Chris Astrella drove four hours to buy a car. It saved him thousands, and he'd do it again.
Chris Astrella
Chris Astrella researched cars for three years before landing on the perfect hybrid.
He nearly bought a Hyundai Tucson — but had to walk away.
He drove four hours to buy the perfect car. The drive saved him $4,000.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chris Astrella, a recent car buyer in Las Vegas, Nevada. It has been edited for length and clarity.
When my grandfather died, he left money for all of his grandchildren. I knew I would eventually need a new vehicle, so I put $25,000 of what he left me in the bank and decided I would use it toward a car.
It took me three years to figure out what I would buy.
I've owned nine vehicles in my life — but this was the first time I walked into the car-buying experience without knowing what I truly wanted. I built a spreadsheet with about 25 vehicles, including everything from a Ford Maverick hybrid and a Hyundai Tucson Hybrid, to a Toyota Venza, and even a gently used Lexus UX.
The only thing I knew was that I needed a hybrid.
My wife and I moved from Wisconsin to Las Vegas, where gas is more expensive. I couldn't justify buying another vehicle that only ran on gas, so I eventually narrowed my choices to the Ford Maverick and Hyundai Tucson.
I walked away from the perfect Hyundai
There was a midsize Tucson SUV at a Hyundai dealership down the road from my house that I test-drove twice. It was perfect, and I was ready to make an offer. I had the money on hand and was prepared to buy it.
For some reason, the dealership wouldn't negotiate.
The Tucson had been sitting there for months, but they wouldn't move on the price. They, like other dealerships I had visited in Vegas during my three-year search, were adding upcharges, such as a $2,000 "reconditioning fee" for work like changing the oil and detailing the vehicle.
I wasn't going to pay that.
So I went back to my spreadsheet and decided I'd look for the Maverick pickup truck. I found the perfect one when I expanded my search radius to 500 miles.
My wife, my dog, four hours, and $4,000
Astrella drove four hours to test a pickup truck he'd never seen.
Chris Astrella
My search quickly narrowed on the perfect listing: a 2022 Maverick Lariat First Edition hybrid with a sunroof, heated seats, and only 9,000 miles on the odometer. It was $4,000 cheaper than similarly specced Mavericks near the Vegas Strip.
There was one catch: It was at a dealership in Flagstaff, Arizona, a four-hour drive from my house.
I had never seen the car, but I had a good feeling about it. I packed my dog, Thumper, in my old Chevy Equinox, and my wife came along, too. "You'd better drive home with this truck," she said before we went on the long journey.
Thumper came along for the four-hour drive to see the new car.
Chris Astrella
I felt the same way, but I also wasn't going to spend that much money on something I didn't want just because we'd driven four hours to see it.
Thankfully, the truck was exactly what I expected from the photos.
I paid about $31,500 out the door. My original budget was around $30,000: $25,000 from the money my grandfather left me, plus some of my own money and the value of my old Chevy Equinox.
For one night in a hotel and eight hours of driving, that was absolutely worth it.
The funny part came about three months later, when the Hyundai dealership called and asked if I was still interested in the Tucson. I got to tell them I'd already taken my business somewhere else.
That was one of the most satisfying phone calls I've ever had.
Lessons from my grandfather
My grandfather taught me how to manage money.
He grew up just after the Depression, and he was incredibly careful about what he spent. He had a saying that he could "squeeze a nickel until the buffalo pisses." I thought about him throughout this entire process.
It mattered to me that I wasn't taking the money he'd worked for and using it to buy some wildly expensive car. I wanted something I could afford, that suited my needs, and that I genuinely liked.
I think my grandfather would've liked the Maverick. He owned some Fords during his life, though he was more of a Lincoln and Cadillac guy.
He'd probably be proud that I was focused on finding the right value. Like him, I stuck to my budget, kept searching, and didn't settle on something that wouldn't have been the right fit.
Maybe three years was a bit too long to keep researching for my next car. But I think he'd be proud of where I ended up.
Molly and Sean Morse agree that they want their 5-year-old daughter to be ready for the AI future. By night they're tech-free, telling stories with her, building fantasy worlds and characters and letting her imagination roam. Then in the morning, she uses an AI image generator like Midourney to visualize a scene from the previous night's bedtime story.
