The feds seized a stake in Anthropic from Sam Bankman-Fried's friends. What happened to the shares?

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 artificial intelligence company's valuation has soared over the past four years. On the secondary market, Anthropic has been valued at $1.5 trillion. It is the most valuable private company in the world, according to Crunchbase.

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.

Ellison was the CEO of Alameda Research, which traded and invested funds that belonged to FTX depositors. She was also Bankman-Fried's on-and-off romantic partner. Singh, an FTX executive and early employee, helped hide the commingling of funds between the two companies.

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.

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Bosses say Gen Zers aren't ready for work. Whose fault is that?

Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI

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."

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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.

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Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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I couldn't land a job, so I started AI training for $15 an hour. Now I make $100 an hour and built a career around AI.

Mo Zohourian

• 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.

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This creator got 'micro-canceled' for promoting Claude. She says AI use is becoming a social taboo.

Anthropic and OpenAI have partnered with influencers for paid promotions. Their comments sections are filling with a chorus of boos.

Bloomberg/Getty Images

• Emma Orhun was caught in a hailstorm of negative comments after partnering with Anthropic.
• "I was nervous that everything that they said was right," she told BI.
• Orhun said she's worried that ongoing backlash will make people less candid about AI use.

Emma Orhun was alone in her apartment when a flood of harsh comments rolled in.

"The first hour was the scariest," she told Business Insider. "People are saying mean things, and then, I have no one to turn to and be like, 'Are they right? Are they not? Am I crazy?'"

Orhun, an Ottawa-based social media influencer and former Shopify design technologist, said she was "micro-canceled" for posting a promotion for Anthropic. She received another round of backlash after talking about that experience on "The Internet is Dead" podcast.

She's not alone. Influencers — including those who make money creating promotional content for their followers — have been getting virtual rotten tomatoes flung in their direction when they pair up with AI labs.

In late July, for example, OpenAI hosted a luxury retreat in upstate New York for roughly a dozen social media personalities. The weekend event included workshops on AI use cases and a beekeeping seminar. When the influencers posted pictures of their OpenAI-branded jars of honey and videos detailing their weekend learnings, the comment sections swarmed with angry followers calling the event everything from "dystopian" to "morally bankrupt."

Orhun didn't attend that event, but her paid promotion with Anthropic received a similar response. Some longtime followers told her AI was "bad for the earth" or said they would unfollow.

"I was nervous that everything that they said was right," she told Business Insider.

The comments made her doubt herself, but they didn't change her mind. "When you yell at people about it and say, 'I'm right, you're wrong' and 'you're a terrible person,' that is no way to get on the same page about anything," she said.

On the podcast, Orhun argued that women online are often expected to act as a kind of moral compass — and suggested that men could use the same AI tools without attracting the same scrutiny.

@brittanydeitch @⌘ emma on doing a Claude brand deal and the discourse around it #ai #coding #claude #womeninstem ♬ original sound - brittany

After the clip drew its own criticism, Orhun said she would now qualify that argument. She pointed to male creators who have also faced backlash for AI promotions and said the reaction to her Claude ad "might not be a gender thing."

She still believes the broader expectation is uneven, though. Women online, she told Business Insider, are more often expected to take the ethically correct position on everything from politics to technology.

Orhun said she now worries that negative comments are putting users in what amounts to an AI closet. Continued backlash could make people less candid about their AI use, she argued.

"I know a lot of people who use the tools," she said, but "they just won't talk about it."

In her own creations, Orhun draws a line between using AI to help with technical work and using generative AI to produce artwork. She uses tools like Claude to code and work through unfamiliar technical problems, but said she won't use AI to generate her art.

"I draw every single day," she said. "I love art, human-made art so much."

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I dropped out of college to sell Pokémon cards full time. My business made $7.8 million in sales last year alone.

Andres Fernandez dropped out of his college in Florida to start his own business, which sells Pokemon cards.

Andres Fernandez

• Andres Fernandez dropped out of his business degree program in college to found his own company.
• The company, MintlyCollects, made $7.8 million in sales in 2025 and became a family business.
• Fernandez said that he believes you can't "just go with the flow" and find a direction in life.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Andres Fernandez, founder and CEO of MintlyCollects, which specializes in selling Pokémon cards on the live selling platform, Whatnot. The company's two Whatnot accounts have around 500k followers altogether. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I was born and raised in Miami, and I've always been an out-of-the-box kid.

