Day: November 10, 2025

• Marriott says it ended its licensing partnership with the short-term rental company Sonder.
• Guests at rentals say they were blindsided. One was told to vacate his room halfway through his stay.
• Sonder’s stock price was down more than 13% after the termination announcement.

Marriott and Sonder have broken up, and guests are bearing the brunt of the fallout.

Hotel operator Marriott International signed a licensing agreement with short-term rental company Sonder in August 2024. On Sunday, Marriott announced that the agreement had been terminated due to “Sonder’s default.” The change canceled guests’ current reservations and stopped future bookings.

Marriott guests who had booked accommodations at Sonder properties say they were blindsided by the announcement.

Tim Schaefer, a blogger from New York, told Business Insider he had booked two separate Sonder apartments in New York City for a total of 10 days. But he received cancellation emails from Sonder and Marriott about an hour before his check-in on Sunday.

He said he spoke with Marriott’s help desk for an hour, asking for help booking another hotel for himself and his spouse at the same price, but was kept on hold.

“We have a high loyalty status — Platinum Elite — with them. We are not happy,” Schaefer said.

David Klingbeil, an NYU course instructor who studies luxury and marketing, said that he was halfway through his two-week stay at Sonder Flatiron in New York when he received an email on Sunday afternoon telling him he had to vacate the hotel by 8 a.m. on Monday.

“I didn’t believe it when I saw the email, I had to check that this wasn’t a phishing attempt or something. Then I saw the articles and posts on X,” Klingbeil told Business Insider.

Klingbeil said he had to book another hotel at a much higher price.

He said he was a Marriott Bonvoy Gold Elite member and had spent $15,000 with the hotel group this year.

“If I don’t see a strong reaction from them, I believe I will never choose Marriott again,” he said.

The company said online that customers who had booked a Sonder property through Marriott’s channels would get a full refund. It added that customers with future reservations would receive an email about the “potential to rebook at another Marriott Bonvoy property.”

Sonder’s stock is down about 87% in the past year, to a $6.8 million market cap. Founded in 2014, the company went public in 2021 through a special-purpose acquisition company. The company had 9,400 live units in its portfolio as of March, according to its earnings report for the first quarter of 2025.

Representatives for Marriott and Sonder did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Were you affected by the termination of Marriott-Sonder’s licensing agreement? Contact this reporter via email at abharade@businessinsider.com.

• Eric Roberge hired a house manager to work 10 hours a week at $28 an hour in August.
• Outsourcing household chores allowed him and his wife to focus on their daughter and their business.
• Investing in help increased their quality of life and highlighted time as a key measure of wealth.

Using money well is a skill. Having this skill means knowing how to invest wisely and maintain a strong savings habit, but it also means you understand how to spend money with intention.

One of the most powerful ways to spend well is to buy back time.

That’s what my family did when we decided to hire a house manager. Our top priority is having more time and energy to be fully present with our 4-year-old daughter. We also wanted to devote more time to our financial planning business, which my wife and I run together, rather than managing our household.

Here’s how we accomplished both.

Outsourcing housework is a high-impact, low-cost way to enjoy more time

Initially, growing the business I founded so that it didn’t rely solely on me to operate was the best way to reclaim my time. If I wasn’t working in the past, neither was the business.

We now have a larger team, and I’ve established strict working hours limits. I also have a greater degree of freedom and flexibility.

I eat breakfast and dinner with my family every day because I’m actually home to do that, and I take random Monday afternoons off to take my daughter to events or the playground.

When we looked at how we could buy back my wife’s time, we first considered hiring someone in the business to take on some of her workplace responsibilities. We realized two things:

1. This would take meaningful work she loved away from her while leaving other tasks she didn’t, like laundry and household errands, still on her plate.
2. It was more cost-effective to outsource household chores that took time away from not just her workday, but also time she wanted to spend with our daughter.

We weighed the pros and cons

We grew up in working-class families; my mother was a nurse for 40 years, and my wife’s father was a firefighter for 30. The idea of having “household help” was extremely foreign to us. Honestly, it felt somewhat embarrassing, too. Everyone else could “do it all;” why couldn’t we?

