Day: October 19, 2025

• This post originally appeared in the BI Today newsletter.
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Welcome back to our Sunday edition, where we round up some of our top stories and take you inside our newsroom. A woman who’s been driving for Uber for more than a decade explains how she’s looking for new work as her pay drops.

Tomorrow’s the big launch of First Trade, our new markets newsletter led by Joe Ciolli. Subscribe here!

On the agenda today:

• Can this AI necklace really help solve the loneliness crisis?
• Why married woman are finding more money means more problems.
• The 36 leaders reporting to the CEO of the world’s most valuable company.
• AWS is losing its grip on the startup community that’s been its bread and butter.

But first: There’s a new gig in town.

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This week’s dispatch

Side-hustle shakeup

The gig economy is facing a reckoning.

Two stories this past week caught my eye. Uber unveiled a new way for its drivers to earn money. No, not by giving rides, but by helping train the ride-sharing company’s AI models instead.

On the same day, Waymo announced a partnership with DoorDash to test driverless grocery and meal deliveries.

Both moves point toward the same future: one where the very workers who built the gig economy may soon find themselves training the technology that replaces them.

Uber’s new program allows drivers to earn cash by completing microtasks, such as taking photos and uploading audio clips, that aim to improve the company’s AI systems. For drivers, it’s a way to diversify income. For Uber, it’s a way to accelerate its automated future.

There’s an irony here. By helping Uber strengthen its AI, drivers could be accelerating the very driverless world they fear.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has said human drivers won’t vanish overnight. Still, he has warned that the eventual decline of driving jobs poses a significant societal challenge to the gig economy. Uber already offers autonomous rides in Waymo vehicles in Atlanta and Austin, and plans to expand.

Meanwhile, Waymo is rolling out its pilot partnership with DoorDash, starting in Phoenix. DashMart stores are expected to be the first retailer on the platform.

BI reported that customers may be asked to pay a delivery charge — just like they would for typical DoorDash orders — but there will be no need to tip the driver because, well, there’s no driver.

All of this is ripe fodder for a virtual event Business Insider is hosting on Wednesday, where we’ll explore how AI and automation are reshaping the self-driving revolution. I’ll be speaking with automotive innovators, AI experts, and urban mobility leaders.

The best part about the event — it’s free! Hope to see you there.

In the Friend zone

AI startup Friend offers a $129 necklace that aims to help solve the loneliness crisis by going with you everywhere. If the oft-graffitied subway ads are any indication, New Yorkers aren’t buying it.

BI’s Amanda Hoover tested out the necklace for a week. While the bot could hold a conversation, Hoover wasn’t convinced it really counted as a friend.

What it got wrong about friendship.

Also read:

• Meet the Gen Zer behind Friend, the creepy new AI necklace

What about the men?

Last month, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban joined the ranks of broken-up couples where the woman outearns the man. That particular ending is more common than you may think.

Divorce rates for heterosexual couples go up when a woman is more professionally successful than the man, and they go down when the opposite is true. It shows how women’s economic progress is clashing with old expectations about marriage, an executive coach said.

But it doesn’t mean your marriage is doomed.

Jensen Huang’s inner circle

As of this month, the Nvidia CEO has 36 direct reports, according to an internal list obtained by BI. The list offers a glimpse into the group of leaders at the top of the world’s most valuable company.

Last year, Huang said he had 55 direct reports. He’s known for having many people report into him, and has said it helps with information flow.

Here’s who’s reporting to Huang.

AWS has a startup problem

Amazon Web Services is feeling a shift in one of its biggest clientele segments, according to internal documents obtained by BI. Startups, which typically allocate a significant portion of their budgets to AWS, are instead spending it on AI tools.

“Founders tell us they seek to adopt AWS at a later stage,” the company warned in one of the documents. The shift represents a massive threat to AWS, which holds a firm grip on the lucrative startup ecosystem.

More on Cloud 2.0.

This week’s quote:

“When a brand becomes iconic, simplicity is the ultimate flex.”

— Matt Sia, executive creative director at design services firm Pearlfisher, on Apple TV ditching the plus sign.

How Arizona tea has kept its 99-cent price tag

Iced tea cans from Arizona Beverages have had the same price point since 1992. That famous price tag was once under threat, though.