When I signed up for college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was going to college because my mom was making me go, and I was studying business, which I find to be cliché.

After just one semester, I dropped out to be a full-time Pokémon card seller.

Rather than getting a business degree to work a corporate job, I ended up building a real business that's mine.

How I found my direction

I was super into video games, YouTube, Twitch, and content creation growing up. I had played Pokémon video games since I was 10, but I wasn't a collector. That changed when my little cousin's birthday came around, and I needed to get him a gift.

I went to Target and bought him some cards. We opened the cards together at his birthday party, and he pulled a $100 card from a $5 pack. As soon as I saw that, I was like, "I'm in. This is awesome."

I started collecting and ripping a lot of packs. At the time, I was working at a croqueta bar, frying food for $10 an hour. I was spending too much money on Pokémon cards, so I started creating content around Pokémon.

I eventually grew an account to about 30,000 followers and started selling on Instagram Live. Then Whatnot reached out to me.

I joined in late 2020, when Whatnot had just started its Pokémon side. I was probably one of the first five Pokémon streamers on the platform.

I saw the vision immediately. I grew up watching YouTube and Twitch, so I thought, "Imagine being on YouTube when YouTube first started." If you're consistent, you're going to succeed because as the platform succeeds, you're going to grow with it.

I was 20, and I stuck with it.

I built a family business

MintlyCollects has since turned into a family business, involving Fernandez's girlfriend, cousin, and close friends.

Andres Fernandez

For the first two to three years, I did everything myself. I streamed six days a week, packed orders, shipped them, and repeated the process Monday through Saturday.

My uncle eventually sat me down and said, "You're onto something. Quit your job. Stop school, and run with it."

So I did.

At first, I didn't know anything about running a business. I wasn't paying myself for the first two and a half years.

But I learned.

Eventually, I realized I couldn't do everything myself. I'm a control freak, but then I took a huge risk and spent $150,000 on my first really large sealed-product investment, and I needed help.

I turned to my friends and family and gave them a commission on the profits. If they streamed and did well, they got paid.

Now, my girlfriend works for me. Her best friend and her best friend's boyfriend work for me. My brother works for me. My girlfriend's cousin works for me. My childhood best friend also works for me.

Today, I have 10 streamers. We can stream more than 20 hours a day on one account and 15 hours a day on another, with both accounts running simultaneously.

In 2024, we did $3.7 million in sales. In 2025, we did $7.8 million, and we're on track to do more than $10 million to $11 million this year.

You can't just go with the flow anymore

Fernandez said his team is aiming to grow its sales in 2026 to over $10 million.

Andres Fernandez

People aren't going to like to hear this, but being comfortable doesn't equal success nine out of 10 times.

People think, "Oh, I'll go to college, and it'll all work out." No. You should be doing internships. You should be working. You should be gaining real experience.

I sacrificed years paying myself zero dollars to get where I'm at. The idea that you can just go with the flow and everything will work out may be true in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, but we're in a different era now.

Find a direction and an interest. If something isn't working, pivot. If you're in tech, go work for a company for free. Volunteer, gain experience, and you will figure something out.

As Gary Vaynerchuk said, you could go to a garage sale, find something, make it nicer, and flip it. Or go to Walmart and get a job, and use that money to start a local business.

Even if my business somehow failed today, I know going to figure something else out — that's how I see life.

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Snyk was worth $8.5 billion. The price of its employees' stock has collapsed.

Snyk advisor and former CEO Peter McKay.

John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

• Cybersecurity startup Snyk was valued at $8.5 billion in 2021. The rise of new AI tools hit it hard.
• The price of each Snyk share given to employees has plummeted to $1.16, a document says.
• Snyk said it doesn't comment on employee share valuations.

Snyk was one of cybersecurity's brightest startup stars, worth $8.5 billion at the height of the software boom. Now, the value of the stock it gives employees has fallen to a fraction of that, underscoring how dramatically fortunes have shifted for many software companies in the AI era.

Snyk, which is headquartered in Boston, became best-known for selling a vulnerability scanner that quickly finds bugs in code. It was valued at $8.5 billion in a 2021 funding round and at $7.4 billion in a 2022 funding round. Snyk has raised more than $1 billion from investors since its founding in 2015.