However, we know that many people who “do it all” aren’t very happy. Reports of burnout and depression are at extreme highs. Mothers, in particular, are often extremely overwhelmed and overloaded, still shouldering the majority of the housework, even in dual-income families.

Our own numbers — both in terms of where our hours went versus where we wanted them to go, and how much it would cost to change that — didn’t lie. They indicated we needed help around the house.

How we hired our house manager

We started by creating a list of everything we felt we could “shed” from our household responsibilities. We used that list to create the following job description:

We’re seeking a part-time house manager/family assistant with light nanny responsibilities for our family of three. Schedule is flexible and can be built around your preferences. Our ideal candidate is willing to assist with light housework, including laundry and meal preparation, and would be open to helping with our two cats as well. We expect the role to start at 10 hours a week, but there is room to expand it. $25-$30 per hour, dependent on experience.

We are looking for someone who:

• Appreciates autonomy and enjoys having control over their schedule, and doesn’t need constant direction
• Is a self-starter and can take charge of their own projects
• Is interested in and passionate about kids
• Has a willingness to learn our family’s routines and preferences
• Is curious, energetic, and compassionate — especially with young children

Responsibilities and tasks:

• Meal prep/help with cooking/grocery pickup/preschooler lunch and snack prep
• Laundry (one load of towels, two sets of sheets, one load of kids’ laundry a week)
• Basic errands like mailing a package at the post office, returning items to the store, returning library books, taking the car in for a maintenance appointment, running to the store to grab paper towels, etc
• Light cleaning (wipe down counters, sweep or vacuum as needed, put away clean dishes as needed)
• Helping with appointments (i.e., be at the home to let scheduled maintenance in)
• Home organization/decluttering projects (reorganizing a messy closet on occasion, helping put up or take down seasonal decorations, etc.)
• Help with cat care (brushing our two cats, helping take both to the vet, spending ~15 minutes/day playing with them)

Once we had our description, we posted it in local parents’ and moms’ groups on Facebook. We thought it would be better to find someone familiar in our community than a stranger from somewhere like Care.com. We received eight applications and hired our current house manager for $28 per hour in August.

She’s a stay-at-home mom whose own kids reached elementary school, so she had more time in her day and genuinely loved the work we needed help doing. We pay her about $1,200 a month.

There haven’t really been any downsides. The only thing is I try to stay out of the kitchen when she’s doing meal prep, which can be a slight inconvenience. But we’ve gotten along very well.

Wealth is more than money; it’s the time you control, too

My wife has been able to devote more hours to the work she wants to do in the business and spend more focused, quality time with our daughter without distraction.

Getting this help also gives us leverage. The additional time devoted to our business provides the opportunity to increase our income more than we could save by trying to avoid hiring additional support.

Wealth is about a lot more than what’s in your bank account — it’s how much autonomy you have; how much you can choose what you do or don’t do with the time you have.

Could we save more money by doing everything ourselves? Perhaps we’d have a little more cash on hand, but we’d be extremely depleted in terms of time and energy. Could I have a higher net worth if I devoted all my time to work? Of course, but my life would also be a lot smaller and emptier.

Time, peace, energy, and health are all measures of wealth, alongside money. Arguably, those things are all more valuable than the dollars on my balance sheet.

• OpenAI’s new hires in health and massive reach have investors betting it can win in consumer health.
• Big Tech has spent decades trying to give consumers control of their health data.
• OpenAI is now exploring building its own consumer health tools, according to sources close to the company.

OpenAI is pushing into healthcare — and the AI giant could be poised to reinvent Big Tech’s consumer health bets.

Tech behemoths like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have spent decades working to give consumers control of their health data. Many of their efforts have crashed and burned. But investors and healthcare leaders think OpenAI has the right ingredients to try again.

Sources close to the company told Business Insider that OpenAI is exploring building its own consumer health tools. It’s weighing several opportunities, such as creating a personal health assistant or a health data aggregator.