But when it comes to managing the mental load of parenting, the Austin-based couple have different ideas.
Molly, who runs a startup to help parents book activities for kids, is willing to use AI for logistics, like meal planning or sorting through her email to surface the most important messages from their daughter's school. Sean, who works in tech sales, wants to go further. He has his eyes on Omi necklace, an AI wearable that listens in on your day and includes a feature called Parent Whisperer. It records and analyzes interactions between parent and child, logging things like school assignments and supplies to order. The device also picks up on tone, alerting parents when their kid may be unhappy — registering everything from "from toddler tantrums to teenage mood swings," per its ad copy — and offering "expert-backed guidance" on how to respond.
Molly isn't sold on the surveillance state aspect. "I don't want it to advise me on the moral north of family life," she says.
Sean doesn't see the Omi as different from all the ways he's already tracked across the internet. He also thinks the AI would help when his daughter's sudden shifts in temperament confuse him and Molly and leave them scrambling. He sees it like a football team watching game film to learn from their mistakes. It may help him answer the question that swims through his brain at night, he says: "Did I do a bad thing as a dad today? Did I mess that up?"
AI companies are marketing their products as solutions to overloaded parenthood. Last month, Sam Altman heralded a "cool use case" of ChatGPT that involved connecting family calendars to the app, and then using it to create a podcast that summarizes upcoming events in kids' lives to play in the car. ("Talk to your kids," came the internet backlash.) Meta recently began piloting an AI storytelling app called StoryKit. And of the 6,500 words in Mark Zuckerberg's recent AI utopia manifesto, some of the most frequently cited and critiqued included a passage about using an agent to help him with the very analog, quaint pastime of baking with his 8-year-old daughter.
These are sentiments largely lost on a public that's become distrustful of AI, dismissed as the musings of out-of-touch billionaires who have infinite parenting resources at their disposal. And yet, parents are turning to AI themselves. It's not that they're lazy or bored by the best parts of parenting — the ones that Altman and Zuckerberg suggest supplementing with AI. Many are turning to AI because they care, and because modern parenting often feels like it requires a third parent, human or robotic.
AI will optimize our work, our lives, and our relationships, Big Tech bosses say. But in parenting, when the ROI for an 18-year investment is a happy, educated, well-adjusted adult offspring, the path from infancy to that goal is one of life's least linear journeys.
Parenting hasn't been waiting for AI to come along. "I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT," Altman said last year, before conceding, "Clearly, people did it for a long time."
But the demands of parenting have ballooned in the past half century. As of 2025, dads with kids ages 5 or younger spent an average of 1.7 hours a day caring for children, and moms spent about 2.8 hours, according to the American Time Use Survey. In 1965, moms spent just under an hour, and dads spent an average of 16 minutes.
Some of this evolved as parents took a more active role in their kids' schooling and social lives, and as kids' schedules filled up with more sports teams, extracurriculars, and tutoring in the ever-escalating college admissions gauntlet. Many of the headaches parents face are the result of the very technology meant to streamline family life — emails from schools, patient portals pinging from every doctor's office, an app for scheduling soccer practice, a WhatsApp chat for parents in the neighborhood. Much of this labor has fallen on moms, who do an average of twice the household labor of dads, even in families where both parents have jobs.
Ironically, parents with more time on their hands already are more likely to use AI for parenting.
Both moms and dads are looking to ease these burdens. Men adopted AI quicker than women, but now about half of each gender say they use chatbots, according to the Pew Research Center. Men are more likely to say AI makes them productive, more likely than women to say AI will have positive impacts on themselves and on society, and that they will feel "extremely confident" using chatbots.
Ironically, parents with more time on their hands already are more likely to have explored AI uses for their family, Lan Nguyen Chaplin, a professor teaching integrated marketing communications at Northwestern University, found in her research. While it may seem like busiest parents would be the ones gravitating toward automation, she found that the most overwhelmed parents haven't had time to use AI and trust it enough to incorporate it into parenting.
