"We would always love to have Taylor play. She is a special, special talent, and obviously, she would be welcome at any time," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
The next Super Bowl halftime show will take place in February 2026.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said Taylor Swift could "maybe" perform at next year's show.
Swift has never headlined at a Super Bowl halftime show before.
National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell said on Wednesday that Taylor Swift could "maybe" perform at next year's Super Bowl.
Goodell was speaking to NBC's "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie when she asked him if Swift could headline the Super Bowl halftime show in 2026.
"We would always love to have Taylor play. She is a special, special talent, and obviously she would be welcome at any time," Goodell told Guthrie.
When asked if plans to have Swift appear were in the works, Goodell said he couldn't tell Guthrie "anything about it."
"It's a maybe," he said, adding that he was waiting for Jay-Z to confirm the performing lineup. The headlining act for the next halftime show has yet to be announced. The 2026 Super Bowl will be its 60th.
Jay-Z's entertainment label, Roc Nation, has produced the Super Bowl halftime shows since it teamed up with the NFL in 2019.
"It's in his hands. I'm waiting for the smoke to come out," Goodell said on Wednesday.
Representatives for Swift and Roc Nation did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Swift has, according to multiple media reports, turned down the opportunity to perform at the Super Bowl several times.
In 2022, TMZ reported that Swift was offered the stage at the 2023 Super Bowl, but said no because she wanted to focus on rerecording her first six albums. Rihanna ended up headlining the 2023 halftime show.
A year later, The Daily Mail reported that Swift turned down the halftime show to focus on her Eras Tour. The 2024 halftime show was headlined by Usher.
Last month, Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelce, the tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs. Swift and Kelce have been dating since 2023.
"Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married," Swift wrote in an Instagram post featuring Kelce's proposal on August 26.
Swift's next album, "The Life of a Showgirl," will be released on October 3.
LMArena cofounders Wei-Lin Chiang and Anastasios Angelopoulos
LMArena
LMArena lets users compare AI models and have them battle it out.
The site, started by UC Berkeley researchers, ranks AI models based on user votes.
LMArena recently saw a traffic spike when Google quietly debuted its Nano Banana model.
An AI war is raging as tech companies race to build models — and sometimes, the best way to determine which model is the best is to have them battle it out.
A site called LMArena allows users to do just that. In 2023, a group of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, started Chatbot Arena, now called LMArena. It allows people to compare different AI models with prompts and determine which is better. Users can vote for how well models perform and compare them on a leaderboard.
LMArena saw a tenfold traffic spike in August when a mysterious new AI text-to-image and image editing model, Nano Banana, went viral for churning out impressive images and photo edits. Based on user votes, Nano Banana ranked #1 on LMArena's image generation leaderboard. As many users guessed, Google was behind Nano Banana, which is Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash.
Now, LMArena has over 3 million monthly users, says Wei-Lin Chiang, its CTO. Chiang cofounded LMArena along with Berkeley researchers Anastasios Angelopoulos, the CEO, and Ion Stoica, also a cofounder of $62 billion Databricks and $1 billion Anyscale.
"We're continuing to build a platform that's open and accessible to anyone," Chiang said. "We want people to test these models and express their opinions and preferences to help the community — including providers — evaluate AI grounded in real-world use cases."
Business Insider caught up with Chiang on how LMArena started, the top AI models people are using, and his best guess on what Meta is building at its new Superintelligence Labs.
The interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Why did you start LMArena?
LMArena started as a research project at UC Berkeley. ChatGPT came out before that, and the model released by Meta was Llama 1. People were trying to figure out which model is the best.
We wondered what the difference was between all these models. Traditional benchmarks didn't tell us much, so we launched this project.
Initially, we called it Chatbot Arena. We wanted to build a community-focused evaluation to invite everyone to come and participate. It got quite a bit of attention.
In the first few weeks, tens of thousands of people voted, meaning they asked a question and indicated which model was better. We used that to compile our first leaderboard. It was mostly some of the open-source models. At that time, the only proprietary chatbots were Claude and GPT. Over time, we added more models and got even more attention.
What are the top models on your platform, and which are the ones that are fast-growing?
It depends on the use cases. People come here and can ask any question. Some ask coding questions, and some ask open-ended questions, like creative writing prompts.
Claude is ranked the best in coding. In terms of creativity, I think Gemini is also at the top.
Beyond text, we also have different modalities. For example, on the vision leaderboard, people upload an image and ask questions about that image. In particular, Gemini is doing very well, and so is the GPT series. For text-to-image and image editing, that's the one where we tested the latest Banana models.