OpenAI’s foray into healthcare marks one of its boldest moves, beyond AI infrastructure and into industry-specific software. After transforming how companies build new tech with generative AI, OpenAI is setting its sights on launching its own applications in sectors dominated by legacy enterprise giants — from sales and marketing to law, and perhaps now, medicine.

OpenAI declined to comment for this story.

The company’s recent hires reflect big healthcare ambitions. OpenAI tapped Nate Gross, the cofounder of public healthtech company Doximity, to lead its healthcare strategy in June. Two months later, it brought on Instagram’s Ashley Alexander as its vice president of health products. At the HLTH conference in October, Gross pointed to OpenAI’s vast reach; ChatGPT gets around 800 million active users every week, many of whom come with medical questions.

That scale has healthcare founders and investors watching OpenAI closely for its next move.

“Consumers have historically gone to Google to ask their health questions, and it’s clear that they’re now starting to shift those questions over to LLMs to capture that knowledge base through a more conversational discovery process,” said Greg Yap, a partner at Menlo Ventures, which isn’t an investor in OpenAI. “I think OpenAI has a tremendous opportunity in that sector.”

Several investors told Business Insider they think OpenAI could tackle a problem that’s tripped up Big Tech for years: the personal health record.

Health data privacy rules and financial incentives keep your health data scattered and siloed across all the doctors you’ve ever been to. The idea of a personal health record is to pull that information into one place, owned and managed by the patient.

It’s a difficult problem to solve, but tech hasn’t stopped trying. Should OpenAI choose to build a personal health assistant with consolidated health records, it’ll be competing with Alphabet’s Verily, which released its own AI-powered personal health record app in October.

OpenAI has mostly stayed quiet about its plans in healthcare. But the company’s explosive growth and dominance in foundational AI have some investors worried that the AI giant has a better shot than many previous Big Tech entrants at building transformative healthtech and trampling startup competition.

“Amazon’s a great company, but they’ve been one foot in healthcare, one foot out. Microsoft, kind of the same way. We haven’t seen that same type of behavior with OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s been pedal all the way down, aggressive, let’s look at everything, let’s talk with everyone. So I’d say I view them much more as a serious potential threat,” said Blake Wu, a partner at NEA, which isn’t an investor in OpenAI or Anthropic.

The personal health record problem

Jennifer Yoo, a healthcare regulatory partner at Fenwick & West, says she’s seeing many companies using AI to build personal health assistants, often with the hopes of connecting a patient’s medical records for tailored support.

But those companies are following a trail blazed by and littered with Big Tech’s past health projects.

Microsoft, Google, and Apple have all tried to build personal health records for consumers, with mixed results. Microsoft’s HealthVault launched in 2007 but shuttered in 2019 after failing to gain user traction, largely because it required patients to manually upload their health records.

Google’s efforts took a similar path — its 2008 health record project died in 2012, only for the company to begin work on an electronic health records search tool a few years later that came under regulatory fire over how Google accessed and handled patient data. Apple still offers a native Health Records feature on iPhones, but that service requires hospitals to sign data-sharing agreements for patients to connect their records to the app.

“Apple’s health record, and any of them that rely on us to log into every portal, download and manually share data, that’s friction that keeps people from getting value from their own health data,” Yap said. “AI suffers from that friction just like anyone else. You can’t personalize information if you don’t have the data.”

The good news: some of those challenges are beginning to chip away. A recent federal ban on “information blocking” prevents hospitals from keeping health data locked up or making it hard for people to access their own records. In practice, however, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has found that many hospitals still limit what patients can download.

Companies like Health Gorilla and Particle Health have stepped up as intermediaries between health systems and patients, pulling records from multiple sources, cleaning and standardizing the data, and sharing it with third-party apps at the patient’s request. Yoo suggested that companies seeking to develop AI health assistants with built-in health records would be wise to partner with an intermediary to avoid the headaches of manually retrieving records.

Consumers, too, are increasingly eager than ever to control their health, including their health data. When OpenAI released GPT-5 in August, CEO Sam Altman said health was one of ChatGPT’s top use cases, and bragged that the new model “can help you understand your healthcare and make decisions on your journey.”