In general, Nguyen Chaplin says, "parents feel perfectly fine using AI to help them schedule. Where the guilt comes in is replacing themselves, using AI to replace them for emotional support." Still, a small portion of parents use AI for that very support, along with keeping their kids occupied, and as a babysitter, Nguyen Chaplin says. More common uses include homework help, meal planning, and finding activities.
Mostly, men and women felt similarly about how AI should be used in parenting, Nguyen Chaplin's research found. But dads were more likely to say AI can help them be a better parent.
As parents try to divvy up the pie of parenting duties fairly, communicating about who has what slice under control is another task itself that AI companies claim to solve. Jean-Denis Greze, the founder of AI assistant platform Town, says he and his wife try to split parenting responsibilities of their two kids fifty-fifty. But that means some of the info about activities could end up in her inbox, and soccer practice schedules in his. Instead of asking each other for updates constantly, they have AI assistants that can search each other's inboxes to find answers. For example: If Greze was tasked with signing their son up for soccer, his wife might follow up by having her assistant ask his.
"The nice thing when I ask my assistant for something that I know lives somewhere in her inbox is, I don't feel like I'm nagging her," Greze says, noting he doesn't think speaking through AI assistants stifles communication between them.
Apps are targeting this pain point. "Running a household is like running a small business," says Liz Meyerdirk, founder of Babs, a family organization app launching in September, and mother of three kids ages 7, 10, and 12. Meyerdirk has spent her career working in logistics, and says she hasn't found a solution like those that exist for work that translates to the sprawling needs of families. "We are trying to push a product out the door" — the product being a child — "maybe in like 18 years, not every quarter — but we just don't have the same tools"
Michelle Battersby, president of the motherhood social network app Peanut, says her team noticed that many moms would query a chatbot, then bring the findings to Peanut's community, asking if other moms agreed, showing they didn't trust AI alone to answer questions about sleep regression and breastfeeding. Peanut added an AI tool called Ask Peanut that would search the groups for answers "We don't see moms using AI to make parenting more efficient," she says. "We see them coming to AI to help them navigate uncertainty."
The most tech-savvy parents have built their own tools. Sarah Baldeo, a cognitive neuroscientist, spent the past year traveling for work, so she built a custom GPT of herself to chat with her 15-year-old son when she's unavailable. Baldeo tells me she programmed the chatbot with her personality, uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, along with documents about her values, the family rules, and challenges she felt in parenting.
Baldeo wanted her son to ask the chatbot advice, and he did prompt it with questions he may have fielded to her, like, How do I diplomatically tell my teacher I'm overloaded with assignments? But he also asked the mombot how to convince his human mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago in the evening — something Baldeo had been hesitant to allow.
The bot told him, as Baldeo recounts, "Your mom very much values new experiences, being around people from different cultures, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and this is how you should frame it to her: that you're exploring a part of Chicago that is more diverse." Her son took this tact to Baldeo, and she said yes. It was only later that she saw the chat history that let her know he had gamed the bot to manipulate her.
"My instinctual reaction after the fact was, 'oh my gosh, I was manipulated by my own reasoning,'" she says. "I reflected on it and I thought, that's a really clever way to use it, because that's not how I built it."
Parents constantly negotiate the terms for raising kids. They may start a family from a place of shared values, but the world evolves quicker, and kids sit at the frontier of new technologies. There's a push and pull between learning from the past mistakes their own parents may have made, and raising kids in a future where the full effects of AI on society and relationships remains murky. "Of all the areas for AI, I think it is the one where we are the most protective in a way," Greze says. "We care so much about these little humans." Even tech execs, who are all-in on AI and make their fortunes off high screen time, have been reluctant to give their kids free range of social media and personal devices. Restricted access to AI may become the sign of a privileged childhood, where mom and dad had the time to debate how it should be used, and to spend screen-free time with kids.
As I spoke to Sean and Molly, they came to another agreement on AI: It should add to, not supplement, what they already do as parents. "I don't want to replace myself," Sean says. "I view it also as additive," he says of the Omi. "It's not a substitute for what we do in the house every day." That was enough to move the needle for Molly.
So, will they buy an Omi to serve as a parent coach?
Maybe, Molly says. As long as it doesn't take over and tell them how to parent.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
It's a question as old as the industry itself: What does a consultant actually do?
