US Energy Secretary Chris Wright oversaw the signing of a series of energy deals during his visit to Caracas, where he met interim President Delcy Rodríguez.
Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images
The US could swap Venezuela's heavy crude for lighter American oil to help refill the SPR.
The Venezuelan barrels don't have to enter the reserve themselves, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said.
More Venezuelan heavy crude could also mean more competition for Canadian oil.
The US could swap heavy Venezuelan crude for American oil to help refill the US emergency reserve, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Wednesday.
"We'll swap you a barrel of heavy crude for a barrel of light or medium United States crude," Wright told CNBC in Caracas.
The swap could get around a mismatch, as some of Venezuela's key heavy crude grades aren't suitable for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Wright's comments came after President Donald Trump said Sunday that he planned to "fill up" the US strategic reserves with Venezuelan oil. The White House has also said oil secured through a sweeping new US-Venezuela agreement could help replenish the SPR.
"It doesn't mean that exactly these barrels go in there," Wright said.
Venezuela's heavy crude could instead go to US refiners, while lighter American barrels obtained through a swap could enter the reserve. Wright said US refineries built in the 1960s and 1970s were designed around Venezuelan crude.
Under the new agreement, North American Blue Energy Partners received 100-year concessions covering 17 Venezuelan oil fields. The US government received a 35% equity stake in the company's corporate parent. The State Department gained the right to buy 20% of the oil from NABEP-operated fields at the cost of production.
"Well, of course. All crude is competition with all other crude," Wright said when asked whether Venezuelan production would compete with Canadian and other North American oil.
Wright said increased competition would push prices lower, which he expects to boost consumption.
"If you have lower oil prices, you have faster demand growth," he said.
Domino's is finally launching a truly personal pizza. Yay! Right? Except that the company's announcement about it is weirdly sad. Hungry diners will be able to customize "without compromise," it says, avoid "sacrifice," and share a meal without actually sharing. Of course, pizza's not that deep, but that's sort of the point. We should generally be able to come to an agreement on olives and pepperoni.
A growing number of Americans are eating by themselves — the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey shows that as of 2023, over a quarter of Americans spent most of their eating and drinking time alone, up from a fifth in 2008. When people do end up gathering for meals, they're increasingly siloed. We've figured out how to eat alone even when we are together.
Food hall-inspired startup Wonder makes meals from multiple menus out of the same kitchen, so no one has to choose between cuisines. Delivery company DoorDash has launched a feature for business customers that lets employees choose separate lunches from different places and get them delivered all at once. A 2026 OpenTable survey found that 52% of Americans say they'd rather order their own dish than share with the table, even as group dining overall is up.
We may be sharing space, but we're not sharing food — and, in turn, we're not sharing all the benefits that come with a communal plate.
"The act of coordinating itself makes people have trust and connection," says Kaitlin Woolley, a professor of management at Cornell University. "Sometimes, this little bit of friction or this little challenge, it does help us to come together."
Woolley means what she says quite literally. In one of her studies, she paired people off and had them either share a bowl of chips and salsa or each get their own. She then put them in a negotiation scenario, in which one person played management and the other a union representative, and asked them to reach a wage agreement. Her findings: Pairs who shared a snack struck a deal faster than those who didn't. The slight inconvenience of timing chip dipping and trying not to hog helped the partners forge an understanding.
Sharing a meal often involves a series of mundane accommodations — choosing the restaurant, waiting until everyone has food before starting, not eating too fast, leaving the last cookie on the tray until someone finally relents and takes it. None of this behavior is particularly profound, but it makes us pay a little more attention to others' wants and actions.
When people order from the same venue or eat the same cuisine, the collective experience improves. That comes at the small expense of everyone not getting precisely what they would have chosen were they on their own, says Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago. "There's a lot to gain from the social side, and the individual cost is usually negligible," she says.
Sharing a meal often involves a series of mundane accommodations.
We tend to bond over similarities related to food as well, Woolley adds: "More so than taste in music or similar clothes, it seemed to be a way for people to connect."