People with Snyk equity have been watching the value of their shares slide over the past few years, two former employees told Business Insider.

One recalled that around Snyk's peak valuation, their shares were worth over $10. By the summer of 2025, that had declined to around $3, the other former employee said. That figure is now down to $1.16 per share as of late August, according to an internal document.

Snyk said it doesn't comment on employee share valuations and declined to provide a valuation for Snyk at this time. Snyk said that 2026 has "brought accelerating momentum" and added that it has launched three new solutions over the past few months.

Dramatic valuation drops have hit some software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies this year due to the rise of powerful new AI systems, said Dan Morgan, a senior trust portfolio manager at Synovus Trust. Morgan added that startups are particularly vulnerable compared to larger, well-established firms.

"I would say it's definitely a trend, not an exception," he said.

Software startup Airtable, which was once valued at over $11 billion in 2021, entered into an agreement to be sold for $1.3 billion earlier this month. Another SaaS company, Domo, was once worth $2.8 billion and has a market capitalization of less than $200 million.

Snyk faces competition and a leadership shake-up

Snyk has been facing rising competition from AI labs like Anthropic and cybersecurity rivals like Wiz, which Google bought in March. Coinbase, for example, previously told Business Insider that it had used Anthropic's Claude to scan its codebase for bugs.

Snyk was growing steadily, though it remained unprofitable by the end of 2024, losing $188 million on $278 million in revenue, according to UK government records.

In December 2024, then-CEO Peter McKay told TechCrunch the company was "very close to break-even" and had plans for an initial public offering, though it wasn't rushing to do so.

Snyk has gone through at least two rounds of job cuts since 2025, according to former employees' LinkedIn posts. In June, Snyk said it was "flattening leadership" and "simplifying our structure" to move faster.

After about seven years as CEO, McKay announced in February he would step down, saying the company needed a new leader with "deep roots in product innovation and AI."

McKay now works as a "value accelerator advisor" for Goldman Sachs and as an advisor at Snyk. Snyk's chief financial officer, Kenneth MacAskill, stepped in as interim CEO.

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Alcohol became a flashpoint in the US-Canada trade war. Now both sides say they're losing.

Alcohol makers in the US and Canada say they're hurting as a result of the trade war.

John Fedele/Getty Images

• The US-Canada trade war escalated on Saturday with new 50% tariffs on Canadian alcohol.
• American booze was pulled from Canadian shelves last year and remains restricted in most of Canada.
• Alcohol makers in the US and Canada say both industries are hurting.

What started as an eye-catching retaliation tactic to tariffs has become a sticking point in the US-Canada trade war — and neither side is standing down.

The booze battle began last year after President Donald Trump imposed broad 25% tariffs on Canadian goods. Canada responded with its own 25% retaliatory tariffs targeting alcohol, among other products. The country's provinces went further, pulling American alcohol from shelves and halting new purchases or distribution.

A year and a half later, American alcohol remains shut out of much of Canada. The boycott was so effective that Trump cited it as a driving force for his latest tariffs, including a 50% tariff on alcohol from Canada that took effect on Saturday after talks between the two countries broke down.

While there's been plenty of finger-pointing about who started what, alcohol industries on both sides of the border say they're losing.

"Our industry is really just an unfortunate victim," Chris Swonger, CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, said. "It's been devastating for the US industry over the last year and a half, and it's going to be significantly devastating for the Canadian spirits industry, but it'll trickle down and have an effect all the way from bartenders to our distributor partners to retailers to the American hospitality economy."

Alcohol represents just a tiny sliver of the hundreds of billions of dollars in goods traded between the US and Canada, but the impact of the trade war on the industry has been especially severe and visible, in part due to the outright bans as well as the direct impact on beloved alcohol brands.

For alcohol makers, the industry is also an unusual target for a trade war that's partially aimed at shifting manufacturing back to the US. Unlike other goods, alcohol is often prized specifically because of its country of origin. You can't make Canadian whisky in the US.

"An American consumer may love Canadian whisky, and someone else may love tequila," Swonger said.

The US and Canadian industries are calling for an end to the alcohol bans and tariffs

Canadian provinces, which control alcohol imports, enacted bans on American alcohol around March 2025, the same month Canada levied its retaliatory tariffs. While those tariffs were lifted in September 2025, most of the province-level bans remained in place.