Following the lackluster response toLlama 4this year, how are developers usingLlama? Are there any updates you expect fromLlama?
We haven't heard from them much lately, likely because they are internally figuring out how they'll structure the new lab and team. We've been chatting with their Reality Labs team to work on potentially benchmarking multimodal models and products. We are looking forward to partnering with them to evaluate text and coding models.
Meta's superintelligence team is building an "omni model." Do you have guesses on what it might be?
A model consolidating modalities into one. That's one of the trends we're observing in the industry.
What do Google, Meta, and other Big Tech companies get out of putting their models on LMArena? Is it just building exposure, or do they get feedback to improve their models?
The main goal here is to build an open space where anyone can come and participate in evaluating all kinds of models. It's community-driven and reflects how people think about all these different models by encouraging them to ask questions and vote for their preference.
When OpenAI, Google, or Meta come here to test their models, they are giving us a few variants of the model.
Basically, the same public leaderboard you're seeing will tell them your model ranks #5, #10 in coding, #4 in creative writing, and so forth. We give them a detailed report and analysis on how their model is doing based on community-driven feedback. We are also open-sourcing some of the data we collect to the public, as well as the code and pipeline.
When all these models are benchmarking so close to one another, do we need new benchmarks?
Building more benchmarks would definitely benefit us. One core thing we want to ensure is that these benchmarks are grounded in real-world use cases.
If AI can save a doctor or a lawyer two hours a day, that will be a huge value add to society.
We want to ensure that we go beyond traditional benchmarks to benchmarks driven by real users and especially professional experts in using AI tools to get these jobs done.
Recently, we launched a benchmark we called WebDev. You can prompt a model to build a website. These are tools that can help people in tech build prototypes to get something done fast.
What do you think of thatMIT reportthat said most companies that invested in AI aren't seeing a return on their investments?
It's an interesting study for sure. That's why linking AI and grounding it in real-world use cases is particularly important.
That's exactly why we want to build this and expand it to more industries. We started from the tech community. We believe in the tech, and people are getting a lot of value from AI. With Cursor and the Copilots of the world, people are obviously paying for it and leveraging it to build better and faster.
We would love to see this applied broadly to more industries. With the data we're collecting, we want to help bridge that gap and help measure that.
Are there particular fields of query, like law, medicine, or education, where LLMs especially struggle to perform or answer appropriately?
We want to understand what percentage of queries are from these industries, legal and finance, and so on. We definitely would love to share when we get more insights and results.
The goal is to use the data we have to understand the model limitations and be transparent about how we do the data study, and release the data for the community to build upon.
Anna Ashurov, a BlackRock executive, works on driving growth for its technology powerhouse Aladdin.
BlackRock
Anna Ashurov was a rising star on Business Insider's 2018 list.
The then-34-year-old was an executive at Goldman, but has since changed jobs twice.
Now at BlackRock, Ashurov explains her moves from Goldman to Anheuser-Busch to the world's largest asset manager.
Anna Ashurov has been busy.
A 2018 member of Business Insider's rising stars list, Ashurov has changed companies twice since her stint at Goldman Sachs, going from the investment bank to the world's largest beer brewer and then to the world's largest asset manager, where she's worked since 2021.
Ashurov now oversees growth strategy and client relationships for Aladdin, BlackRock's widely used risk analytics and portfolio management tech. She told Business Insider, she's focused on "driving growth holistically" instead of structuring deals and advising clients.
We caught up with her on her career changes, and she shared advice for those considering a big leap. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
BI: What has your career been like since Business Insider featured you on our2018 rising stars list?
AA: When I spoke to your colleagues last, I was at Goldman, in leveraged finance and capital markets. I purposefully wanted to be more on the operating side, and I transitioned into a role within the financing division at Goldman — it was essentially a chief of staff for the financing division. And that gave me a perspective on the operating side within the firm.
From there, I was hired by AB InBev to lead their commercial strategy and transformation. And that was essentially my introduction to being on the operating side, leading commercial strategy, leading market build-out. We had a ton of interesting work that we were doing in our beyond beer strategy, doing some interesting acquisitions. And as I was getting deeper into the operating field, I had an inbound from BlackRock to join the Aladdin business, which to me was absolutely fascinating.
And I decided to make that move. Ultimately, what drove me or drew me to BlackRock was its unique position at the intersection of finance, technology, and innovation. I've always been interested in how technology can transform industries. So to me, that was a perfect opportunity to join the fintech world, and I've been here since then. It's been a fun ride.
BI: What core skills from your time at Goldman do you still use today?