Traditionally, consultants have acted as an external support system, called in to crunch the numbers, trim head count, or identify growth opportunities.
Now, AI is reshaping what clients want from consultants and how work gets done, creating a new job profile that blurs the lines between tech and consulting.
Instead of generalist teams producing research and strategy decks, consultants are increasingly expected to provide something tangible: tools, systems, and holistic, ongoing support. The big firms aren't only advising on tech strategy, they're building and implementing it, often through multi-year transformation projects.
To win that work, consulting firms are racing to position themselves as "AI-native."
"The more they're perceived to be a technology firm, the more likely they are to win business," Fiona Czerniawska, CEO of Source Global, a consulting sector intelligence firm, told Business Insider.
But the transformation raises a key question: Are these companies fundamentally changing what they do, or merely how they describe themselves?
The race to become AI-native
Looking back atthe top firms' actions and rhetoric over the past year makes clear just how central AI has become to the consulting business.
"There is no doubt that our firm is a tech company that delivers now on audit, tax, and advisory services," Tim Walsh, CEO of KPMG US, told Business Insider's Dan DeFrancesco at the World Economic Forum in January.
For the fourth-largest professional services firm in the US, with roots reaching back to 1897, Walsh's statement was striking. A decade ago, KPMG would have described itself as a time-and-materials business with "smart people doing smart things," Rob Fisher, vice chairman of advisory at KPMG, said about Walsh's comments.
Rob Fisher, global head of advisory and vice chair of KPMG US.
KPMG
Now, the firm is embedding AI across its traditional offerings, while responding to growing client demand for subscription-style products, alongside advice and managed services, said Fisher. "We have to become more of a technology organization because clients want to consume our expertise that way," Fisher said.
KPMG isn't an outlier.
PwC has rewritten its training agenda around 30 core skills: 15 AI-centric and 15 human-centric, both of which are "extremely critical" to its success, Yolanda Seals-Coffield, chief people and inclusion officer for PwC US, told Business Insider in February.
EY is using AI as a training assistant to help its staff anticipate how their roles will evolve, and McKinsey has started using Lilli, its internal AI chatbot, in its recruitment process.
Allison Heithoff, a consultant with five years of experience, has seen the change firsthand.
Before AI, most of Heithoff's consulting job was "hands-to-keyboard work." In her first years at the midsizefirm West Monroe, she spent her time gathering client data, configuring systems, developing features, testing them, and deploying them.
Five years later, AI can do a lot of that work.
The shift has made her role more strategy-focused and technical. Heithoff, who studied business administration, has found herself using AI to code and develop client solutions in ways she never expected.
Consultancies are hiring differently, too, looking to fill their ranks with deeply skilled technologists. Recent annual reports show that Accenture — already known for its technology capabilities — has added nearly 40,000 AI and data professionals in the last two years, and EY has added 61,000 technologists since 2023.
In February, PwC introduced a new career track for the first time in its 170-year history: the engineering track. The move is a "signpost" for where PwC expects future value to be created, Matt Wood, the firm's then-chief technology and innovation officer, told Business Insider. (Wood left the firm in May).
Even the language of consulting is changing. As Business Insider reported in January, Deloitte is outright scrapping titles like "analyst" and "consultant" and giving all US employees more specific job titles.
Tech and consulting are bleeding into each other
Underpinning all of this is a deeper shift in what consulting firms do and the tools they use to do it.
The largest consultancies have struck multibillion-dollar partnerships with the biggest names in AI, such as OpenAI, Nvidia, Anthropic, and Microsoft, to build internal tools that automate work once handled by junior staff. Now they are rolling out networks of AI agents for employees, and launching AI-enhanced platforms to give clients direct access to their expertise.
The work is also starting to look different. The strategy consulting firm BCG reported in April that AI- and tech-focused services now account for over 40% of its total global revenue, driven by a 25% year-on-year growth in AI services. At McKinsey, AI initiatives now account for roughly 40% of the firm's work, Alex Singla, a senior partner who co-leads QuantumBlack, McKinsey's AI arm, told Business Insider in January.
