by destroying seven-time champ Ronnie O'Sullivan in the semis. After that, his comfortable final win over Mark Williams and a check to the sum of £500,000 (around $675,000) seemed a mere formality.
In order to go back-to-back, however, he'll have to defy the so-called 'Crucible Curse' — no first-time winner of the World Snooker Championship has been able to retain the title in the five decades that the tournament has been held at the venue. And there are plenty of worthy opponents waiting to stop him, such as O'Sullivan, Williams, world No. 1 Judd Trump, and in-form 2010 champion Neil Robertson. Not to mention the record 10 other Chinese entries, with Wuhan Open winner Xiao Guodong the highest ranked among them.
Where to watch World Snooker Championship for free in the UK
As ever, the free-to-air BBC has extensive live coverage of the 2026 World Snooker Championship. In addition to televised action across its BBC One, Two, and Four channels, the broadcaster will show every single shot and pot on its free online BBC iPlayer platform and BBC Sport website. As well as smartphones and laptops, iPlayer is available to stream on pretty much every streaming device you can think of.
For an alternative commentary and analysis, UK snooker fans can also watch on TNT Sports — available with certain Sky, Virgin Media, and EE TV plans, or through an HBO Max subscription costing from $26 a month.
How to watch World Snooker Championship from anywhere
Watching the 2026 World Snooker Championship for free in the UK is easy. But try accessing BBC iPlayer when abroad and you'll discover that you can't due to geo-blocking. Thankfully, you can get around this annoyance with a VPN (or virtual private network), which will let you set your smartphone, laptop, or streaming device so that it thinks it's back in the UK.
NordVPN is currently the very best VPN you can get. It offers rapid server speeds, an easy-to-use interface, and is superb at unblocking your domestic services when traveling overseas. You can discover more in our dedicated NordVPN review or, if you're ready to sign up now, take advantage of the fact that you can cancel within the first 30 days and get a full refund thanks to the provider's money-back guarantee.
Where to watch World Snooker Championship in the US
Unlike in the UK, you have to pay to watch this tournament in the US. It is being shown on the dedicated WST Play streaming platform. Prices are in GBP, with the monthly pass costing £7. That means you can watch every match of the 2026 World Snooker Championship for less than $10.
Where to watch World Snooker Championship in Canada
Just like south of the border, there are no domestic options for watching the 2026 World Snooker Championship in Canada. That means you'll need to subscribe to WST Play. The £7 a month fee works out to around CA$13.
Note: The use of VPNs is illegal in certain countries and using VPNs to access region-locked streaming content might constitute a breach of the terms of use for certain services. Business Insider does not endorse or condone the illegal use of VPNs.
When Massiel Lugo's parents moved to Jackson Heights, Queens, from the Dominican Republic nearly 50 years ago, the working-class neighborhood was an affordable place to raise a family.
Now that Lugo is in her early 30s and raising her own two kids in the same neighborhood, that's increasingly not the case. Though she took over her aunt's lease and the landlord hasn't raised the rent to market rate, Lugo's approximately $1,700 a month rent still adds up to more than 30% of her income, the threshold at which housing experts generally define housing as unaffordable.
Rents all around her have soared — data from StreetEasy indicates median rent in Jackson Heights rose about 26% between 2020 and 2025 — pushing more households into the rent-burdened category. Lugo worries she'll never be able to afford to move.
"At the end of the day, it's home, but it has changed so much," Lugo said.
A growing share of New Yorkers are struggling to afford life in one of the most expensive cities in the world — and the rising cost of housing is a big part of that. Once-affordable neighborhoods from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to Jackson Heights, have been gentrified by higher-income newcomers fleeing costlier areas, prompting the question: Who can afford the concrete jungle anymore?
Where NYC rents are sky high
New York City's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was elected on a pledge to make the city affordable for working-class New Yorkers again, including by freezing rents on the city's nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments and fast-tracking housing construction on city-owned land.
"As many working people know, it is increasingly impossible to find an affordable home in New York City, to build a dignified life without making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year," Mamdani said during a press conference.
More than half of New York City's tenants are rent-burdened, and nearly 30% of renters fork over more than half their income on housing each month, comparable to the share of cost-burdened renters in the country as a whole. The vast majority of rent-burdened New Yorkers make far less than the median income, but a substantial share of middle- and higher-income renters and homeowners are cost-burdened, too.