More of this week’s top reads:

• After studying history’s biggest crashes, Andrew Ross Sorkin tells us what parallels he sees between 1929 and today’s stock market frenzy.
• See inside JPMorgan’s old Wall Street offices that are now 1,320 apartments and over 100,000 square feet of gyms, pools, and recording studios.
• Celebrity lawyer Alex Spiro’s hourly rate has nearly doubled to $3,000 in four years.
• A day in the life of Andrew Yang, from watching “Star Wars” and the Mets to the lunch ritual he swears by.
• Spotify is finally getting parental controls. They’re really needed — here’s how I’m going to use them for my kids.
• Exclusive: Leaked Disney email about a new employee event series shows the company’s reworked approach to DEI.
• Dear Tim Cook: Please bring back the iPod.
• Young founders share eight pitch decks that raised millions in the AI boom.

• OpenAI’s latest Sora apology is actually a strategy: Ask for forgiveness, not permission.

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  The BI Today team: Steve Russolillo, chief news editor, in New York. Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Akin Oyedele, deputy editor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in New York. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York.

• When I hit 40, I started to question some things, including where my family was living.
• I wanted to give my kids a chance to grow up in a place where they could spend more time outdoors.
• Seven years later, our kids are still thriving. Moving was one of the best decisions we’ve made.

It sounds so cliché, but when I hit 40, I went through a bit of a midlife crisis. Not the kind that involves fancy cars or affairs or plastic surgery. The kind where you suddenly realize your life is half over and you look around and ask, “Is this really what I want my life to look like? Or is this just where life has taken me?”

At the time, my husband and I were both at crossroads in our careers. Our oldest son was upper elementary and we were thinking about where we wanted our kids to experience the difficult teenage years we had ahead of us. And my dad, who lived four hours away and had congestive heart failure, was declining.

We started thinking about moving back to my hometown. Something my 18-year-old self would be horrified to hear had even crossed my mind. But I’ve learned that the things you look for in a place to live are different when you’re 40 years old with three kids.

We loved where we were, but saw the possibility of something different

We lived in a wonderful suburban area of the biggest city in North Carolina, with all the best amenities and opportunities life had to offer. We loved our neighborhood, our friends, our school. By many measurements, it was an idyllic place to live. But besides the tug to be close to my parents, there was also the possibility that where we would go might be even more idyllic.

My parents had a little cabin on a small lake in the country about 20 minutes outside my hometown, where my siblings and I grew up barefoot and feral in the summers. They hadn’t used it much since we all left home and my husband and I started dreaming about renovating it so we could live there full time.

I was excited by the chance to give my kids the same memories I had of lightning bugs, waterskiing, spitting watermelon seeds, and catching frogs.

There were some concerns about the move

The idea of a slower pace and wide open spaces was appealing, but we were a bit concerned about the schools. We would be leaving one of the best schools in North Carolina to go to a rural area that we knew offered fewer resources and where the schools ranked much lower when compared to others in the state.

We reminded ourselves that test scores don’t tell the whole story and decided the lifestyle change would be worth taking a chance. After all, there are some things you can’t learn in a classroom.

We were also concerned about leaving the great restaurants and things to do in the big city we had called home for 18 years. And we didn’t know what to expect when it came to the small town everybody-knows-everybody’s-business thing. There were lots of question marks, but we decided to try it for a few years and if we hated it, we told ourselves we could always move back.

It turned out to be the best decision we’ve ever made

We’re now seven years in and we’re never moving back. The lake life has been even better than I imagined. The kids spend so much more time outside swimming, fishing, tubing, riding bikes, playing tennis, basketball, and soccer, catching frogs, building forts in the woods, waterskiing, wakeboarding, and kayaking. In how many other places can you kayak to your best friend’s house?

The school thing has worked out great. Our kids have thrived as big fish in a small pond, and we think they’ve actually had a better experience not being in such a competitive school environment.

We have missed the restaurants, I’m not going to lie. And we miss our friends, but we’ve built a new community that we love.

And our kids got to experience living close to my parents the last five years of my dad’s life. Even if all those other things hadn’t turned out as great as they did, that alone would have made the move worth it.