It's the kind of implementation work that tech companies often do with their own products. Last year, OpenAI launched its own consulting wing, offering clients tailored products and implementation support. Palantir, a tech company that sells software platforms, has teams of "forward-deployed engineers" and "customer success teams" that provide hands-on implementation and strategic advisory services to clients. (Palantir also partners with traditional consulting firms like Bain, PwC, and Accenture.)
Add in the surge of new AI-powered consulting startups — betting that AI can do strategy work just as easily as a team of consultants — and the lines between the two worlds get blurrier.
KPMG's Fisher said the firm's leadership team is out on the West Coast and Silicon Valley every six weeks to "stay connected to the action," meeting with founders, venture capital firms, and their large alliance partners. Previously, business development teams on the West Coast and client conversations would help senior leaders keep abreast of technology shifts.
The result of all this tech evolution is partnerships galore between the top firms and AI leaders. Consulting firms have become critical intermediaries in the AI boom, giving top AI companies access to a vast roster of Fortune 500 clients who still want to turn to a traditional firm for breadth of services, sector expertise, and global reach.
From the early internet to cybersecurity to SaaS, consulting has adapted to technology before, layering fresh capabilities onto a familiar model. The difference now, industry insiders say, is that technology capabilities are becoming table stakes for all firms and evolving faster than ever.
Over the past decade, technology integration evolved gradually, Tony Farnfield, the CEO of the mid-market consultancy BearingPoint, told Business Insider. AI has disrupted the industry much more rapidly, significantly increasing the level of tech involvement in almost every project, he said.
"Very rarely do we do a project that doesn't have some technology element to it," said Farnfield.
Many firms are now moving toward an "Accenture model" that integrates business strategy with technology and execution in a combined offering.
One of the key drivers leading that transformation is economics. Over the last five years, technology-related services have outperformed the broader market, growing two to six times as fast as traditional sectors, said Czerniawska, the CEO of Source Global. The demand has led "every firm that can do so to invest in their technology services," she said.
"While everyone is offering more technology services, some want to go even further to say, 'If that's what the future looks like, then we need to turn ourselves into a tech services player that just happens to specialize," said Czerniawska.
While the race to become AI native is undeniably on, the industry's reinvention may be more pronounced in pitch than in practice.
In terms of pure tech usage, consulting firms are still "a long way from the frontier of what's possible" with AI, Charlie Cheesman, a former senior AI consultant at EY, who helped to write the firm's UK AI strategy, told Business Insider.
Professional services firms' strength lies in "initiating large-scale organizational change," he said.
They"were never built to be technical organizations," he said, so they are having to change massively to keep up with AI progress.
Not every firm is rushing to recast itself as a technology company.
"I don't know if the identity of our firm is changing as a result of this," Errol Gardner, global head of consulting at EY, told Business Insider. Technology now drives about half of EY's business, and the firm is hiring deeply technical talent, but that doesn't change EY's core proposition.
Errol Gardner, global head of consulting at EY.
EY
"What we do is move clients from state A to state B in a safer way and as value-enabled a way as possible," said Gardner, and AI is a "new tool in the toolbox" to help with that.
Deploying AI at an enterprise-wide scale requires the kind of work consulting firms have long done — navigating regulation, data governance, organizational resistance, and budgets. "They need a business strategy that is powered by AI as opposed to a separate AI strategy," said Gardner.
The identity of a consulting job — being client-facing, delivering value to clients, developing the teams, and working collaboratively — hasn't fundamentally changed, he said.
PwC's Wood struck a similar note: "It's tempting to look at AI and think the firm needs to become a technology company," he said, but PwC's approach is to focus on how to become the best version of itself using AI.
"The real shift in consulting is not from strategy to implementation, or from generalists to specialists. It is that enterprise problems are now more interconnected," Kate Smaje, global leader of technology and AI at McKinsey, told Business Insider.
The employee experience
Five employees from top consulting firms —Deloitte, KPMG, and McKinsey — all said the job was undoubtedly more tech-heavy, but that AI's impact on consulting jobs is more complex than simply turning them into technologists.
Every employee at McKinsey has become more technical than they were three years ago, said Louis-Charles Généreux, an associate partner at McKinsey, who first joined the firm in 2018. Using AI to enhance work has become a crucial part of remaining competitive in the industry, he said.