AA: My background in finance has been foundational for my current role, and I even think in my role at AB InBev. So early on, I built deep relationships with institutional clients, which taught me how to understand their needs and different challenges, and to deliver solutions.
That sort of client-centric perspective is what I brought with me, and that is essential to creating long-term value. At AB InBev, I had the opportunity to drive commercial strategy and lead those transformational initiatives, so that also gave me the hands-on experience of aligning business priorities and delivering operational execution that I brought here as well.
I had to learn all about technology, which I haven't done before, but I think some of the foundational skills and being a client-facing executive are something that I'd ultimately apply anywhere.
BI:You've been tasked, in an operating role, with growing brands that many would consider to be the leaders in their space. BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager, while AB InBev is the world's largest brewer. How do you grow established brands while retaining what got them to this point?
AA: It's easier to do when the organization has foundational cultural values, right? AB InBev is a big conglomerate, but at the same time, it was absolutely flat in terms of structure. I had direct access to Michel Doukeris, who's the CEO of the organization, and direct access to the head of strategy — the organization was so agile and nimble that you were able to make decisions and drive change. Same thing at BlackRock. In order for you to be able to actually impact the organization, impact its growth, impact the strategy, and make the difference that you are there to make, you need to have the proper cultural foundation to be able to actually effectuate that change. Both of the organizations have that.
BI: You've now worked in different industries, including some known for long hours and grueling schedules. Have you kept a similar routine as far as your day-to-day as you shifted between jobs? Is there something you've kept the same even as your roles have changed?
AA: I do read during my commute. That's actually probably the only time when I have time to read. So I love when I have like an hour-and-a-half commute, I read both ways or I listen to podcasts, but often I read. I like fiction, I like murder mysteries. That's my time to decompress and release and do something different, because I am kind of on all the time.
BI: What advice would you give someone who is thinking of making a big career move? Maybe someone who has had some success in their career but is thinking of changing industries or firms, as someone who has taken that leap.
AA: If I reflect on my journey and look back at my career, the one sort of constant is that I've grown through change. Do not be afraid of change. For me, it's always been important to not become complacent and to continue to feel challenged. It's important to continue pushing yourself.
Hiring the right commercial and investment banks can be critical for a startup's success.
We asked 15 startup founders and investors to name the best banks they've worked with.
Their picks ranged from early-stage commercial banking partners to IPO-focused heavyweights.
From a startup's earliest stages through its hopeful exit, founders need banks — to manage the company's money, negotiate favorable deals, and minimize financial headaches along the way.
Business Insider asked 15 investors and founders to nominate the best banks doing business with startups in 2025. Most of the people asked to remain anonymous to preserve their existing banking relationships.
Some VCs said that when working with a bank on discreet transactions, especially for small to midsize M&A, choosing a highly specialized individual banker should be the top priority.
"You want to hire a banker who really knows your industry," said Micah Rosenbloom, a managing partner at Founder Collective. "In a lot of these cases, the 'who' matters more than the firm."
For other aspects of banking, however, from managing checking accounts to negotiating a public listing, a bank's broader practice and client network can often take precedent.
More banks have been stepping up to provide high-touch services to startups and venture funds, especially after Silicon Valley Bank's 2023 collapse. HSBC and Citizens Bank, for example, two banks that didn't make this list, have hired numerous SVB alums to pick up venture-backed clients and serve the growing innovation economy.
These are the 10 banks that emerged from founders' and VCs' picks as top partners for commercial banking, debt lending, capital raises, M&A, and IPOs.
Allen & Company
The annual Sun Valley conference is attended every year by business leaders across the globe.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Best for: M&A and fundraising
Why it's on this list: Boutique investment bank Allen & Company keeps a notoriously low profile. The firm, which was founded in the early 1920s, has no website or public contact information.
Instead, the New York-based bank prides itself on its singular focus on nurturing industry relationships. It's perhaps best known for its annual Sun Valley Conference, the "summer camp for billionaires" where deal talks abound.
Investors said the bank's deep network in tech, media, and finance has kept Allen & Co in the flow of hot M&A deals and, occasionally, venture fundraises.
Due to the bank's secretive nature, there's scant public information about specific deals Allen & Co has worked on. So far this year, according to PitchBook, the only transactions the bank has publicly been associated with were T-Mobile's acquisitions of Blis, for $175 million, and Vistar Media, for an undisclosed amount.
Allen & Company didn't respond to a request for comment for this story.
Axom Partners
Axom Partners' website.
Axom Partners
Best for: Small to midsize sell-side M&A
Why it's on this list: Started just two years ago by three former Qatalyst bankers, Axom Partners is making a name for itself by leading some hot software and AI deals.