This isn't always as simple as everyone agreeing on the same cheese pizza and moving on. Many people have food allergies or dietary restrictions, and the option to personalize things makes it easier to participate, even if it comes with its own set of challenges. Instead of getting veto power, the person with the issue can do their own thing and still hang out.
It can be stressful to be the odd one out, and research shows that people with food restrictions tend to worry about how they'll be perceived. They get anxious about having to reveal their restrictions, wonder whether people will decline to invite them in the future, and feel self-conscious about others making negative assumptions about them.
Kevin Kniffin, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Cornell University, did a study about a decade ago that found that firefighters who eat meals together perform better as a group than teams who eat alone. One of the firefighters in the study was vegan. He would bring his own meal, but still made sure to eat at the same time and at the same table as everyone else. He also took part in shared clean-up chores, despite not contributing to the shared mess.
"The firefighter seemingly had a strong intuition that all of those shoulder-to-shoulder and face-to-face activities were important, and it was his smart way of matching his own dietary decisions with his platoon's meal-sharing practices," Kniffin says. He adjusted the part of the meal he needed to without opting out of everything around it.
To be sure, people share meals without eating the same food all the time — i.e., we often order separate dishes at restaurants. Eating distinct items together doesn't erase social interaction. A lot of the dynamics depend on expectations. If everyone agrees to bring their own lunch to the breakroom, that can strengthen bonds. But if someone invites friends over with the express purpose of cooking a homemade meal and a guest decides to DoorDash their own food instead, that's a no-no, even if the host might not openly show offense.
"There are silent social agreements," says Nicklas Neuman, an associate professor and senior lecturer in food studies, nutrition, and dietetics at Uppsala University.
The idea that everyone should get exactly what they want is a modern luxury. It's a "radical" development in human history to choose what we eat based on taste preference rather than what's available to us, Neuman says. "It's obviously also connected to how individualized the culture is," he says.
Meals aren't just about nutrition, taste, or social gatherings — they're also a consumer choice. What we eat says something about who we are, what we value, what we can afford, and where we are in the class hierarchy.
Delivery apps and the ability to get hyper-customized meals have unbundled the constellation of decisions and activities typically involved in communal eating, Kniffin says. In terms of the consequences, he compares the effects to Jenga: It's not clear "which pieces in the bundle are critical" to actually providing the societal benefits of a shared meal. Maybe the shared entrée isn't load-bearing, but if you remove too many other blocks, the whole thing collapses, and what remains is a handful of people consuming individualized products around the same time, staring at their phones.
Apart from food selection, other parts of the shared meal are turning into atomized interactions as well. Technology has enabled the precise division of the bill. A multi-person lunch or dinner has long created opportunities for low-stakes financial tensions. Do we split it evenly? Does the person who skipped drinks pay less? Does anyone really want to decipher who ate how much of the appetizer?
Everyone choosing their own specific adventure may lead to a trade-off between long-term social connection and short-term convenience.
Apps such as Zelle, Splitwise, and Venmo make it possible to settle those questions with strict accuracy. That may ease potential conflicts, says Margaret Clark, a professor of psychology at Yale University. When one friend starts calculating everyone's share down to the last cent, "it just feels petty," she says. If, instead, the app automatically does the arithmetic, it may feel less loaded. "It's not the person, it's not one of the members, who is suggesting that we should be transactional to the last cent," she says.
Friction at mealtime isn't inherently virtuous, nor is removing it necessarily antisocial. Sometimes, technology and optionality clear away annoying logistics and make it easier to be together. Other times, the thing being engineered away has value — taking turns, making accommodations, finding compromise. Everyone choosing their own specific adventure may lead to a trade-off between long-term social connection and short-term convenience. There's something to approaching meals in a more joint, straightforward way — we eat the same thing, generally guess how the money should shake out, or you say you'll get me next time when I pay — that might make the relationship better.
Maybe instead of five people ordering five individual pizzas and going with Domino's "without compromise" approach, most of the group agrees to get a large cheese. The person who really wanted sausage learns to live without it for a meal, and the person with an allergy gets a separate small pie with a gluten-free crust. Everyone tackles their slices around the table and discusses whether it might be better to do Chinese or Mexican next time.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
According to a new survey, the share of burners in their 20s has plunged to 10% in 2025.