At Deloitte, AI hasn't caused the work to change overnight, said a US-based technology consultant who has been at the firm for six years. Instead, it's slowly shifted the job from creation to validation and has increased expectations for workers. "Teams are now expected to deliver more with the same or fewer people," the consultant said.
A senior consultant at Deloitte UK said that even after clients implement AI tools, they still return to the firm needing ongoing support. The "core identity of the profession remains rooted in adaptability," the consultant said.
Others said that, while leadership narratives emphasize AI in everything they do, daily use still mostly leans on generative AI rather than agentic AI.
Cheesman, the former EY AI consultant, said the industry's ability to deploy AI has yet to match the technology's potential: Consultancies can move clients "one or two steps forward" when AI could be taking them 5 or 10 steps forward.
There is no shortage of highly intelligent, capable people in the industry, Cheesman said, but 99% are not coders.
For now, it's still unclear how far consulting firms will go toward remaking themselves as technology companies. They may offer more technology services than they did a decade ago, but most clients still think of the top strategy firms as doing strategy, and the Big Four predominantly as doing finance-related work, said Source Global's Czerniawska. Ultimately, she added, it's for clients to decide the firm's identity, not vice versa.
Around 90% of clients believe AI will affect how firms deliver their services, yet the share who expect that impact to be significant has fallen — from 60% in 2024 to 40% more recently, according to Source Global's research.
There are also advantages to maintaining the consulting identity. Firms that lean too much towards presenting themselves as technology companies face a pricing risk, said Czerniawska. Clients associate technology with lower costs than traditional consulting, she said. Move too far in that direction, and firms risk eroding the premium they charge.
"Identities have shifted unquestionably, but they've not moved to a point where somebody's saying, 'this is a technology company,'" said Czerniawska.
Sam Barnes/Sportsfile for Web Summit Qatar via Getty Images
Space station startup Vast cut 4% of its employees this week, Business Insider has learned.
The startup is building a commercial replacement for the International Space Station.
A Vast spokesperson said the cuts were performance-related and the startup is looking to backfill them.
Space station startup Vast has cut 4% of its workforce as the new space race heats up.
The startup, which is developing a commercial replacement for the International Space Station (ISS), fired 46 employees on Wednesday, Business Insider has learned.
The cuts come months after Vast raised $500 million in a funding round aimed at launching the world's first commercial space station in 2027.
A spokesperson for the startup confirmed the cuts, which they said were performance-related. They added that the company was still hiring and had 277 open roles.
"As part of our mid-year review cycle, Vast parted ways with employees who were not meeting expectations. We are backfilling these positions and are continuing to grow and execute," the spokesperson said.
Business Insider spoke to two employees affected by the job losses, who said no issues had been raised about the quality or output of their work during their 1:1s with managers or in performance reviews over the past few months.
A rendering of Haven-2, Vast's proposed ISS replacement.
The California-based startup plans to launch Haven-1, its first space station, next year on a SpaceX rocket. Vast says it will begin launching Haven-2, the modular 12-person space station the company plans to use to replace the ISS, by 2028.
Like Elon Musk's SpaceX, Vast's long-term plans sound like something pulled from science fiction. The company's ultimate ambition is to build space stations that will rotate in orbit to produce their own artificial gravity.
Recently, Vast has expanded into satellite manufacturing and struck a deal with the European Space Agency to send its astronauts to the ISS.
It comes amid uncertainty over NASA's plans to fund a new generation of commercial space stations. In March, the agency proposed a new post-ISS strategy based around a single space station, but withdrew it in June after backlash from across the space industry.
On Tuesday's episode of the "Rodeo Time" podcast hosted by Dale Brisby, Sheridan said his purchase of the Four Sixes Ranch prompted him to sign a deal with Paramount and continue working.
"I was set up to retire. I was going to be done after 'Yellowstone,'" Sheridan said.
The writer and producer said he had already paid cash for another ranch in Weatherford, Texas, and "didn't owe anybody anything."
"I was going to put my feet up and show horses, and have my little hobby herd over here, and that was it," Sheridan said.
However, buying the Four Sixes Ranch meant Sheridan couldn't retire just yet. "I knew that if I bought this ranch, I was not going to be quitting my day job for a while," he said.