Analyzing data from the Census Bureau's 2019-2023 American Community Survey, we found that most New York City neighborhoods have a significant population of both renters and homeowners who are cost-burdened, with that share concentrated in the outer boroughs. Few parts of the city are in the clear.
"A high-income household that's paying 40% of income toward housing probably can still afford medication and afford food," said Emily Goldstein, director of organizing and advocacy at Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a coalition of housing groups.
Homebuilding isn't keeping up with the city
For decades, New York City has not built enough new homes, creating a severe shortage that's driven up rents and home prices. Between 2011 and 2023, the city added 895,000 new jobs, but only about 350,000 new homes. The city's housing vacancy rate fell to 1.4% in 2023 — the lowest since 1968 — and far below the widely considered healthy vacancy rate of 5 to 8%.
The housing that's been built in recent years is dominated by higher-end one- and two-bedroom apartments designed for higher earners. While the median renter household in the city makes about $70,000, the median rent citywide is about $4,400 per month, or $52,800 a year — significantly above the recommended 30% of income max spend on housing.
New Yorkers who made the city's average wage of around $88,600 in 2023 could afford less than 5% of rentals on the market that year, according to Streeteasy. Essential workers making typical wages could afford less than 1% of rentals.
Family-sized apartments with two or three bedrooms are especially hard to come by. The cost crisis is pushing many out of the city, particularly families with young children and lower-income Black and Hispanic residents, according to a 2024 study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. New Yorkers who manage to find larger apartments tend to hang onto them — more than 40% of apartments with three or more bedrooms have been occupied by the same tenants for more than a decade.
Mamdani has made big promises on housing affordability, some of which would require state approval, including freezing rents on rent-stabilized apartments, which have gone up between 2.75% and 3.25% for one-year leases over the last couple years. His campaign also promised that the city government would build 200,000 permanently affordable housing units over 10 years.
Those moves are not without their critics — landlords who own rent-stabilized units are worried about keeping up with their own bills, and building new housing is notoriously difficult in a city where many stakeholders have veto points.
"There's no question that the majority of New Yorkers are struggling with housing costs, and that, especially in the last election, we saw a really clear mandate that voters want the government to do everything in their power to address the cost of living and affordability," said Annemarie Gray, the executive director of Open New York, a nonprofit group that supports housing development, who's also advised Mamdani's team.
Gray said the city needs to add about 500,000 new homes — market-rate and affordable — over the next decade to bring down housing costs. In late 2024, the city enacted a sweeping zoning reform package, known as "City of Yes," designed to pave the way for 80,000 new homes across the city over 15 years. Gray called the potential impact of those reforms "a drop in the bucket."
"There are not nearly enough types of housing of different sizes, of different scales, that are meeting different income levels," Gray said.
The real estate industry is pushing for more subsidies for new housing, continued zoning reforms, and fewer regulations that slow down construction. The Real Estate Board of New York, an industry lobbying and advocacy group, released a report in December that concluded it takes, on average, 3.4 years to build a new apartment building or four years if it's in Manhattan.
"We must strengthen existing financing tools to promote new construction, expand development opportunities through zoning, and streamline the permitting process," said Basha Gerhards, REBNY's executive vice president of public policy.
When affordable housing isn't really affordable
Much of the subsidized affordable housing that's been built in recent years — largely by private developers with government incentives — isn't affordable enough for many lower-income, rent-burdened New Yorkers.
Freezing rents for stabilized units, which are disproportionately home to lower-income New Yorkers, would prevent some New Yorkers from being forced out of their homes because they can't afford rent, advocates say. "At an individual level, freezing rents is actually an eviction prevention approach," Goldstein said.
Lugo wouldn't directly benefit from a rent freeze since her apartment isn't rent-stabilized. She dreams of moving to Bayside, a wealthier, more suburban part of Queens, but housing and transportation costs out there would be even higher. She doesn't think she can find a better deal on any similarly sized apartment in a comparable neighborhood in the city.
For now, she's sticking it out. "I know I am very fortunate with the apartment that I have," she said.
Deloitte introduced a new firmwide talent architecture in January.
Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Deloitte US will cut benefits for some workers, according to internal documents seen by Business Insider.