Some provinces started allowing existing American stock to be sold, but continued to ban new imports. Eight out of 10 provinces still have some restrictions in place, with Alberta and Saskatchewan as the exceptions.

The bans turned out to be one of the more headline-grabbing results of the trade war. They were also effective at inflicting economic pain: Imports of US alcohol to Canada fell by 81%, from about $718 million to $137 million, from March 2025 through February 2026, compared with the preceding year, according to the White House. In comparison, total US exports to Canada fell 4.8% in 2025.

American alcohol makers felt they were being unfairly targeted. Lawson Whiting, CEO of Brown-Forman, the parent company of Jack Daniel's, said last year the bans were a "disproportionate" response to the tariffs. On an earnings call in June, the company said its organic sales in Canada fell nearly 60% in its 2026 fiscal year, as its products remained off shelves in most Canadian provinces.

Canadian provinces banned American alcohol in early 2025. Most of those restrictions are still in place.

VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Now, Canadian makers, which are far more dependent on the US market than their American counterparts are on the Canadian market, face Trump's new 50% tariffs, which he said were a direct response to "Canadian discrimination" against American-made booze.

The tariffs impact spirits, wine, and beer, with the most popular Canadian booze export to the US being Canadian whisky. Popular brands like Crown Royal, Canadian Club, and Fireball — the latter of which is made in America with imported Canadian whisky — could be affected.

"Both the Canadian and American spirits industries have felt significant impacts of this broader trade dispute," Cal Bricker, President and CEO of Spirits Canada, said in a statement in July.

Canadian spirit makers rely more heavily on exports to the US than American makers do on exports to Canada. Before the bans, Canada accounted for about 10% of US spirits exports. But 93% of all of Canada's spirits exports by value went to the US, according to Spirits Canada. Of all the spirits produced in Canada, nearly 50% are tied to US demand, the group says.

The bans on American alcohol didn't necessarily translate to an increase in sales for Canadian makers, either. Following the bans, overall spirits sales in Canada fell about 4.4% by volume, while sales volumes of Canadian-made spirits were essentially flat, according to Spirits Canada.

The alcohol bans were a key part of the failed negotiations

The provincial bans became a major talking point last week as Canadian and US officials sought to make a deal to avoid new tariffs.

Swonger said the alcohol industry feels it has unfairly become a "leverage point in broader trade negotiations." He said that while distillers appreciated Trump's efforts to prioritize the US alcohol industry going into negotiations, they also wanted to avoid the new 50% tariffs and get the bans lifted instead.

Prime Minister Mark Carney asked Canadian provinces to return US alcohol to their shelves last week as the countries closed in on a deal. Officials in two provinces, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, signaled they were ready to lift bans on American alcohol if a broader deal was reached.

Newfoundland said Thursday it would resume ordering American products, but changed course days later after the trade talks failed.

Canadian makers have also been telling the Canadian provincial governments that the policy intended to punish America is endangering them as well.

"While intended as a response to broader trade tensions, those measures have now become the stated basis for direct US retaliation against Canadian spirits exports," Spirits Canada said in July, encouraging the federal and provincial governments to work together to avoid US retaliation.

Now, trade associations in Canada and the US are pushing for the same goal: end the mini trade war over alcohol.

"We like to compete by sip and taste," Swonger said. "Not by trade barriers."

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Dolly Parton had a hotel, museum, and Broadway musical set to launch in the months ahead

Before her death, Dolly Parton had several projects underway to give fans new ways to experience her world.

Terry Wyatt/WireImage

• In the months before her death, Dolly Parton was still building out her business empire.
• The musician had a Nashville hotel, museum, and Broadway musical set to launch later this year.
• In an interview days before her death, Parton also said she was working on a new line of dog treats.

A new Nashville hotel, museum, and Broadway musical were among the projects set to carry Dolly Parton's legacy into a new chapter this fall.

The country music superstar died on Tuesday in Nashville after "bravely facing a brief battle with cancer," her representatives told Business Insider. She was 80.

Before her death, Parton had been building new ways for fans to step into her world.

One of the projects planned for the months ahead is the SongTeller Hotel, a 245-room Nashville property set to open this fall.

The hotel's reservation system showed rooms are available to book from September 14. Nightly room rates start at $386.

The hotel is designed around Parton's music and storytelling, with two live-music venues, Parton's Live and Jolene's.