The opportunity to buy the ranch came after its then-owner, Anne Marion, died.
Sheridan, who had met her while filming "Yellowstone" there, said the ranch was set to be divided and sold, but Marion had asked her estate to find someone who would "maintain her vision."
"And, so, the person they came up with was me," Sheridan said.
When they approached Sheridan about buying the ranch, the property came with a heftyprice tag. "I said, 'Well, boys, I'm a little short. In fact, I'm about $300 million short,'" Sheridan said, recalling his response.
He said the prospect of buying the ranch led him to reconsider an "exclusive deal" with Paramount, which he had previously resisted.
"They were terrified that I was going to go to greener pastures and leave them and go somewhere else, which I probably was," Sheridan said.
"But once this happened, I called them, and I said, 'You know what? I think I'm ready to make an overall deal.' And they said, 'That's great. Do you have a number in mind?' And I said, 'Why yes, I do,'" Sheridan said.
However, Sheridan's partnership with Paramount may soon be winding down. Puck reported in 2025 that he was set to leave Paramount for NBCUniversal once his current deal expires.
Inside Sheridan's piece of Texas history
Founded by Samuel "Burk" Burnett in 1870, the Four Sixes Ranch is known for its Angus cattle and Quarter horses, per its website. It remained under the Burnett family for generations, eventually passing to Marion, Burnett's great-granddaughter.
Marion's will required the family's ranching operations to be sold after her death, according to the property's listing. The main Four Sixes Ranch, spanning 142,372 acres in King County, was listed for $192.2 million. It was offered together with two separate properties, the Dixon Creek and Frisco Creek ranch divisions, which were listed for $137.3 million and $12.2 million, respectively.
Texas Land Magazine reported in June 2022 that Sheridan put together a group of investors to buy the ranch. It said the deal closed in January that year, and "all parties signed a confidentiality agreement preventing disclosure of the final sale price."
"The deal was all-inclusive — three ranches and all inventory," Sam Middleton, the listing agent and broker who represented Marion's estate during the sale, told the magazine.
Sheridan, meanwhile, said the scripts he wrote while "Yellowstone" production was shut down during the pandemic helped him secure a controlling stake in the investment.
"I wrote a bunch," Sheridan said in an interview with The Land Report published in June 2022. "I sold enough scripts that I was able to become the majority owner in the partnership."
Americans' wallets are feeling the strain of inflation outpacing wages.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
US consumer sentiment is worse than in the pandemic years.
One likely reason is that wage growth isn't keeping up with inflation.
The sky-high inflation of a few years ago has had lingering effects on workers.
Americans' wages aren't keeping up with the cost of living, and it's likely dragging down how they feel about the economy.
The economy is still slowly growing, consumers are still spending, and both unemployment and layoffs are low. However, consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan's monthly survey, remains worse than during the COVID period. One big factor could explain why: Inflation has exceeded wage growth for four straight months.
"Consumers' frustration over the erosion of their purchasing power continues to mount," Joanne Hsu, University of Michigan's surveys of consumers director, said.
The survey showed almost three-quarters of consumers in August thought price growth would outpace their income growth over the next year. Hsu said many people are worried that higher energy prices will affect other parts of the economy.
"A sustained drop in gasoline prices over the course of several months (in contrast to temporary dips) would go a long way in boosting consumer views of the economy," Hsu said.
Wage growth lagging inflation is not the only concerning trend in the economy. For instance, labor force participation is at its lowest level in decades outside the pandemic. However, it can be tough for consumers to ignore the higher prices blasted on gas station signs and posted along grocery aisles.
Even though inflation is down from its post-COVID peak, it's still above historical norms, and the long-running impact of that spike is still being felt in Americans' wallets years later.
A new working paper from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business's Erik Hurst and Christina Patterson, and ADP Research's Nela Richardson and Liv Wang, used ADP's payroll data through 2025 to examine purchasing power. They found that the unexpected and temporary inflation shock as the economy reopened in the wake of the pandemic resulted in a "persistent downward shift in real wages, helping explain why Americans' dissatisfaction outlasted the inflation episode itself."
The researchers found that real wages fell between December 2020 and 2024 for nearly 40% of workers, higher than the roughly 24% of workers pre-pandemic.