Parental leave, PTO, and pension plan payments have been pared back for some internal-facing staff.
The changes are part of a wider overhaul in which the firm has also created new job titles.
Deloitte plans to pare back several core benefits for some of its employees, according to internal documents and a meeting recording seen by Business Insider.
Parental leave, annual PTO, a pension plan, and IVF funding have been reduced or cut for a group of employees who fall under the "Center" talent model, which broadly refers to employees in internal support roles, such as admin, IT support, and finance.
The changes are slated to come into effect on January 1, 2027, according to a document sent to the Center talent model in March.
It is unclear exactly how many employees will be impacted. The Big Four consulting and accounting firm employs about 181,000 people in the US.
The benefit shake-up is part of a wider talent restructuring that Deloitte announced internally in January, and that was first reported by Business Insider. As part of the changes, the firm told employees they would be getting new job titles and created a new class of leader. It also created four new segments within the business: Center, Core, Project, and Domain.
"Deloitte US is modernizing its talent architecture to provide a more tailored experience reflective of our professionals' broad range of skills and the work they do serving our clients," a Deloitte spokesperson told Business Insider.
"Benefits are regularly updated and will be tailored for a small subset of professionals to better align with the marketplace," the spokesperson said.
Companies are reducing costs
Deloitte isn't alone in tightening up workplace policies.
Workers face a difficult corporate outlook in 2026, as the shaky job market has shifted power back to employers. Faced with AI disruption and economic uncertainty, many companies are raising performance expectations and reining in perks.
Deloitte's US head count has grown over the past three years, alongside rising revenue, which reached $35.7 billion for the year ending May 31, 2025 — up 8% compared to the previous financial year.
Like its industry peers, however, Deloitte is facing challenges across both its core business lines — accounting and consulting — largely driven by AI disruption. Major consulting firms are evolving their offerings to drive AI-related business, while redesigning their internal operations and workforces to fit the future landscape.
Deloitte's government business was also hit last year amid the Trump administration's DOGE-related crackdown on consulting contracts.
"We are hearing from a number of clients that they are considering actions to reduce cost, given the ongoing uncertainty in the global economy," Ravin Jesuthasan, a future-of-work expert and the global leader of Mercer's transformation services business, told Business Insider.
They're taking a hard look at the different components of their overall labor cost, and "benefits and perks that are not fully utilized by the workforce are typically top of the list," he said.
Most of the cuts he's seen across the market have focused on tightening travel budgets and scaling back "nice to have" perks, Jesuthasan said.
A harder-edged management culture has taken hold in the corporate world, with strict RTO mandates, mass layoffs, and higher performance expectations placed on workers across the business landscape.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. The company has restricted work travel and cut perks in recent years.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
In recent years, Google and Meta have tried to cut costs by dropping perks and restricting work travel, and Amazon has reduced the number of shares it gives employees as part of their compensation.
"Companies have been getting tougher across the board," both by way of layoffs and ramping up workloads, said Peter Cappelli, professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton Business School.
"Cuts and squeezing do not seem to be because businesses are in trouble. It seems more like with the job market slack, they feel they can," he added.
What's changing at Deloitte?
From January, all employees in the Center talent model will receive up to eight weeks of paid family leave and 18 to 25 days of PTO, depending on their seniority and tenure, the internal document shows.
They will stop earning additional accruals under Deloitte's pension plan after December 31st, the document said.
The changes also impact the part of Deloitte's Enterprise Solutions team that falls under the Center talent model, documents show.
Paid family leave, including parental leave, will be cut in half from 16 weeks to eight for employees in this group. They will also lose a $50,000 adoption and surrogacy reimbursement, which covers IVF treatment, starting in January.
PTO allowances for this group will decrease by 5-10 days for most employees, depending on seniority and start date. For example, an Enterprise Solutions employee who joined a decade ago will see their PTO drop from 30 days to 20 days in January, the documents show.
PTO for junior-level employees in this group will remain unchanged at either 20 or 18 days, depending on whether they joined before or after 2017.
In addition to PTO, the firm will continue to offer 15 companywide "disconnect days" and holidays, according to the documents.
Employees will retain benefits like medical and dental coverage, well-being subsidy, bereavement leave, and tuition assistance, according to a recording of a February meeting led by Lora Rothe, Deloitte's chief people officer for Enterprise Solutions, seen by Business Insider.