The tech-focused boutique investment bank has focused on helping earlier-stage venture-backed startups sell themselves. In the AI boom, they've done several deals with AI infrastructure and application companies. "They're in the flow of a lot of interesting AI things going on in the market right now," one investor said.
This year, Axom advised Eppo on its $220 million sale to Datadog in May and VoyageAI on its $220 million sale to MongoDB in February. The bank also worked on OctoAI's sale to Nvidia and Rockset's sale to OpenAI last year.
Axom is picking up top talent along the way, including hiring software-focused dealmaker Buzz Black from Morgan Stanley in March.
Axom Partners didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.
Citi
CEO Jane Fraser
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Best for: International commercial banking
Why it's on this list: For startups with an extensive international footprint, managing bills and payroll across multiple countries can be a huge hassle.
One founder said Citi has been a great partner in helping his company minimize that problem. Citi is generally cited as the bank with the broadest global network, offering services in nearly 180 countries with an on-the-ground presence in over 90 countries and jurisdictions.
Working with Citi means the startup doesn't have to open checking accounts with multiple different banks across different countries, which also helps the company more easily tackle tasks like compliance audits, the founder said.
Citi said it targets clients with annual revenues between $10 million and $3 billion. Wyatt Crowell, head of Citi's North American commercial bank segment, said that the bank aims to connect midsize companies with all of its products, from cash management to investment banking.
Goldman Sachs
David Solomon, Chairman and CEO, Goldman Sachs, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
Best for: IPOs and large M&A
Why it's on this list: Goldman Sachs is the oldest bank on this list, with an over 150-year reputation that precedes it. Its brand makes it a valuable partner for top tech companies seeking an IPO, investors and founders said.
Sources said that because many top-tier public investors bank with Goldman in some capacity, the firm is particularly skilled at connecting pre-IPO companies with the right investors for their listings. One tech founder said Goldman is "probably the best of the big three" at helping pre-IPO startups build relationships with public investors, referring to the top three investment banks in the US: Goldman, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley.
That network also makes it easier for the bank to find the right buyer for companies looking to sell themselves in large M&A transactions, investors said.
Goldman has served as a bookrunner on IPOs including Chime, Figma, and CoreWeave's listings this year, and advised on large sell-side transactions like Wiz's $32 billion sale to Alphabet, announced in March.
An investor said that while Goldman's scale can make its banking offerings less personalized for some startups, "their name just goes such a long way."
Goldman Sachs declined to comment for this story.
JPMorgan Chase
P Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon looks on during the inauguration of the new French headquarters of US' JP Morgan bank on June 29, 2021 in Paris.
Michel Euler/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
Best for: Growth-stage banking and IPOs
Why it's on its list:JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the US and the largest in the world by market cap.
VCs and founders said the bank's scale makes it particularly adept at managing large transactions, especially initial public offerings. This year, JPMorgan has supported some of tech's top IPOs, serving as the primary underwriter on Circle's IPO and contributing to Chime, Figma, and CoreWeave's listings.
Founders and investors said JPMorgan is also a great partner for pre-IPO startups looking to make acquisitions. And because JPMorgan Chase offers a full suite of commercial and investment banking services for early-stage companies through IPO and beyond, the bank can adapt to its clients' evolving needs. Sami Inkinen, the founder of pre-IPO diabetes company Virta Health, said the bank is "positively aggressive and flexible in servicing growth companies."
Opinions on JPMorgan Chase's commercial banking offerings for startups were more mixed. While founders like Inkinen cited positive commercial banking experiences with JPMorgan, others said its status as a bulge-bracket bank can box out smaller startups in favor of higher-profile, high-growth players. One founder said it can be "difficult to get [JPMorgan] interested in working with you."
Founders and investors agreed that JPMorgan appears to have invested more than its bulge-bracket peers in serving venture-backed startups throughout their lifecycles. The bank saw "tremendous growth" in startups rushing to work with JPMorgan in 2023 after SVB's collapse, and rapidly expanded into new products, people, geographies, and sectors to support them, said Andrew Kresse, cohead of JPMorgan's innovation economy unit. That business now has over 550 bankers globally, working with over 11,000 venture-backed companies.
"The companies, founders, and VCs who make up the innovation economy require tailored solutions and services to help them navigate growth and excel in competitive and innovative industries," Kresse and fellow innovation economy cohead John China said in a statement to BI.
"JPMorgan provides unmatched capabilities to this critical sector and we're committed to serving companies of all sizes — from the earliest stage startups to scaled companies — with 360-degree coverage across commercial banking, investment banking and the private bank."