Dolly's Life of Many Colors Museum is also scheduled to open this fall. Housed on the third floor of the SongTeller Hotel, the museum is set to be the "largest exhibit celebrating her life anywhere in the world," per its website.

Tickets are on sale for visits beginning September 29, and visitors will not need to book a hotel stay to see the museum.

"Dolly: A True Original Musical" is expected to begin Broadway previews at the St. James Theatre in December, ahead of its planned opening night in January. The musical will feature some of Parton's top hits, like "Jolene" and "9 to 5," along with new music she wrote for the show.

The musical's producers told Variety that the production is set to continue as planned, "as was Dolly's wish."

Those three projects were part of a wider slate of ventures tied to Parton's brand this year.

Parton opened her Tennessean Travel Stop in Cornersville in June. An April press release said additional locations were planned across the country, but provided no further details.

She also partnered with Community Coffee to launch Cup of Ambition, a coffee line that debuted at the travel stop in June. Cup of Ambition's website said it planned to roll the brand out to consumers nationwide later this year, but has not officially announced when or where it will be sold.

In an August 21 interview with People, days before her death, Parton said she expected the coffee to be available online nationwide in September. In the same interview, she also said she was working on a dog-treat line with Purina, but did not share specifics.

Her representatives did not respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.

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They were Lyft drivers. Now they're cleaning Waymos.

Chauncey Thompson (foreground) inspects a Waymo at the company's Nashville depot.

Lyft

Former Lyft drivers are ceding the roads to robots, and helping the machines get five-star ratings.

In Nashville, Lyft's Flexdrive subsidiary plans to open its largest vehicle cleaning and maintenance depot yet in October — to service Waymo robotaxis. The 80,000-square-foot facility will employ about 70 full-time workers, about half of whom formerly drove for Lyft. The situation offers an early glimpse at what AI may mean for millions of workers: eliminating some jobs while creating new work around the machines taking over.

Jonathan Baines drove for Lyft for about a decade to help support himself while pursuing a career as a pop and soul singer-songwriter. Now, as a fleet operations lead at Waymo's existing Nashville depot — which Lyft took over in June — he helps direct robotaxi traffic through the facility and determine whether the cars are ready to return to passengers.

"The general idea is to keep cars rolling through," Baines says.

For him, the best part of the job is that it gives him experience in an industry he expects to be part of the future. "It's new. It's innovative," Baines says. "This is going to give me opportunities within the AV industry, here within Lyft and Flexdrive, that I wouldn't otherwise have."

Similarly, Chauncey Thompson, who played college basketball and later spent about a decade working in the rental-car industry before driving for Lyft, says he strongly prefers being a fleet operations associate to being a driver. He cites the opportunity to work with new technology, consistent hours, and the camaraderie of working on a team. (Lyft arranged the interviews with Thompson and Baines.)

Thompson says servicing Waymos is more hidden and repetitive than when he was driving for Lyft, but he finds the job more future-proof.

Lyft

Flexdrive's internal tech tracks diagnostics and maintenance, alerting the company when cars need service, but workers are still responsible for visually inspecting the vehicles, cleaning and charging them, and flagging anything that needs extra attention. After a storm, Baines might notice mud on a car's rocker panels or an issue with a window's calibration and send it for further inspection by a technician.

Thompson inspects each car, charges it, wipes it down, vacuums it, and checks tire pressure. For now, deciding whether a car is clean enough to return to passengers still relies on human judgment.

Thompson's background also made the transition feel natural. While driving for Lyft, he used his own car, which meant paying close attention to how it looked and whether it was ready for customers. "I wanted my car to look nice on the road and my tires to be in perfect condition before I hit the road," he says.

For Lyft, which sold its division that built self-driving cars in 2021, this work offers another way to participate in autonomous transportation. Its Flexdrive unit, which cleans and services cars that Lyft drivers rent from the company, is now trying its hand at cleaning and servicing vehicles without drivers. Riders will be able to hail Waymos through Lyft's app, in addition to Waymo's, later this year. That puts Lyft on both sides of the operation: providing the platform through which passengers request rides, and the human and physical infrastructure that keeps the vehicles clean and running.

Flexdrive CEO John Parks says autonomous-fleet management is more labor-intensive than the company's traditional rental business because work once handled by drivers, who kept their cars for 14 to 16 weeks, now must be handled by Lyft daily.

