Day: November 9, 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. What would you do to land your dream job? One man was so eager to kick-start his tech career that he lived in his car for three months to take a role at Google. He soon found out he wasn’t the only Googler doing it.

On the agenda today:

• America is willing to gamble on anything. These businesses are cashing in.
• Influencers are becoming a double-edged sword for the military.
• America’s first-time homebuyers are disappearing. Older “repeat buyers” are taking their place.
• Introducing Goldman’s newest crop of MDs.

But first: Getting AI to work for you.

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This week’s dispatch

Unpacking AI in the workplace

At the Davos conference in January, Marc Benioff asked a crowd of luminaries whether AI was a basic human right.

Here is another question: Can it make him money?

He gushed about AI agents last year, enthusiasm that helped drive the company’s stock to an all-time high in early December. This year, though, Salesforce isn’t in the AI darling club. Its shares are down roughly 28%.

Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart has been reporting on the company’s “Agentforce” project, which represents Salesforce’s big bet on AI agents.

“Inside the company, some current and former employees say there’s been constant struggle for the teams scrambling to deliver on Benioff’s public promises of what their AI products can do,” she wrote.

Her in-depth piece showed how hard this evolution can be, even at companies all in on it.

“It’s very, very difficult — even for people working on the products — to know the difference between what we say in a demo, what’s on a road map, and what’s actually in production,” one senior employee told Ashley. “It’s a full-time job just figuring that out.”

Meanwhile, my LinkedIn post on the story generated a pointed discussion.

At Business Insider, we’re actively reporting on how AI is and isn’t helping people in business. And we’re not just looking at big companies.

A new series, Tiny Teams, features entrepreneurs trying to leverage themselves with AI to scurry around incumbents. Our profile of Tim DeSoto, most recently of Walmart, is an example.

DeSoto is launching an AI-driven shopping app he hopes will help customers this holiday season. Reach out to BI’s Agnes Applegate if you have a similar story to share.

Then there is Vercel, a ten-year-old tech company that serves developers. It shadowed a top performer in sales for six weeks and then built an agent to mimic that person’s process. The result helped take the team from 10 to one human, with the other nine being redeployed, Lakshmi Varanasi reported.

Is AI a human right? The philosophers can debate it.

Business Insider is committed to helping you figure out how to use it. As always, please reach me at eic@businessinsider.com.

Wanna bet?

After a 2018 ruling burst open the sports-betting floodgates, it didn’t take long for gambling to get popular everywhere. Now, the focus is mostly on prediction markets.

These platforms have long been limited in the US, but they’re now taking advantage of lax federal regulators and what they say are legal loopholes to offer their services in more and more states.

Everything is casino.

A reckoning within the ranks

Top military influencers are taking over corners of the internet, and it’s opening a can of ethical worms for the Pentagon. Regardless of follower count, these creators operate in a murky space between personal branding and military ethics guidelines.

Across the ranks, the Pentagon’s social media policies are vague and unevenly enforced, leaving troops eager to grow their followings but wary of the consequences, according to six military influencers and five public affairs officials.

The military’s Wild West.

Read more from BI’s military influencer series:

• This soldier built a side hustle on TikTok and Instagram and says it’s now paying better than the Army
• The Army is turning to TikTok-famous soldiers to pump up recruiting — but it’s hit a snag

An old person’s game

A decade ago, Americans typically bought their first home in their early 30s. Now, the average age of a first-time homebuyer is closer to 40.

With younger adults boxed out, the real-estate market has become an old(er) person’s game. Silver-haired “repeat buyers,” armed with decades of home equity and faced with less competition, are snapping up the supply instead.

The age of the geriatric homebuyer.

Goldman’s newest execs

Goldman Sachs announced its newest class of managing directors, the second-highest designation at the bank outside the C-suite.

This class of MDs is 638 people strong, roughly 5% bigger than the last cohort in 2023. The moneymakers were also the ones most heavily rewarded, with 70% of new MDs coming from revenue-generating divisions of the bank.

See the full list here.

Also read:

• 5 top Goldman Sachs partners share their best advice to the bank’s newest managing directors
• Goldman will soon crown its next generation of managing directors. Here’s an inside look at the promotions process.