Getty Images
Gen Zers made up just 10% of Burning Man attendees in 2025.
The share of burners in their 20s has plunged from more than 30% a decade earlier.
The cost of attendance was cited in 2025 as the main obstacle to being at the festival.
Burning Man is falling out of favor with Gen Zers.
As the annual counterculture festival kicks off in the Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada, the annual Black Rock City census survey, which tracks the demographics of festival attendees, shows that burners in their 20s hit a record low in 2025.
According to the survey, around 10% of surveyed burners in 2025 are in their 20s at the time of attendance, compared to more than 30% back in 2015. The figure has been in steady decline over the past decade, but it took a much steeper nosedive after the festival resumed in 2022 following a two-year pandemic hiatus.
The survey, which also asks respondents about their biggest obstacles to attending the festival, provided insights into why younger attendees feel deterred.
In 2025, more than a quarter of survey respondents said that the cost of attendance was their largest obstacle, while another 16% cited getting time off from work or school. More than 10% also said that learning how to prepare for a week in the desert is a challenge, since participants are expected to bring their own water, food, and camping gear.
The price of admission to Burning Man has climbed over the past decade, and the Burning Man Project, the organization behind the festival, has faced funding shortages in recent years as ticket prices have struggled to offset operational costs. According to the organization's financial disclosures, it lost $265 per main ticket sold in 2024.
Compared to the main ticket price of $390 in 2015, Burning Man tickets started at $550 in 2026, while a vehicle pass cost another $165. That put the lowest advertised price for someone driving alone at $715 before taxes and processing fees. Including camping gear, food, water, transportation, and camping fees, those costs can easily push the total price of attending beyond $1,000, particularly for first-timers.
The Burning Man Project did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
Brett Schreiber, a plaintiff trial lawyer who led the first jury win against Tesla involving Autopilot, said he continues to receive inquiries about potential cases involving the EV maker's Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems.
Courtesy Brett Schreiber
Brett Schreiber led the first Tesla Autopilot case in which a jury found the company liable.
Schreiber said he has more inquiries about potential cases related to Tesla's Autopilot and FSD.
He said he has to reject many of them because taking Tesla to court is costly.
This as-told-to essay is based on three conversations with Brett Schreiber, a California-based lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in the Miami Autopilot case involving Naibel Benavides Leon. In 2025, a federal jury found Tesla partially responsible for the crash that killed Benavides Leon and seriously injured Dillon Angulo. The jury ordered Tesla to pay more than $242.5 million in damages. Tesla is appealing the verdict. Tesla and its attorney did not respond to requests for comment. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
I've practiced law in California since 2005.
I came up in a plaintiff civil litigation firm in San Diego and had the opportunity to work up and try serious-injury cases.
Around 2021, I started getting calls about Tesla crashes. At the time, I had a GED-level education in autonomous vehicles, but that already put me head and shoulders above many of my contemporaries.
Now, my firm has weekly meetings called "Tesla Autopilot Review Team" and gets dozens of calls a month from across the country on incidents involving Autopilot or Full Self-Driving modes.
The vast majority of them involve minor or modest injuries that I'm simply incapable of reviewing. The barrier to entry due to the cost of litigation is so high.
In the Miami case, I spent over a million dollars on litigation costs alone — not including fees, but experts, depositions, data work, and everything else. I'm a contingency lawyer. The math on that has to be a $10-plus million case to make sense.
So we have to limit the cases that we look at to those involving catastrophic injuries or, unfortunately, a loss of life.
For someone who is minimally hurt: great for them, bad for their lawsuit. At the end of the day, the courthouse doors are closed to most of those people.
The Benavides case
The Benavides case was always about shared responsibility. We never tried to frame it as anything but that.
In every one of these Tesla Autopilot cases, there is typically an at-fault driver. Someone did something wrong. Someone failed to be an alert and attentive driver. That, however, should not absolve Tesla.
Tesla's frame was to focus on the last three seconds: What was the driver doing? What didn't they do? What systems were on? What systems were off?
The Benavides v. Tesla case involved a driver with Enhanced Autopilot enabled in his 2019 Tesla Model S.
