Welcome back to our Sunday edition, where we round up some of our top stories and take you inside our newsroom. The devastation from fires this week in Los Angeles worsened the state’s insurance crisis. Business Insider’s Dan Latu spoke to experts about how premiums will continue to rise and why securing a loan may even get harder.
On the agenda today:
But first: Back to the office.
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Five years
It’s been nearly five years since corporate America sent its white-collar workforce home amid the onset of the pandemic.
Five years later, RTO v. WFH, a.k.a. working in an office vs. at a kitchen table, remains hotly debated. Business Insider keeps delivering the scoops.
Dominick Reuter and Tim Paradis recently broke the story that AT&T would follow Amazon with a 5-day mandate.
Meanwhile, JPMorgan officially told employees on Friday it expects most workers back in the office five days a week starting in March. Read the full memo here.
It’s one thing to set a mandate, and it’s another to make it work for workers.
Ashley Stewart broke the news in December that Amazon would delay its policy in select locations due to workplace shortages. This past week, Ashley exclusively reported a list of some 40 locations where the Amazon rollout was delayed, from Santa Clara, Calif. and Austin to hubs in China and India.
Meanwhile, Dominick came back with an exclusive about bumps in AT&T’s rollout for workers, such as waits for elevators and jockeying for parking spots. (I put his article on my Linkedin and got some spicy comments.)
Tim wrote about why companies can’t seem to stick the landing once they make the decision to return five days.
And Aki Ito jumped in to write that despite the headlines, corporate America is far from a full return to the office.
We’ll stay on this story in the weeks and months to come.
Please let me know your thoughts on our coverage, on this or any other subject!
Meta’s Trump era
Content moderation has gotten Meta into plenty of hot water before. But the abrupt ending of its third-party fact-checking program was done specifically for Donald Trump, BI’s Peter Kafka writes.
The new policy includes adopting “Community Notes,” which would have users police one another à la Elon Musk’s X. It’s the latest in a series of moves Mark Zuckerberg has made to curry favor with the president-elect and his conservative allies.
Zuckerberg in Trumpland.
Also read:
Leaked AWS org chart
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has made a few changes to the cloud business since stepping into the role last June.
One of his biggest changes has been hiring Julia White as chief marketing officer. A leaked organization chart shows the 11 executives under Garman who are helping him lead the unit through an intense competition period of cloud computing and AI.
Meet the 11 executives.
Behold, the millennial boomers
Millennials have long had a “forever young” air to them. They’re a generation marked by a sense of arrested development.
But in reality, millennials are starting to mirror their boomer parents in terms of wealth and earnings. They’re buying homes and settling down in the suburbs. And in some areas, they’re actually doing better than their parents.
Becoming mom and dad.
Also read:
Mike Wilson’s tough-love advice
Sometimes you have to flop before you fly. That much is true, even on Wall Street.
Morgan Stanley’s Mike Wilson says the key to success is learning to accept failures. He wants newly minted Wall Streeters to know the road ahead is only going to get harder — and how to prepare themselves for it.
Words to the wise.
This week’s quote:
“We have a captured industry where the middlemen get to kind of do whatever they want.”
— Josh Tucker, an appraisal manager and cofounder of the Appraisal Regulation Compliance Council, on homebuying’s giant hidden cost.
More of this week’s top reads:
- The Getty Villa survived LA’s firestorms while everything around it burned, revealing a key lesson for homeowners.
- Internal Microsoft document shows one way managers decide which employees they can’t afford to lose — and it’s all about AI.
- Fed up with HR, people are reporting their horrible bosses on social media.
- Exclusive: Microsoft is planning job cuts and focusing more on underperforming employees.
- Polymarket is taking bets on the Palisades fire in California.
- The wildfires have a Hollywood producer wondering: Should I even stay in LA?
- Vox Media shakes up leadership and lays off staff for the 2nd time in about a month.
- The gambling industry’s sly new way to suck money from desperate Americans.
- I’ve interviewed dozens of self-made millionaires, early retirees, and ‘super savers’ and plan to use one of their top wealth-building strategies in 2025.
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Silicon Valley is licking their chops at the promise of AI ‘agents.’ These are the startups to watch.
The BI Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York.