This week’s quote:

“It’s all about control. People in leadership positions are feeling like they finally have the upper hand again.”

— Jeff LeBlanc, a management lecturer at Bentley University, on the growing trend of companies becoming leaner and eliminating DEI.

Why Nepal grows Japan’s cash

Japan utilizes argeli, a low-value crop found in the Himalayas, to produce its physical yen, eventually turning it into a cash crop. What happens to Nepal’s big business if Japan goes cashless like the rest of Asia?

More of this week’s top reads:

• Exclusive: Walleye’s chief strategy officer is leaving, the latest in a string of senior exits at the $9.4 billion hedge fund.
• Disney’s villain era: The YouTube TV dispute highlights the challenge to maintain a good-guy image.
• Exclusive: Google is in talks to pour more money into Anthropic, which could push the AI startup’s value to $350 billion.
• Here’s where the “Trump Trade” scorecard stands one year after his election win.
• Exclusive: Tesla has ramped up work on its long-delayed Roadster. Here’s what insiders have seen.
• Warren Buffett is in his final two months as CEO. He’s leaving at a tricky time for Berkshire Hathaway.
• Hooters is getting a “re-Hooterization” as its founders retake control of the restaurant chain.

• They got laid off from Corporate America’s country club and dumped into a hellish job market.

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  The BI Today team: Jamie Heller, editor in chief, 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.

• I recently arrived at the gym and realized I’d forgotten my headphones.
• I almost went home; I didn’t want to work out without my trusty playlist.
• But during my workout, I had a nice interaction I likely wouldn’t have had if I’d been wearing them.

A few weeks ago, something terrible happened. I arrived at the gym and realized I’d forgotten my headphones.

I was tempted to throw my car into reverse, tear out of the parking garage, and zip back home to get them (or just throw in the towel on the workout entirely that day). But I trudged in, resigned to the fact that I’d have to listen to the gym’s often terrible soundtrack and go without my trusty amp-up playlist.

Not wearing headphones led to a pleasant interaction

At one point, I was resting on a hip thrust machine, letting my mind wander without auditory stimuli beaming directly into my brain — kind of nice, actually — when a woman called, “Hey, do you have a second?” and asked for advice on using the belt squat machine. I was happy to help, and we chatted for a bit before exchanging friendly goodbyes. If I see her there again, I know I’ll say hello and chat with her again. Later, I realized: Maybe my no-headphones gym day led to making a new friend.

I’ve long been an advocate for the gym as a place to make friends. I wrote an article in 2024 about how group fitness classes, in particular (which I taught for several years), are especially conducive to friendship-making because they foster the proximity, frequency, and shared interest necessary to connect with others. From teaching and attending classes myself, I’ve established new friendships that persist to this day.

But when I go to the open floor plan gym by myself, things are obviously a lot less social. I move through my lifting routine with my big, clunky headphones firmly planted over my ears. As a typically extroverted person, this isn’t always meant to be a “leave me alone” move (I’ve also written that I think it’s OK to flirt with people in the gym, with caveats!); it’s just become a habit, and blasting music of my choice really does help me during my sessions.

The issue, though, is that headphones-on is pretty universally regarded as a ‘do not approach’ sign, and I wonder if the woman who asked me for help would have felt as comfortable doing so if I had my ears blocked by my Bose headphones. I know I’d feel less disruptive, even subconsciously, to talk to someone if I didn’t have to make the “Can I bother you to take your headphones off?” gesture first.

I wonder how many opportunities I’ve missed to have even the smallest friendly interaction with someone because we’re all locked into our own worlds on the gym floor. I ended up feeling glad that I’d forgotten my headphones that day. It was a minor inconvenience that turned into a pleasant benefit.

I won’t always go headphone-free, but now, I’ll find a happy medium

I’m not suggesting that anyone should go totally headphones-free if they don’t want to (I won’t), and I understand that for many people, the gym is a place to focus on movement and decompress from days filled with perhaps too many person-to-person interactions at work and elsewhere.

For me, though, someone who works from home as a writer and spends inordinate hours alone, small interactions with other people keep me feeling happy and human. From now on, I’ll probably go headphones-on during my sets and pop them off in between. I want gyms to feel like friendlier places, and maybe this is a simple start.