Brett Schreiber
My role was to make it about something larger. Accidents happen, but systemic failures are caused by choices. If I made this case about the last three seconds, I would lose.
We can't change the facts about the driver's conduct. We talked about it. But we also argued that Tesla made decisions years before the collision — decisions to overstate, overhype, and oversell this technology, resulting in people over-relying on it just as this driver did.
So suddenly, it's not just about the driver's actions. What this driver did became inevitable, and that inevitability exists because of the choices Tesla made.
There is no playbook for AV lawsuits
In the world of auto-product liability, such as a tire-failure case or a seatback-failure case, there's a bit of a playbook. Meaning, a lot of the same experts are involved. Testing has been done.
The Benavides trial in Miami was only the third case ever to go to trial against Tesla, and the first time the plaintiffs won. We're in the very nascent stages of this type of litigation. We're building the plane as we're flying it.
In the last half-century of auto product-defect litigation, you could typically point to a mechanical failure mechanism. Some bolt failed, some hose disconnected, or a seatback bolt wasn't properly torqued, and as a result, the seat folded like a beach chair.
Here, if there are defect exists, they exist in the software. There is typically no mechanical thumbprint, no witness mark that shows you how the system failed. All of this is algorithmic. All of this lives in a world of ones and zeros.
The challenge is to turn algorithmic decision-making into something that we can discover and explain to jurors so they can understand how and why these crashes occurred.
Sometimes it's a camera-fusion failure. Sometimes it's a failure of automatic emergency braking or forward-collision warning to work. Sometimes a system activates in a place it should not have.
I don't need Tesla's source code to understand when a camera-fusion failure occurs. If three cameras target an issue and all three read it differently, I can show a jury that none of them could agree and there was no decision-maker.
The updates leave a glaring problem
There are a lot of Tesla vehicles still on the road today that use cameras and radar for the sensors.
People purchased these vehicles over the last decade with the idea or promise that they would reach a point where they would be fully self-driving and fully autonomous.
Elon Musk only recently said that not all Teslas will operate fully autonomously.
[In April, Musk said older Teslas with the Hardware 3 computer could not achieve unsupervised FSD without a hardware upgrade.]
Tesla has tried to push out over-the-air updates. We've seen in a number of areas that that's kind of like trying to push out an update for an iPhone 17 and make it fit on an iPhone 4. There are computing limitations.
Flash forward: We're now starting to see problems with the camera-onlysystem.
[There is a current National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation into Tesla's "degradation detection system." A filing from NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation shows that the department is examining whether the system properly detects when conditions such as glare degrade camera visibility and warns drivers in time to respond.]
I believe in autonomy
I still fundamentally believe that autonomous driving is a tremendous societal good.
I believe that it is where the future of driving technology is headed, and it can be done well. This is not an indictment of the autonomous vehicle industry.
I think Tesla has to do two things.
One, the company has to be more intentional about the safety culture and about fixing bugs and problems far sooner.
The problem with an over-the-air software update is that it's one thing if I haven't updated my Spotify app. No one's going to lose their life,whether I'm running the most up-to-date version of Spotify.But someone can lose their life if they're not running the most up-to-date version of an autonomous vehicle software.
Number two, Tesla has to change the narrative that this is some glorious, full self-driving vehicle when it's not.
There is only one company in the world that markets partial automation as "full self-driving." The words partial and full in any reasonable interpretation of the English language do not mean the same thing.
I'm sorry, but calling it "Full Self-Driving Supervised" is not enough.
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. Two of them, 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 the 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. Other filings show that nearly all of that amount came from the sale of Robinhood shares previously owned by Bankman-Fried. 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.
My first internship gave me a simple task: Email a press release to a large list of reporters. I followed the meticulous formatting instructions from a binder, and hit send.
Minutes later, a supervisor let me know that I had botched this most basic responsibility. I needed to BCC the list of recipients, something I had neglected to do because in my time in a college classroom, I hadn't learned what BCC meant. It was the kind of rookie mistake I couldn't anticipate and learn only by bumbling through my first office job. For today's young workers, navigating first jobs may become even more complicated.