Mercury Technologies
Mercury founder and CEO Immad Akhund
Mercury
Best for: Commercial banking
Why it's on this list: Mercury is the only company on this list that isn't actually a bank, but a fintech platform that provides online banking services.
Founded in 2017, Mercury has been gaining traction with startups and tech founders. Multiple founders and VCs named Mercury a top choice for startups prioritizing customizable, easy-to-use online banking.
Dave McClure, the founder and managing partner of Practical Venture Capital, an investor in Mercury, said the company has seen many startups flock to its platform following Silicon Valley Bank's collapse in 2023.
McClure said Mercury offers "overall a better fit for startups and tech folks" due to its user-friendly interface, tools for automating tasks like AI-powered bill payment categorizations and expense management, and seamless integrations with other fintech software and financial institutions.
Mercury is venture-backed itself, most recently raising a $300 million Series C round led by Sequoia Capital. The company told BI it serves more than 200,000 across industries, including startups, VC firms, and small businesses.
One VC said that because Mercury is relatively young, its longevity will depend on the company's ability to continue to meet the needs of startups as they grow.
Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick
Jeenah Moon / Reuters
Best for: IPOs and large M&A
Why it's on this list: Investment banking heavyweight Morgan Stanley has long been a key player in large M&A and IPOs.
When it comes to tech IPO advisory, specifically, some VCs and founders said Morgan Stanley is outdoing its peers. Investors cited the high quality of its tech investment banking team, pointing to its successes in understanding private companies deeply to create resonant narratives for public investors.
Many of the biggest tech companies to go public this year seem to agree. Morgan Stanley has served as the lead left bookrunner on eight tech IPOs in the US so far this year, including Figma, CoreWeave, Chime, and Hinge Health.
The bank has also advised on several multibillion-dollar M&A deals in 2025, including Intel's sale of Altera's majority stake to Silver Lake and GTCR's sale of Worldpay to Global Payments, both in April.
"Fueled by new waves of innovation across AI, software, and semiconductors, the technology M&A and capital markets have shifted into high gear," said Drew Guevara, cohead of global technology investment banking at Morgan Stanley. "Morgan Stanley is proud to partner with many of the leading companies, who are driving value creation throughout the global economy."
Qatalyst Partners
Qatalyst Partners
Best for: Large sell-side M&A
Why it's on this list:Qatalyst Partners is well-known in VC circles for leading top-dollar tech acquisitions.
The San Francisco-based boutique bank was founded in 2008 by Frank Quattrone, a longtime tech investment banker who previously led the tech banking groups at Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and Credit Suisse, and advised on major tech IPOs, including Amazon and Cisco's listings.
Founders and investors who have worked with Qatalyst said that while the bank tends to only take on large M&A deals, in the range of the high hundreds of millions to tens of billions of dollars, the firm knows how to get great returns for its clients.
"They have this knack for being able to get outsize premiums on acquisitions," one tech investor said. "If you're on the sell side, many folks would love to have Qatalyst in their corner."
Qatalyst advised on Cognigy in its $955 million sale to NICE in July, and Weights & Biases in its $1.7 billion sale to CoreWeave in May, two months after CoreWeave's IPO.
Qatalyst declined to comment for this story.
Silicon Valley Bank
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Best for: Commercial banking and venture debt lending
Why it's on this list: In 2022, Silicon Valley Bank said it served nearly half of all tech and healthcare venture-backed startups in the US. The next year, it collapsed.
Founded in 1983, SVB became extremely popular in the Bay Area in the 2010s and early 2020s by catering to venture-backed startups, beginning to work with companies at their earliest stages and offering them flexible financing like venture debt that traditional banks stayed away from.
First Citizens Bank bought Silicon Valley Bank later the same month, and SVB continues to provide venture-focused banking today. For many startups, the damage was done. One investor said that there's "still too much scar tissue" for some tech entrepreneurs to feel safe continuing to bank with SVB.
SVB acknowledged the reputational hit in an email to BI. The bank said it retained the majority of its customers after the bank failure, albeit some with reduced deposits. The firm added that some startups that left SVB after the collapse have since returned, noting that the bank added more than 1,000 new clients in the first six months of 2025.
Several founders and investors, including multiple sources who still bank with the firm today, praised SVB's high-touch approach, citing its ultra-responsive customer service, easy-to-use checking accounts, and collaboration in times of crisis. Investors also highlighted the firm's venture debt offerings, which one VC called "quick, flexible, and generous."
"We aim to earn the trust and business of the innovation economy every day with relevant financing solutions, excellent service, and products that help startups, large innovation companies, and investors meet their ambitious goals," said SVB president Marc Cadieux in a statement to BI.