"Autonomous vehicles can't clean themselves, they can't charge themselves and they can't repair themselves," Parks says. "Now all of those come back to our depot."

He didn't share specifics on the relative servicing time, but noted that robotaxis, which aren't constrained by a human driver's need to sleep or take time off, could travel as many as 100,000 miles a year, compared with roughly 40,000 miles for a car in Flexdrive's rental fleet. More mileage means more charging, cleaning, tire replacements, and repairs.

"The big difference is the frequency with which you have to touch the cars," he says, noting that depot workers are charging and cleaning robotaxis about two to three times per day, rather than every few months, when Lyft drivers return their rental vehicles.

What they lost in passing interactions with passengers, they say, they gained in sustained relationships with coworkers.

Flexdrive manages about 15,000 traditional rental vehicles across 24 markets with only about 100 employees, Parks says. Its Nashville Waymo depot, built to accommodate a growing fleet, will employ 70 people. About 50 Waymos are currently operating in the city, though that number will grow gradually over time.

Some of that work is routine. Other problems require human judgment. A broken charger may need troubleshooting; a badly positioned car can disrupt the depot's flow. Even when the vehicles move themselves around parts of the facility, Parks says workers still need to notice when something is wrong and figure out what to do next.

The new structure has also changed the social experience for the former drivers. Driving put Baines and Thompson in contact with a changing cast of passengers and required them to read people and situations in real time. Depot work is more hidden and repetitive, but both men find it more compelling.

"I miss driving because I love interacting with people," Baines says. "But in terms of the actual work itself, I love this more."

Thompson says he is "definitely less visible" now, though both men still occasionally drive for Lyft. What they lost in passing interactions, they say, they gained in sustained relationships with coworkers, and the potential for more career opportunities.

"These jobs where blue-collar workers get to work on something that is more tied to AI, it's not a surprise to me at all that those workers feel much more secure about their career prospects going forward," says Daniel Zhao, the chief economist at Glassdoor. People, he says, "would rather be working on a product that they think is where the future is headed."

---

The Nashville depot is one small example of a broader phenomenon economists and labor researchers are trying to measure: AI doesn't simply eliminate jobs. It can also break them apart, automate some tasks and shift others to new workers.

Jonathan Baines drove for Lyft for about a decade. Now he helps direct robotaxi traffic and determine whether the cars are ready to return to passengers.

Chad Ziemendorf

Alexander Alonso, chief knowledge officer at the Society for Human Resource Management, says the shift from driving to depot work illustrates a more useful way to think about AI and employment. He calls it the "redesign of work."

"The big metric is not only jobs lost," Alonso says. "It is: How are jobs changing?"

SHRM's research suggests that change is already underway: 42% of workers expect AI to significantly change their roles. Meanwhile, 35% of the skills in current job postings did not appear in postings for the same jobs a year and a half earlier.

But Alonso isn't yet seeing massive growth in AI-related jobs to offset those potentially lost to AI. "We're not seeing a one-for-one replacement," he says.

SHRM estimates that 22 million U.S. jobs have the technical potential to be displaced by AI and automation by 2030, but after accounting for consumer preferences, regulations, and jobs that combine automatable and nonautomatable tasks, it considers about 8 million realistically at risk.

"The technology might automate one responsibility, but if the organization still needs the person for the other tasks, it doesn't actually create savings," Alonso says.

Waymo, for its part, argues that autonomous vehicles can create new jobs without eliminating driving as a viable source of income. The company would not disclose how many people it takes to clean, charge, and service its national fleet of more than 3,500 vehicles.

Robotaxis may remove the driver from behind the wheel, but they have not removed people from the work of providing a ride. As it stands, some of that work has moved out of the driver's seat and, increasingly, out of the passenger's view.

---

Rani Molla is a technology journalist with nearly 15 years of experience covering Silicon Valley, AI, labor, and the companies reshaping society.

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Genesis wants to move like a startup. Hyundai gives it the muscle to scale like an auto giant.

Ted Mengiste, chief operating officer of Genesis Motor North America, said the luxury brand operates like a startup within Hyundai, a nearly 80-year-old company.

David Dee Delgado/Reuters

• Genesis began as a Hyundai luxury model before becoming a stand-alone brand in 2015.
• It now sells sedans, SUVs, and EVs, and notched 5 straight years of record global sales.
• Genesis North America's COO said the brand has a "startup mindset" that helps it pivot quickly.