Bosses say Gen Z isn't really workplace ready. Glenn Fogel, CEO of Priceline's parent company Bookings Holdings, has said young workers need more guidance on the norms of the office. Former Whole Foods CEO John Mackey said that young people "don't seem like they want to work." In 2024, a poll of nearly 1,000 business leaders from Intelligent.com found that 75% of companies said some or all of recent grads they hired were "unsatisfactory," and another survey of 800 HR leaders sponsored by Hult International Business School, found that 37% of HR leaders said would prefer to have a robot or AI do a job than hire a recent new grad, while another 30% said they would rather leave the job vacant.
"Workplace ready" is a slippery designation that shifts shape by industry or office. Employers hungry for workers who know how to get an ROI on AI have tied their hopes to an ever-growing cohort of AI native Gen Zers entering the workforce. After emphasizing technical skills during the 2010s, they're finding AI can automate some of that work. Communication has become more valuable, just as a generation who had their adolescence marred by COVID and grew up on screens enters the workforce. "What I think colleges need to do — and companies — is first integrate people into what is work: how do you socialize, what is expected of you, and then how can you help me with AI, using AI to help enhance our processes that we have today," says Jason Desentz, chief human resources officer at Toshiba, who sees training young people as a "shared responsibility" between schools and colleges.
Desentz also thinks schools should emphasize skills over what many think of as traditional academia. "Can we focus on the stuff that actually matters, and get rid of the fluff?" he says
"The question isn't whether colleges should prepare students for careers. They absolutely must," says Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. "It's whether we prepare students for the job that exists today, or give them the kinds of knowledge, skills, competencies, and judgments to navigate a lifetime of work in an economy that's going to continue to change, especially with the rapid proliferation of AI."
New grads may never have stepped into the office workplace ready. But today's young workers have a maze with even more twists and turns to navigate.
Each generation unlocks a new stigma upon entering the workforce. Gen X bosses saw Millennials as soft and spoiled, Boomer bosses saw Gen Xers as apathetic slackers, and Silent Generation bosses saw Boomers as hippies determined to disrupt the society's morals and norms. The allegations against Gen Z, who embraced Lazy Girl jobs and Quiet Quitting, are just the latest packaging.
"Every age group gets that complaint because the transition from school to work is different," says Peter Cappelli, a professor in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. That transition smooths, and young people grow into jobs just as their parents did. But the professors I spoke to for this story agreed that these new grads are different — they're coming to college without the communication skills typical freshman had in the past.
COVID-19 shutdowns disrupted their high school experience. Gen Z has spent more time on screens and less time dating than their predecessors, and just over a third of those ages 16 to 19 worked a summer job this year, a rite of passage that reached a historic high of 58% in 1978, according to the Pew Research Center. They have grown up with parents increasingly involved in school and extracurriculars who have constant connection to their kids, some of which they have maintained throughout college and the early years of their children's careers.
A growing number of Americans are questioning the value of a college degree. A 2024 Gallup poll found that just 36% of respondents had a "great deal" of confidence in the higher education system, compared to 57% in 2015. Palantir has offered a pipeline for people to skip college and intern at the company. Stanford dropout Sam Altman recently said he thought four years was too long for college, and that the experience could be dramatically compressed.
The professors I spoke to said that if anything, today's college students need more time to develop. Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University who a piece for The Wall Street Journal earlier this year titled "A New Lost Generation: Why Gen Z Is Unprepared for the Workplace," says she has noticed freshman have arrived on campus less able to communicate, and with less experience in romantic relationships, debating, or confronting professors. In some ways, college professors now have to build the skills previous students had mastered upon arriving at campus into their coursework. "It falls on us to fix it," West says. "Anyone can learn the technical skills. It's the relational skills."
Now add that college students have been handed the keys to Gen AI tools that are altering how people communicate with one another and make it easier to cheat their way to a degree and enter the workforce with neutered critical thinking skills. Headlines about Gen Z in the workforce have sounded alarm bells. The Financial Times reported this spring about a finance firm that pivoted away from STEM graduates toward those with humanities degrees, after finding the 2025 intern class to have "shallow" ideas for which their AI native skills couldn't compensate.