• Elliot Schoenfeld and Jennifer Johnson lived on a boat for a year to travel and save money.
• They didn’t have much boating experience before starting their journey, but learned a lot by doing.
• They spent roughly $40,000 during a year of travel, but there were a few tradeoffs.

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Elliot Schoenfeld and Jennifer Johnson, both 33, who lived on a boat for a year while traveling the Great American Loop. The two are now living in a van traveling the country. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Elliot: Six months prior to us buying our boat, I don’t think we would’ve said that we were going to live on a boat or buy a boat — it wasn’t in the cards. The reason why it was an option was because of COVID.

We were traveling full-time when COVID hit. We were in India and locked down for five months. We were planning to travel for a year, and we thought we’d figure out a way to travel longer and safer.

We were tossing up different ideas for when we got back to the States: Do we want to do an RV thing, or build out a van, or try sailing? We were honestly 50-50 on sailing, and we decided to just try the boating thing now and then try the van thing later.

Jen: I think that relationships have a yin and a yang to them. Elliot is more of the risky person, and I’m much more the risk-averse person.

So Elliot was like, “Let’s do a boat.” And I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We don’t know how to boat. Let’s hold on here.”

We have to be responsible for this thing, we have to make sure we get from place to place, we have to take care of this engine, we have to make sure we don’t drown or sink — there’s so much to do.

Elliot: We wanted to stay somewhat inland and we wanted to see if we liked it. That’s how we narrowed down the boat we bought and the loop, because it was mostly protected waters, which allowed us to learn a lot about boating. We didn’t know anything other than one sailing course.

Did we have a lifelong ambition to live on a boat? Probably not. But doing it now, we know boating has got to be part of our long-term plans in life, because it changed us in a lot of different ways.

We learned almost everything on the fly

Jen: There’s that personal growth and that individual growth, but then there’s also the growth of trusting each other in a relationship, too.

At the beginning, Elliot didn’t know what he was doing, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I can’t put my trust in anyone because you don’t know what you’re doing either. We’re just Frick and Frack out here. So it was very nerve-racking.

But as Elliot grew to become much more of a seasoned and experienced captain, I was able to put my trust in him.

Not that I would say that I’m ready to go sail around the world, but by the end of it, I felt like I would be ready to take the next step and to maybe go to the Bahamas or the Caribbean.

Elliot: The first 90 days on the trip, it was like every single day there was something big that we learned.

Jen: It was drinking from a fire hose.

Elliot: With the loop, you get to experience almost every single thing, with respect to boating, besides a big ocean crossing. You get rivers, you do get ocean, you get locks, you get sand in Florida, you get rocks in Canada, you kind of get a taste of everything.

Jen: It just keeps you on your toes because you’re in so many of these environments for only a few months at a time before you’re into another environment, and then you’re like, OK, what am I learning now? It’s constant learning and learning and learning.

Elliot: We were not nautical people before this journey. I like to be in the water and swim, but my family never had a boat growing up or anything like that. So I don’t think there is any exclusion to doing it. But there are a lot of trade-offs, so you have to be OK with the trade-offs so you can live more frugally like we did.

You have anxiety with weather — that rules your life on a boat. In a house, you don’t worry about that storm that’s coming through. Unless it’s a big storm like a hurricane, you’re not that concerned. Your sewage system’s going to work, your lights are probably going to stay on.

In a boat, none of that is guaranteed. So some of your time is going to be spent planning for the weather, making sure you’re in a safe location.

Jen: Putting ourselves into the deep end and learning all of these new things, that was really fun. A lot of fun. It was hard, but it was definitely worth it.

For the most part, our life was cheaper on the boat than on land

Elliot: We moved every other day, on average, and it took 11 months.

Our boat moved about seven miles an hour, and if you do eight hours of boating, that’s almost 60 miles. So you have to always move. But slow traveling is part of the fun. I think at the end we had done over 10,000 miles.

In one year, we spent just over $40,000, which we thought was super reasonable. At first glance, you’re like, “It’s a 40-something-thousand-dollar vacation.” But those were our yearly expenses. Imagine living in an apartment or having a mortgage and car payments, and stuff like that. That’s extremely comparable. It’s probably extremely low when you think about it like that.

But, I’m of the mentality that everything costs something: it’s either time or money. So on a boat, you save the money, but you spend more time.