Genesis is, by now, a nearly 20-year-old name.

When Ted Mengiste joined the Hyundai brand five years ago as an executive director of sales operations, he described the internal workings of Genesis as "ground floor."

His team was about 37 people, Mengiste told Business Insider, and along the way, he had to build the processes, go-to-market strategies, and the reports they'd use to measure how the business was doing.

"That's tough, but you find some bright minds that are eager to create something new — like a startup," Mengiste said. "We were really a startup."

Mengiste now oversees a team of roughly 200 employees.

Of course, Genesis isn't really a startup. Under the hood, the brand is backed by the multibillion-dollar Hyundai Motor Group — South Korea's national pride and one of the world's largest automotive companies.

A decade after Genesis spun out of Hyundai and became a stand-alone luxury brand, its executives say that operating with the mentality of a young company while tapping into the resources of an auto giant has helped Genesis grow quickly.

"When you have that type of, not just economic and investment backing, but the level of talent and experience to draw on, I think it gives you confidence to be bold and daring," Mengiste said.

A startup backed by a legacy brand

The first Genesis model was introduced in 2008 under the Hyundai name. At the time, the rear-wheel-drive sedan was a major departure for the automaker, which was best known for affordable, mass-market cars.

Hyundai launched the first Genesis model in 2008.

Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

In 2015, Hyundai spun Genesis out into an independent luxury brand, with ambitions to compete more directly with the BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes of the automotive world. Hyundai later said it established an "autonomous business unit," with dedicated teams for marketing, product, brand, and sales planning.

Since then, Genesis has expanded its portfolio from sedans into a lineup of SUVs, EVs, and performance cars. On Wednesday, the brand unveiled its first full-size SUV, the GV90.

While Genesis still accounts for a fraction of Hyundai's overall sales, it's become an important part of the parent company's push into more profitable luxury cars.

In 2025, Genesis sold a record 221,482 vehicles, while Hyundai Motor Company sold 4.1 million vehicles.

A company spokesperson said Hyundai has increased support for Genesis as it has grown, citing investments in product development, design, manufacturing, and customer experience. Last year, Genesis opened a dedicated design center in El Segundo, California. It also announced plans for 22 new or "significantly enhanced" vehicles through 2030.

The upside — and limits — of Hyundai's scale

An automaker startup could only dream of having the kind of backing Genesis has.

Nowhere is that clearer than Hyundai's massive global manufacturing network, with a total annual production capacity of more than 4 million vehicles — not including Kia Corporation, another car company it owns.

Mengiste, who previously worked at Nissan, Infiniti, and Ford, said Hyundai's manufacturing prowess allows the brand to move quickly between different models and powertrains.

"It's an amazing thing to see," Mengiste said. "I've never seen the speed and the flexibility that I have seen at Hyundai Motor Company."

The COO added that Genesis draws from other critical Hyundai resources, such as its advertising firm, engineering and research, steel production, and shipping.

"When the cars are done, the ship is waiting right there — our ships," Mengiste said. "We build the ships, and we have the Glovis logistics firm that ships our cars for us."

Hyundai Motor Group's resources include a global manufacturing network and Glovis, its logistics and shipping affiliate.

SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images

At the same time, Genesis doesn't always get first priority.

Hyundai recently moved production of Genesis' GV70 SUV — the brand's most popular car in North America — out of Alabama and back to South Korea. The move came months after Genesis said it was doubling down on US production.

Mengiste said Hyundai's own growth in the US tightened capacity at the Alabama plant. The decision made more room for Hyundai production, he said.

It's a clash that's familiar to many large companies. Uber COO Andrew Macdonald recently called it the "classic innovator's dilemma" — a massive core business can swallow the resources and management attention that newer ventures need.

Still, Mengiste said Hyundai has been "doubling down on Genesis a lot." The imperative remains to show results.

"The company will invest and maybe even be patient," he said of Hyundai. "But at some point, you have to deliver. And if you show signs of delivery and consistency, you get more investment, and you can then increase the speed of your growth."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at lloydlee@businessinsider.com or Signal at lloydlee.71. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

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I spent 3 years looking for a car my grandfather would approve of after he left me money

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.

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The modern parenting throuple: Mom, Dad, and Papa Clanker

Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI

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.

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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."

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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.

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Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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