Enterprise Solutions employees will still be eligible for Deloitte's 401(k) savings plan, Rothe said.
One Deloitte worker who has been at the firm for over 10 years and falls into the Center talent model told Business Insider their benefits used to be "amazing" but said the changes felt like a "huge regression."
Do you work at Deloitte? Contact this reporter via email atpthompson@businessinsider.comor Signal at Polly_Thompson.89. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide tosharing information securely.
Blackberry Soul Fine Catering has catered events for the staff of Google, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Stephen and Ayesha Curry, and the Golden State Warriors.
Blackberry Soul Fine Catering
Chef Rene Johnson built a million-dollar soul food empire catering to Bay Area power players.
Using her grandmother's recipes, Blackberry Soul has fed big names like Sergey Brin and Steph Curry.
Now, Johnson coaches entrepreneurs on how to scale their businesses as she did.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chef Rene Johnson, the founder of Blackberry Soul Fine Catering and entrepreneur behind Link and Thrive, a mentorship program for business owners. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I didn't even like food as a kid.
What I loved was being with my grandmother, who always made everything from scratch, and the way our family gathered around her food. That's where it started for me — not with cooking, but with connection.
I was her first granddaughter, and I always say she channeled me the most. I cook like her, think like her, have a business mindset like her. Everything I make — the peach cobbler, the red beans and rice, the biscuits — all come from her.
Before I rebuilt my career around her food, I was in the mortgage industry.
I had gotten a job in telephone sales and took to it naturally. When my clients closed on a home, I would gift them a homemade dessert: peach cobbler, pound cake, or banana pudding. That was my way of celebrating them.
When the mortgage industry crashed, I had to figure out what to do with my life. That's when I turned to cooking.
Nobody would have thought that I — a teenage mom without a college degree or formal culinary training — would build a business like this.
My kids were the ones who told me, "Mom, do something with your food." I lived in Georgia for a while and started dropping off meals at barber shops and around the neighborhood, but I couldn't quite get my footing there.
When I came back home to the Bay Area, everything changed. That's when I learned that it's not only about what you do, but also about who you do it with. I tapped into my community, and Blackberry Soul took off.
A broader mindset was key to my growth
At first, I thought I was building a small business, but I knew I had to shift that idea in my head.
I started telling people, "This is not a small business. This is my company." That changed everything: how I showed up, how I hired, how I thought about growing.
A wedding was my first big event. After that, I did a fundraiser for a political event with almost no budget, but everyone important was in the room. They tasted my soul food, and I became the preferred caterer for their events.
At first, I did everything myself, but I was holding on too tightly, trying to control everything. One of my biggest lessons, something I should have done sooner, was learning to let go.
When I finally did build a real crew, that's when the business blew up. As I let other people take over tasks like answering phones or doing the shopping, we grew so much faster than I could have ever imagined.
These days, if I show up to help with an event, sometimes my team will say, "You're not on the schedule. You can go home."
That's when you know you've built something real — when the business can run itself.
Now, Blackberry Soul feeds everyone from our community to major political and business leaders.
We've served thousands of people at once. I've fed 2,500 people at Google, including its cofounder Sergey Brin. I've cooked for Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and so many others, but it's important to me that we treat every client the same.
Whether we're catering for executives or people in my community, I want them to have the same experience — that same "pop" when they take the first bite. So we cook everything from scratch and don't cut corners.
From solo operator to mentor
These days, my passion has grown bigger than food. I still love cooking, but helping other entrepreneurs is my real focus.
I learned everything the hard way. Nobody taught me how to run a business, how to scale, or build a team. I didn't even know I needed PR in the early days.
After I started really growing, people began coming up to me all the time asking for mentorship.
That's why I created Link and Thrive, my coaching program to teach people how to build their own businesses. Rather than being in the kitchen, I now spend most of my days paying it forward.
I always say: You might know how to make a great hamburger, but do you know how to run a hamburger stand?
That's what we focus on — the day-to-day reality of being an entrepreneur. Building your team, creating customer experiences, and navigating the peaks and valleys.
My goal is to pass along the lessons I learned and show people that success is not just about the work. It's about how you show up, connect, and grow.