The real office situation isn't so dire, but new grads have room to improve. Fifty-five percent of employers said new college graduates' skills at least partially aligned with hiring needs, and 42% said their skills "very closely aligned," in a survey of hiring managers conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Seventy-one percent said recent grads were "somewhat prepared" for the workforce, and only 22% were very well prepared.
NACE also asked employers what the most important skills were: professionalism, teamwork, communication, and critical thinking landed at the top. But only about half said they found new grads proficient in communication, critical thinking, and professionalism, while about 75% said the new grads were proficient in teamwork. In 2024, 66% of employers told NACE new grads had a high proficiency in critical thinking.
NACE didn't have data about these same questions going further back, but in 2014, the AAC&U surveyed top business leaders and found they were down on Millennials: Just a quarter said new grads at the time were well prepared to do critical thinking, communicating, and solving complex problems at work. A 2007 survey by the AAC&U found 63% of employers thought too many recent graduates did not have the necessary skills to thrive at work.
A vast majority of employers told NACE that recent grads were somewhat or very prepared to use AI at work. "Students are better at using AI than people in my workforce," says Annie Chechitelli, chief product officer at EdTech software company Turnitin. She says that today's students may sometimes struggle with resilience and may not have done the hard work — particularly if they become overreliant on AI, but she plans to keep hiring young people. "They're more creative thinkers. I think that they have a different perspective of the world that's more applicable."
Seeking a target for their dissatisfaction, employers are pressuring colleges to emphasize career readiness and prepare students for the AI era, all while colleges fend off a culture war in which they must combat funding losses and defend their value to parents and prospective students who increasingly question if college is worth its skyrocketing cost.
The conversation about a lack of work readiness often skips over the employer's responsibility. Companies hiring young workers have traditionally made an implicit concession to take on the fresh faced employees who need some polishing, in exchange paying them less and assigning them tedious tasks. But many companies have slacked on training workers. Training hours for entry-level workers has been falling since the 2000s, as more training has been geared toward upskilling mid- and senior-level talent. By 2023, a majority of workers said they did not have a mentor, according to the Pew Research Center.
The rush to skill a tech workforce for lucrative jobs may have hit a turning point. From 2007 to 2022, humanities degrees dropped by 25% in most disciplines, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, the Obama administration set a goal of boosting STEM graduates by 1 million over the next decade, a goal that was exceeded as 4.6 million STEM graduates earned degrees by 2022. AI has lowered the bar for performing technical work, and employers have increasing interest in hiring people with liberal arts degrees. This shift over the past decade shows how hard pivots by schools and groups of young people to meet employers' expectations can create an overcorrection.
By 2023, a majority of workers said they did not have a mentor.
Colleges are taking the heat for a generational issue, scrambling to reinvest in career centers and align their classrooms with AI skill expectations, all while trying to draw the line between a smart use of AI and cheating. "I don't think they're responsible for it, but if you're thinking who could do anything about it, that's the easiest place to push," Cappelli says of colleges.
Last year, Dartmouth College rechristened its Center for Professional Development as the Center for Career Design, shifting its focus to helping students find their areas of passion rather than a direct focus on one profession, sometimes using an AI tool to narrow down options that fit their interests, a sort of aptitude test befitting for 2026. The center has set out to raise $94 million to add more career coaches, internships funded by the college, and future-proof students to a changing interview process and shifts in demand for AI skills. "We wanted students to be equipped to navigate the future of work," says Joe Catrino, the center's executive director. "It's ambiguous, it's tumultuous, it is all over the place right now."
To navigate those unknowns, Catrino says the center needs to bridge the gaps in how employers and schools talk about career readiness and skills. That includes conversations with employers about how Dartmouth students have performed in internships and first jobs, and what skills employers are seeking, while shifting how students talk about themselves and their abilities to also focus on skills rather than a quick name drop of companies and schools.
This fall, colleges welcome another class of students whose educations and childhoods have been marked by screens, AI, and anxious parents. The schools must educate them for jobs that may not yet exist in a workforce that's become chilly to new grads. The concept of what makes someone workplace ready in four years could wildly shift, but the idea that there's always some stumbling and learning to be done on the job won't.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
Mo Zohourian turned to AI training when he couldn't land a traditional 9-to-5.