Stifel Financial
Stifel Financial's headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri.
Raymond Boyd/Getty Images
Best for: Early-stage commercial banking and venture debt
Why it's on this list:Stifel launched its venture banking practice in 2019. Then, in 2023, a group of about 30 bankers fleeing Silicon Valley Bank joined Stifel to supercharge the business.
Stifel says it wants to work with companies from their early stages through IPO and beyond, with a full suite of services from commercial banking to investment banking. Investors who've worked with Stifel told BI they've had particularly good experiences with the efforts to cater to early to midstage startups and with the bank's venture debt offerings.
While few of those debt transactions are public, Stifel Bank did contribute $20 million in venture debt financing to space security company True Anomaly last year, ahead of its $260 million Series C in April.
Matt Trotter, one of those 30 former SVB bankers, is now a managing director in Stifel's venture banking segment. He told BI the firm has more than doubled its venture banking team in the last two and a half years.
"We want to be the bank for the venture fund, the general partner, the startup, and the founder," he said. "Because we can serve every constituent's individual needs, and we have these insights into both venture funds and their companies, we can be nimble and create solutions that are unique to help them along the way."
Jess Merrill / Alamy; Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for The Recording Academy; Rebecca Zisser/BI
Every couple of years or so, we get a new cultural Beanie Baby. Labubus: Beanie Baby. NFTs: Beanie Baby. Cabbage Patch Kids, Tamagotchis, Furbies: pre-Beanie Baby Beanie Babies. Taylor Swift: Beanie Baby. An enduring, human one, but Beanie Baby nonetheless. I know what you might be thinking on that last one, but hear me out.
The answer to the question, "Is this peak Taylor Swift?" has been no for years. The limit, miraculously and perpetually, does not exist. The law of fads is that they fade. Celebrities eventually fall from grace or find themselves on the receiving end of backlash, especially the female ones — just look at Katy Perry's recent woes or Jennifer Lawrence, or even all the way back to Elizabeth Taylor. But not the 35-year-old Swift. Just when you think something finally has to give, it doesn't.
Swift has been able to transform herself into a collector's item. She's a person, but also a product. She's commodified everything about herself, with the help of her marketing team and fans. Just like kids wanted the Princess Diana bear, Pinchers the Lobster, and Chocolate the Moose in the '90s, Swifties today have a voracious appetite for her vinyl records, cassettes, merch, shows, and every crumb she leaves on social media. Our identities are so wrapped up in consumerism that to love Taylor Swift is to buy Taylor Swift, or at least, a piece of her, and those little pieces add up. The woman is worth $1.6 billion. She's an economy of her own — and one that, thus far, isn't going out of style.
Swift gives a lot of herself. She regularly releases new music, and when the music itself isn't new, she releases new formats of her music — a special album cover, an extra song, etc. She's one of the many artists who feel like they have to constantly produce in the age of Spotify and TikTok, to be a never-ending stream of content. What's unique about Swift isn't just the pace and volume at which she puts things out, but also the manner in which she manages to hold things back at the same time. She's widely available and in short supply.
"It's almost like a cat-and-mouse game," says Sally Theran, a psychologist at Wellesley College.
Swift manages to foster a sense of scarcity even when, musically, there's nothing scarce about her. Ahead of the October release of her coming album, "The Life of a Showgirl," she's been dropping special vinyl releases that are available for purchase for only 48 hours. It's part of her regular limited-time-offer playbook, where she trickles out merchandise that can be acquired only at set times and, sometimes, in set places. It's similar to what the founder of Beanie Babies, Ty Warner, did with his toys — he'd "retire" them at random to drum up interest and send people rushing to stores. The tactics spark the thrill of the chase, the excitement of grabbing onto something that, while perhaps contrived, is hard to get.
Swift leaves "easter eggs," subtle hints and secret messages, for fans to keep them constantly guessing, even if their guesses are often incorrect and borderline conspiratorial. People go about collecting various album releases and merch drops piece by piece, like in Monopoly or Pokémon, or plush toys. The physical acquisitions of merchandise and the Instagram and Snapchat posts that they're at the Eras tour help fans prove their bona fides to other Swifties and show their dedication.
The Taylor Swift fandom is a gamified endeavor born out of millions of widespread parasocial relationships with followers across the globe. Parasocial relationships mean they're one-sided: Swift's fans have a connection with her; she does not with them. And they express that affection through consumerism, which renders Swift a commercial product.