Kurdish officials displayed the remnants of a Shahed drone (foreground) they recovered from an Iranian attack.
Ibra Naber/Business Insider
Iran attacked the Kurdish region in northern Iraq over 400 times during its war with the US and Israel.
Officials displayed weapons recovered from these strikes.
They included a new drone jet that's twice as fast as the Shahed drones that are Iran's signature.
Three men unloaded the remains of a monstrous weapon from a white van in Erbil, Iraq last week. Here, in the cordoned-off yard of the Asayish — the security forces of the auton›omous Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq — explosive ordnance disposal specialists examined every Iranian projectile used in this war. "Zolfaghar," one of the Kurds said, tapping the pitch-black metal. "This missile struck near a mosque on the outskirts of the city just a few hours ago."
The Zolfaghar is a large ballistic missile that carries a warhead weighing up to 1,100 pounds. The missile is only one part of the extensive arsenal with which Iran has attacked the Gulf states and the Middle East in recent weeks. In an exclusive presentation for Business Insider, the Asayish unit displayed some of the drones and missiles that have struck Kurdistan since late February, killing 17 people in the region.
These remnants are a gallery of the many weapons Iran has used to kill and terrify people across the region: triangular Shahed long-range drones, hulking ballistic missiles, and a new jet-powered drone that's more difficult to shoot down.
"With the help of Russia, China and North Korea, Iran has succeeded over recent decades in building up an impressive arsenal of effective, technologically sophisticated long-range weapons," the influential Austrian colonel and military analyst Markus Reisner said.
Authorities in the Kurdish region of Iraq have recovered drones and missiles from the many Iranian attacks there during Iran's war with the US and Israel.
Ibra Naber/Business Insider
Tehran's ability to continue carrying out 60 to 90 drone attacks a day — combined with missile strikes — even into the sixth week of the war prolonged the conflict and increased pressure on global energy markets. The American-Israeli alliance struck more than 13,000 targets in Iran, including more than 2,000 command and control targets, but was unable to decisively break its military capabilities, before the US and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire on April 7. According to US intelligence assessments reported by CNN, around half of Iran's missile launchers are still intact; in addition, the country continues to possess thousands of long-range kamikaze drones.
The destructive power of Iranian weapons has been demonstrated in this war, Reisner said: "Drones are being deployed in a saturating combination with cruise missiles and rockets. When these weapons systems are combined with targeted satellite reconnaissance from Russia and China, they also develop a troubling degree of precision."
In the yard, Kurdish security forces lined up various pieces of debris. In the center: Iran's most frequently used weapon — Shahed long-range drones, with a range of up to 1,200 miles. Russia uses these lumbering weapons, which have a recognizable delta-wing shape, extensively against Ukraine, usually in improved variants. "We identified three kinds of Iranian Shahed drones," said Halmat, a member of the Kurdish bomb-analysis team. The most frequently used Shahed-136 had more of a lead-colored, metallic surface; others were lighter or black. Their components, however, were very similar.
Officials recovered a new jet-powered drone (at left) designed with sharp angles to reduce its radar signature.
Ibra Naber/Business Insider
Iran also used other models from its roughly dozen combat drones against Kurdistan, including the Meraj-532, a medium-range attack drone used by the Revolutionary Guards. "And that over there," Halmat said, "is a new Iranian drone, the Hadid-110."
It is a jet-powered attack that can race past many air defenses and slam into targets at over twice the speed of most Shaheds. The drone is launched with a rocket booster that accelerates it before the jet engine takes over for sustained flight. Its design similarly reflects the growing sophistication of Iran's designs: A triangular wing configuration combined with sharply angled surfaces intended to hide it from radar. One of these drone jets slammed into a home in a neighborhood outside Erbil, the EOD specialists said.
Smaller combat drones with a shorter range have also appeared in the Iran war. Videos released in March by Iranian-backed militias show small piloted drones hitting hangars and a helicopter near a US base in Iraq. Even advanced air defenses struggled to defeat threats this small and numerous.
The bulky remains of the Kheibar ballistic missile lay at the back of the yard. "They also used it to strike civilian areas here in the region," said Pishtiwan, who is part of the engineering team of the Asayish security forces. He pointed to the markings left on the 10-meter-long missile. "This happened on March 19 in the Mala Omer area, outside the city. We found it at 12:55 p.m."