"Inflation has slowed, but many people never fully recovered the purchasing power they lost when prices surged," Richardson said in a blog post about the findings.
She said that a 3% raise was usually sufficient to get a "modest" real income gain pre-pandemic. She added that when inflation skyrocketed in 2022, employers gave raises that didn't keep pace with the higher inflation.
"Hence this once-in-a-generation inflation shock led to a decline in U.S. consumer purchasing power that persists today," she said.
Despite an uptick in the average share of workers getting a bonus from 2021 to 2023 compared to 2017 to 2019, the researchers found bonuses "did very little to stem the real wage losses that workers experienced." Off-cycle raises helped moderate real wage declines for job stayers.
The importance of real wage gains
Mark Hamrick, chief economic analyst at The Hamrick Brief, told Business Insider that persistently high inflation above the Fed's 2% target is contributing to Americans' pessimistic feelings about the economy.
"Americans are literally paying the price for high inflation through elevated price levels," he said.
"Even if you're making more money numbers-wise, with the way prices are rising, you have less money left over at the end of the month," ZipRecruiter economist Nicole Bachaud told Business Insider. "That's really going to impact the large consumer base of America, middle- and low-income households, who are really dependent on wage growth to help them remain economically viable."
People with different levels of wealth aren't experiencing the economy equally. Hamrick said those lacking substantial wealth are constantly reminded of the gap. As an example, he noted that on many airlines, higher-paying passengers at the front of the plane typically receive a higher level of service than "those who sit in the back and are scrunched up."
"At the end of the day, it's affordability challenges and a growing wealth divide that ends up disenfranchising a good number of people," he said.
While Hamrick said there will always be divides in wealth, sustained wage gains adjusted for inflation would help mitigate the problem, which hasn't been happening in aggregate.
"A number of people are being taken financial prisoner by that," he said.
Reach out to this reporter to share how the economy has affected you financially, at mhoff@businessinsider.com.
The Hims and Hers CEO said that companies with their own datasets stand to save a lot of money by using open-weight models.
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Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum touted the use of open-weight models to achieve cost savings in AI.
He said companies that generate large amounts of internal data can save up to 80% using open-weight models.
This is one of the hottest topics in the tech sphere as enterprises strategize to improve returns.
One executive is touting open-weight models, especially if your company produces lots of data.
In an interview with CNBC Squawkbox, released on Tuesday, Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum said companies that already have large datasets should shift away from using big AI models and toward using open-weight models.
He cited his company, a telehealth provider that delivers prescription drugs and personal care products through a subscription-based service. He said the company has a large closed-loop dataset of patients it has worked with, which he called a "real asset" because it can be used to train AI models.
"I think for companies that have the resources and scale, if they have an independent dataset, that is a path that they will go, no question," he said to CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin. "The cost can be upward of 70, 80% less."
Open-weight models let users access and customize a model's trained parameters, and can be cheaper to run at scale. More importantly, Dudum said models trained on a company's actual use cases would perform better.
"And so what we launched, our first version, immediately outsurpassed what we could get in market," he said. "But the trajectory of what's possible in just six months is transformative because it's continuously learning on every new patient that comes into Hims & Hers."
Dudum's comments come as saving AI costs is one of the hottest topics in the tech and business spheres. Companies are phasing out tokenmaxxing, in which employees were urged to burn as many AI tokens as possible, and are now focusing on getting the most value from their spending.
Many are model routing, referring to matching tasks to AI models based on their complexity. Some executives, like Coinbase's Brian Armstrong, have implemented the use of Chinese models like Kimi K2.7 and GLM 5.2 as default models within their companies.
Kimi K3, an open-weight model developed by the Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI, made waves in Silicon Valley last month for promising to rival the capabilities of models from OpenAI and Anthropic at lower costs.
Meanwhile, data has become one of the most sought-after resources in the AI space, as it is crucial to model training. Earlier this month, Google paid $10 million for internal data from the shuttered carrier Spirit Airlines, which included internal documents, workflows, emails, and millions of Teams messages.
AI training firm Handshake AI has promised to pay $6 per page of "high-quality" work documents, capped at $30,000, in a bid to gain access to more data.