"Because of this combination of emotional attachment through the intentional stoking of the parasocial relationship and connection, you also have this dehumanization that comes up at the same time because people feel this genuine emotional response to her, absent any depth to back it up," says Janelle Peifer, a psychologist at the University of Richmond. "It becomes following or collecting an object."
Maybe Swift's real scarcity is in her staying power.
The thing about Taylor Swift is that nobody knows Taylor Swift except her family, now Travis Kelce, and her business and social circles. The era of social media just makes people feel like they do. Parasocial relationships with celebrities have existed for a long time. In the 1950s, even the staid newscaster Walter Cronkite made people feel like he was a calming uncle. But Cronkite wasn't posting his vacation pics on Instagram or leaving countdown clocks to his next broadcast. Michael Jackson and the Beatles may have had the same or even greater levels of fervor around them, but they also maintained a layer of remove.
"We feel like we get these peeks behind the scenes that we never really got before," says Bradley Bond, a communications professor at the University of San Diego. "And so it only makes sense that we then have significantly intensified our feelings of connectedness to these individuals. They feel more authentic and real."
Swift also hit before the streaming era, during the last gasp of monoculture, before tech platforms siloed music fans off. "She broke in a time when things were a little bit more ubiquitous," says Jarred Arfa, the head of global music at Independent Artist Group. "If there was a hit in the early 2000s, everybody still knew it. If there's a hit now, chances are, if you don't listen to that style of music, you don't know it."
What makes Swift unique, beyond her fame and stature, is that she presents as highly benign. No offense to arguably the biggest celebrity in the world, but a lot about her is generic. Her music is fine. Her voice is fine. Her dancing is … passable. Her forays into politics are fairly uncontroversial stuff. She's not risqué. It makes her relatable. It also makes it possible for fans to project whatever they want onto her in a sense, because she's such a blank slate (sorry, sorry).
"She's not someone who has such a strong personality that people have a really strong negative reaction to her," Theran says.
Celebrities' fall from grace often comes when they violate some sort of expectation of them. An in-control pop prince gets a DWI charge, or a smiling talk show host is reported to be mean to staff. Swift has managed to avoid that. Does she get criticism for sucking money out of her fans? Yes. But she also gets headlines for giving bonuses to her Eras Tour truck drivers.
"With celebrity, we fill in the blanks with our ideal, so we kind of create this self-fulfilling prophecy type of thing where things we don't know we're going to idealize," Bond says. "Since very few of us will ever actually have an intimate moment with Taylor Swift where she might be able to violate our expectations, without that expectancy violation, then we are able to maintain that sense of a strong connection."
In a sense, Swift becomes like Barbie. She can be a pilot, an astronaut, a babysitter, or whatever a couple of little girls made up that day. It's a bit like '90s kids with Beanie Babies concocting realities for their toy friends.
"She manages to be endearing and charismatic and accessible and engaging, and she kind of hooks you in. And the easter eggs are genius, because it's a payoff for her fans who are the most loyal," Theran says. "It makes them feel special, and so we all want to feel special."
To be famous nowadays, people almost can't do one thing. Concert tours are no longer a singer with a guitar onstage —they're enormous productions accompanied by giant marketing apparatuses and endless promotion. That's why they're so expensive. Actors, athletes, models, and talk show hosts are, at some level, advertisers. Swift is an advertiser, too, though largely for herself. Stars have to constantly give people things to buy, to think, talk, and brag about.
Many trends and bubbles don't entirely follow logic. Why Labubus took off when some other ugly plush toy didn't isn't really explicable. The same goes for Stanley cups overshadowing, I don't know, a nice water glass. Swift, like Beanie Babies, falls into this category. It makes sense that she's reached these heights, but it also doesn't.
"You're taking an object that makes no sense to have the level of fervor associated with it, but it has been made meaningful by groupthink, by mass groups of people focusing on, and the marketing campaign that continues to feed that," Peifer says.
Swift is the capitalist gift that keeps on giving. She is, rightly, making money off of herself, as is her fiancé and seemingly every brand known to man when they jump on Swift-related news. Just look at all the buzz around her engagement. Tons of companies tried to capitalize on it to do Taylor-and-Travis-related promos and content. My own outlet has published more than a dozen articles about it. Here I am, writing about her now.
"It's almost that you're in the minority if you're not hopping onto it," says Leslie Fogel, a senior vice president of entertainment and marketing at Zeno Group, a communications firm. "The brand bubble around this may burst eventually, but I don't know when that's going to be."