Kurdish EOD specialists recovered fragments from an Iranian Kheibar ballistic missile that struck the region.
Ibra Naber/Business Insider
In total, Iran attacked the Erbil region alone with more than 400 drones and ballistic missiles, Halmat said: "And we have defused and collected more than 200 bombs."
Pishtiwan explained that after every explosion in the region, one of their specialized units is dispatched to assess the damage and identify the weapon. The risk of being caught in a so-called double-tap attack — a second strike hitting the same target just minutes later — is very real. "But it is our duty to protect our people. We are ready to sacrifice our lives for this country."
According to military expert Reisner, Iran's weapons have also inflicted considerable damage on the United States and Israel. "Iranian strikes in Israel and in the middle of American bases made that abundantly clear in recent weeks."
The past weeks have also delivered a painful lesson in the Kurdistan Region: not even the United States — the most advanced military in the world — can fully protect its bases and diplomatic facilities in a modern drone war.
The Erbil region has been struck over 400 times by Iranian drones and missiles, authorities there said.
Ibra Naber/Business Insider
During the attacks on Erbil, Iran and its allied militias targeted both the US military installation at the airport and the US consulate, which opened in late 2025 at a cost of nearly $800 million. Kurdish security forces shared videos with Business Insider showing damage from impacts on the consulate grounds, though the destruction does not appear to have been extensive. The French military was hit harder. A drone strike killed a French soldier in March in a town near Erbil, which President Emmanuel Macron confirmed was the country's first military death in the Middle East war.
Kurdish security forces said they are almost entirely dependent on Western air defenses. A Patriot system fought off Iranian ballistic missiles over the last few weeks. Drone defenses were numerous. The C-RAM gun system fired bursts, including glowing tracer rounds, at incoming drones. And US fighter jets like the F-16 Fighting Falcon regularly took off to hunt drones, as seen in videos from Kurdistan. According to media reports, the Raytheon Coyote drone was also used to destroy several drones in flight.
Kurdish security officials say that, according to their information, no Ukrainian drone specialists were stationed in Kurdistan for air defense. Kyiv had deployed more than 200 drone experts during the conflict with Iran, primarily to Gulf states, to provide support.
According to Reisner, Iran's waves of attacks are also a final warning for Europe. "The range of Iranian missiles extends to the periphery of Europe. The US missile defense system stationed in Europe — the European Phased Adaptive Approach, or EPAA — and national procurement initiatives such as Germany's introduction of the Israeli 'Arrow' system are therefore of great importance."
Ibrahim Naber is a foreign correspondent who has reported from Ukraine since 2022. In October 2025, he and his team were injured in a Russian Lancet drone strike in Dnipro. In 2025, he received the George Weidenfeld Prize for his coverage of global conflicts and crisis zones. He wrote his dissertation at King's College London on the psychology of modern drone warfare.
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, 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.
Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark joked that Anthropic is making it a great time to be a philsophy major.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark says his literature degree proved to be a great match for working in AI.
He said the best majors will involve "synthesis across a whole variety of subjects."
Clark pointed out that Anthropic employs philosophers.
Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark says you shouldn't write off liberal arts majors.
After all, Clark, a former journalist who studied literature at the University of East Anglia, is one of them.
"What turned out to be useful is that I got to learn a lot about history and a lot about the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future," Clark said on Monday during Semafor's World Economy Summit. "That's turned out to be like, extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn't have predicted."
Clark said that the best areas of study are those that have a lot of overlap.
"I think that majors which are going to become more important are ones which involve like synthesis across a whole variety of subjects and analytical thinking about that," he said.
The best skill, Clark said, is learning how to ask the right question.
"The really important thing is knowing the right questions to ask and having intuitions about what would be interesting, colliders, different insights from many different disciplines," he said.
After repeated pressing, Clark said that "rote programming" is something he would avoid. That's on brand with his Anthropic colleagues, including Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, who has said the title of software engineer will start to be phased out this year.
"Some people need to know those fundamentals, but we do see that technology move up the stack," Clark said.
Overall, though, Clark said that majors that may seem mismatched to the age of AI will actually be fairly worthwhile. He pointed out that Anthropic employs philosophers.
"When was the last time you heard that a philosophy degree was like a great job prospect?" he said.