He started on generalist projects at $15/hour and now makes $100/hour as a sales specialist.
Even though he had 15 years experience in sales, Zohourian said his AI career has grown much faster.
This is an as-told-essay based on a conversation with Mo Zohourian, who works as a contractor for AI training companies, specializing in sales management. His work and project rates have been confirmed by Business Insider. Zohourian also consults on AI for small businesses and founded Annotation Academy, an educational platform for AI training. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I moved to Canada from Iran in 2023 and started searching for jobs. I had 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship and sales management, but after back-to-back interviews, I was not getting hired.
I had been applying for about 10 months when I saw an ad on LinkedIn offering work for $15 per hour to train AI, no experience needed. Because I didn't have a job, I said, "Okay, I'll give it a shot," but I was skeptical. I didn't even tell my wife that I started doing it until I received the first payment.
A few years later, I've built a career around AI. I now earn $100 per hour on AI evaluation as a specialist in sales management. I also consult for small businesses on how to use AI and have launched a platform to teach others how to become AI trainers.
It's been crazy. I never thought that AI would be my profession when I started doing it.
My sales experience helped me move on to higher-paying AI training projects
Initially, the work was inconsistent, and I was still looking for full-time jobs.
About three months in, I got a project for $30 an hour. The company I was doing work for had assessments you could take, and by passing them, you would be eligible to work on more important projects. I took and passed assessments for English literature, reasoning, and mathematics. I started making $35 an hour.
I started doing work for multiple companies. Sometimes I'd make $45 an hour on a project, other times $70. There isn't a baseline. Sometimes a project pays less than the one you did before it. As a freelancer, you don't have the same leverage. It is what it is. You can take it or leave it.
Everything changed when the expert jobs started to show. The biggest jump in pay and consistent work was when I started getting assigned sales projects, because that was my expertise.
Initially, the expert projects were limited to STEM fields such as physics, chemistry, and coding. As soon as they started to look for sales experts, I already had a good track record of high-quality tasks on all the platforms, so I was able to get on projects. If I hadn't had a history on these platforms, I don't think I would've gotten the higher-paying sales projects.
Now I work as a sales manager expert on high-stakes projects. I've been consistently getting on projects for $100 an hour for the past 10 months.
These projects are so different from when I started AI evaluation, when everything was so easy — just writing a prompt, writing two responses, and writing a simple justification. Now, with agentic AI and the more powerful models, the tasks are completely different and more complex.
I work a lot, but AI training gave me flexibility and the freedom to start my own business
I stopped applying to full-time jobs about three months after I started AI evaluation, but I still thought AI training was a transition job. It wasn't until about a year of AI training that I was sure it was what I wanted to do.
I typically spend 20 to 40 hours a week on AI training. There may be a one- to two-week pause, or even a monthlong pause, in a project. I always have the option to start another project. But because I have my own business, I use those windows to be more focused on what I am doing personally.
Currently, my priority is my business. I started a firm as an AI consultant helping small businesses use AI to be more efficient. I got my first client, a meal prep company, through someone I met at a party last year. I also launched Annotation Academy, an online platform where I teach people how to do AI evaluation. I got my first paying client for that on launch day in June.
I work a lot, from early in the morning to late at night. But because I can set my own schedule, I still have the luxury of spending time with my son — dropping him off, picking him up, taking him to classes. I can live a life that I love in a way that I could not if I had a full-time job.
My businesses are profitable, but I don't pay myself a salary from them. Because of my AI evaluation job, I can reinvest that money into the company for future expansion and live on my income from AI evaluation.
When I started AI training, I had some savings and was not under great financial pressure. That helped me stay in AI evaluation when the work was inconsistent. The tasks were also much simpler then, so I was able to grow in the work as the tasks became more difficult. But there is a huge demand right now for people who can deliver and who have domain expertise.
This job changed my life in a good way. After working in sales for 15 years, I was attached to it. You think you can develop faster in an industry that you built a foundation on. But for me, I could never find the quick advancement that I found in AI training.