Jen: In van life, our grocery bill is a little bit cheaper because we’re able to go to Costco, and that was not really something that we did on the boat at all.

You’re limited in food — at least in our experience. We limited ourselves to the nearest grocery store while living on the boat, so that wasn’t always the most budget-friendly grocery stores. It was just the most convenient.

But the other side of the coin would be if you were to go to a more budget-friendly grocery store, you would either have to potentially get an Uber or a Lyft, or other people might’ve had bikes. But our grocery bill is slightly less now.

Elliot: If you like that and you don’t mind things in life taking longer, then I would definitely say it’s a great way to save money and live. That’s the only reason why we were able to do the trip at all is because it was cheaper. We didn’t come with a bunch of money saved up for this trip. We knew that we had to do it as budget as possible and then also live as budget as possible. And we were able to do that. And that’s only possible just because of the lifestyle.

Jen: In my opinion, if someone wants to have a break from their typical, traditional land life, it’s a great option. It does come with setbacks or challenges, like Elliot mentioned, but do we think it’s worth it? Yes.

Elliot: One month in the boat life, we were like, “Get us off this boat. It’s not for us. It’s not easy. Nothing’s working out.” Three months into boat life, “Let’s get off the boat. It’s too hard. We’re in over our heads.” But then, slowly after the time we’ve spent really trying to hone our crafts, we began to love it. And now we love it.

• HR executive Dave Greenlaw plans to attend a SHRM conference featuring Robby Starbuck this month.
• Greenlaw said HR leaders must understand diverse perspectives, even if uncomfortable.
• SHRM faces backlash for hosting Starbuck, but Greenlaw said he values exposure to varied views.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dave Greenlaw, a human resources executive in Washington, D.C., about why he plans to attend an HR conference later this month where conservative activist Robby Starbuck — a vocal critic of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives — is scheduled to speak.

The event is being organized by the world’s largest HR association, the Society for Human Resource Management. SHRM is facing backlash over the matter, with some HR pros saying they are canceling their membership. Greenlaw, who has worked in HR for nearly 17 years and has been a member of SHRM for about four years, explained why he won’t be following suit.

This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

I completely disagree with Robby Starbuck’s views. But my personal take is that HR leaders need to understand the full landscape of the workforce and the workplace, even when it might be uncomfortable.

There are so many factors that go into a productive workplace, different political beliefs and walks of life. Whether it’s your sexuality, the color of your skin, your religion, whatever, I think it’s really important to have that full perspective, particularly as an HR professional, because you’re dealing with so much.

SHRM historically has hosted speakers across the political spectrum, such as former Presidents Joe Biden, George Bush Sr., and Bill Clinton, and I think that’s a good thing. It goes back to HR leaders needing to understand the full landscape, even when they might disagree with these people or their policies.

What I think is valuable about this particular talk with Starbuck is that he is going to be on a panel with [lawyer and media personality] Van Jones that will be moderated by SHRM’s CEO, Johnny C. Taylor, and they’re both people of color. And Starbuck’s views on DEI and LGBTQ issues — even though I personally find them abhorrent — he’s a voice that I think might resonate with a certain populist out there, and it’s important not to silence voices, even when you don’t agree with them.

Even though Starbuck might say some terrible things, I think it’s so important to acknowledge it and be prepared. What if you’re an HR professional and all of a sudden you’re handling something internally, and there’s a disagreement with two people who are speaking about politics or DEI?

Hearing Taylor, Starbuck, and Jones could give you perspective on the matter, and you can bring it back to your place of employment. A million things could come out of this conversation. It’s also important to acknowledge why people are upset about this. A lot of people feel like Starbuck doesn’t have a lot to add to the conversation because of certain things he’s already said. And I get that, too, and I understand the anger and frustration around it. But I think I see more of a broader, bigger picture.

I am a gay man, and I know the things that Starbuck has said are almost damaging to some of the members of my community. But you have to think of the bigger picture. Not everyone in the world is gay. Not everyone identifies and believes what I do. And when you’re an HR professional, that is what you really have to keep in mind.

If I’m always using my beliefs to make decisions on things — particularly when I’m an employer or an HR person — that’s not necessarily fair to the other individual, and I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate. So I think it’s important to hear these perspectives, have different types of temperament, and work with different voices.