I've spent a lot of time over the past couple of years wondering when the Taylor Swift bubble might pop. To be clear, I'm a fan — a country-music-loving friend turned me on to her when we were in high school. But all the rules of modern capitalism, celebrity, and trends indicate that what goes up must eventually come down, or maybe just cool off. And yet, Swift's bubble keeps inflating. She constantly reissues herself, in new colors and themes. And her fans keep buying into it.
Emily Stewartis a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
Before he was fired last December, Mody Khan was earning a six-figure salary as a cloud solution architect at Microsoft. Nine months into his job search, he's at risk of losing his home.
"I had savings, and I've depleted almost all of it," said Khan, who's in his 50s and based in Texas. "I'm in a very tight spot."
A new job could stabilize his finances — but despite a five-year run at Microsoft and his prior experience in the tech industry, even landing interviews has been challenging.
"It feels like recruiters are looking for Superman," he said.
Khan is among the thousands of Microsoft employees who've lost their jobs over the past year. In recent years, Big Tech firms — including Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon — have revamped their performance review and compensation systems to better reward top performers and weed out underperformers in pursuit of smaller, higher-performing teams.
Then there are the layoffs. After cutting about 6,000 jobs in May, Microsoft laid off roughly 9,000 more in July. A Microsoft spokesperson previously told Business Insider that the company was focused on reducing management layers and streamlining processes. The cuts have also affected many individual contributor roles.
Microsoft isn't alone. Google, Intel, Amazon, and Walmart are among the companies that have also announced plans to reduce the number of managers in a trend dubbed the "Great Flattening."
While layoffs across the US economy remain low by historical standards, tech workers have been hit particularly hard. Since the beginning of this year, global tech companies have laid off more than 80,000 workers, according to data from the online tracker Layoffs.fyi. These cuts have come amid a white-collar hiring slowdown.
"I've been constantly applying, and I've had interviews, but I've been turned down everywhere," Khan said.
Performance expectations took a toll
After immigrating to the US from Pakistan in 2007, Khan said he struggled to find high-paying work during the 2008 recession. But over time, his job prospects improved — and he held various tech roles before joining Microsoft in July 2019 as a contract support engineer.
He became a full-time employee in May 2020, working as a support escalation engineer. In December 2021, he was promoted to cloud solution architect — a fully remote role he held until his termination in December 2024.
Khan's final years at the company were very difficult. He said multiple managers raised concerns about his performance over the years and eventually warned him that his job was in jeopardy.
While he made efforts to improve, he said it didn't seem to make a difference — and that he believes his managers didn't give him the support he needed to succeed. He said he often lacked clear guidance on expectations and would have benefited from more constructive feedback and coaching. At times, he said, it felt like his managers were more focused on "building a case" against him than helping him improve.
At one point, he told his wife that if he ever won even a small lottery jackpot, he'd walk away. The pressure had become too much.
"I hated going from the bedroom to my home office," he said. "I was under so much stress."
Last December, Khan learned he was being fired for performance reasons and wouldn't be receiving severance pay. He was told he could still apply for other roles at Microsoft — and said he later applied to as many as 30 internal positions — but never received an offer.
Khan said he sold some of his Microsoft stock holdings but now has only about $10,000 in "survival money" left in his bank account — enough to last him and his wife about two more months. If that runs out, they'd be forced to tap into his remaining investments or 401(k).
To make matters worse, they fell behind on their mortgage payments — and if they can't resume payments once their forbearance plan ends in November, they could face foreclosure. The financial toll has also caused his credit score to drop from the high 600s into the 500s in just a few months.
Age and lack of startup background are among his job search challenges
Since expanding his search outside Microsoft, Khan said he's managed to land some interviews, but no matter how well they seem to go, none have led to offers.
"I've had so many good interviews where I'm ready for them to say, 'Mody, let's rock 'n' roll' — and then they don't move forward," he said.
He added that it's particularly frustrating when seemingly promising conversations with recruiters don't end in a clear rejection — but in silence, leaving him unsure whether he was ever truly considered.
"Recruiters contact me, take my résumé, and they ghost me," he said.
Khan believes a few factors may be hindering his job search. He's concerned that some employers assume, because of his age, that he's not up to date on the latest technologies. To push back on that perception, he said he completed an AI certification through the University of Texas. He added that many of his interviewers appeared to be looking for candidates with startup backgrounds, which made him feel like his experience at a tech giant like Microsoft was almost a strike against him.
Additionally, he said he believes his Pakistani background has, at times, been an obstacle. He believes some Indian recruiters or interviewers may carry biases that surface during the hiring process, particularly given long-standing regional and political tensions between India and Pakistan.
Khan said he continues to apply to roles every week, hoping that one will finally come through. But with the financial pressure mounting and his savings running low, he said the stakes are getting higher.