“They’re already using ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude for their health questions. I think users are seeing the value of, “hey, if that also had all my long-term medical records, how much better would the information be for me?” Yoo said.

OpenAI’s partnership approach

OpenAI isn’t yet encouraging users to upload their medical data, and it’s treading carefully as more users turn to ChatGPT for health information.

Viral posts circulating in early November, including a now-deleted post from prediction markets startup Kalshi, suggested that ChatGPT would no longer provide health advice. It was a misinterpretation of OpenAI’s rules. The company’s recently updated usage policies tell consumers not to use its products to do a doctor’s job, including for diagnosis or treatment, but the policies don’t preclude ChatGPT from offering general medical information. OpenAI’s health AI research lead said the company hasn’t changed its models.

If OpenAI steers clear of handling medical records directly, it could take a different page from Apple’s health data playbook. Apple’s Healthkit, launched in 2014, collects health and fitness data from third-party apps and wearables like Apple Watches and centralizes that information into its Health app.

OpenAI could partner with other health companies to collect that data. As Gross said during his HLTH panel, “I think the way that we’re going to achieve the greatest amount of good is by a robust ecosystem of partners.” Investors pointed to consumer lab testing companies like Superpower and Function Health as potentially attractive partners for OpenAI’s health push.

While some investors are eager for OpenAI to go deep in consumer health, the AI giant is digging into the healthcare sector from multiple angles. Gross’s early mandate includes co-creating new healthcare technologies with clinicians and researchers, while Alexander is building healthcare products for clinicians as well as individual consumers. OpenAI is already working with pharma giants like Eli Lilly and Sanofi on drug discovery and development, as well as with healthtech companies like Penda Health on AI-powered clinical decision support. It’s also landing ChatGPT enterprise deals and other partnerships with health systems.

Meanwhile, the latest wave of healthcare VC investment has gone straight to AI tools that automate administrative work, especially for clinicians and health systems. OpenAI’s provider-facing projects could challenge those bets, too, another sign of AI giants steadily encroaching on startups’ territory.

• Uber and Lyft both plan to introduce more robotaxis to their platforms.
• During earnings calls last week, the CEOs of Uber and Lyft said robotaxis help expand their markets.
• Here is what the CEOs said about their robotaxi plans.

The CEOs of the two largest ride-hailing platforms in the US see significant potential in attracting more customers and generating additional revenue with autonomous vehicles.

How and when they arrive there may differ.

During their respective Q3 earnings calls last week, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Lyft CEO David Risher fielded multiple questions about their robotaxi expansion plans.

Both companies have secured partnerships with Waymo and others to deploy autonomous vehicles for their fleets in the near future. Still, the partnership structure won’t be the same in every market, leaving room for Uber and Lyft to carve out ways to earn money through those relationships.

Meanwhile, the CEOs of both companies say that so far, they’re seeing the rideshare market grow in areas where autonomous vehicles are deployed.

“The biggest scale operations that we’ve got are with Waymo in Austin and Atlanta,” Khosrowshahi said during Uber’s earnings call. “And what we are seeing is that those markets are growing faster than other US markets.”

Risher expressed a similar sentiment, saying, “We like the economics of AVs a lot,” during Lyft’s earnings call on Wednesday.

Here’s what they’ve recently said about their visions for robotaxis.

A hybrid future

It may not be shocking that the chief executives of companies whose businesses rely on a large network of human drivers would say that the future of ride-hailing will be hybrid for some time.

Risher, the Lyft CEO, provided a little more insight into the why.

“It’s really, really hard to satisfy demand just with AVs anytime in the near future,” he said. “There’s just not enough supply in the world.”

Risher added that human drivers also provide their own cars — one less asset Lyft has to provide.

Meanwhile, Uber is addressing the robotaxi supply issue through its OEM partnerships. The company has partnered with Stellantis to bring at least 5,000 robotaxis to its global fleet. It has also partnered with Lucid and Nuro to deploy 20,000 robotaxis over the next six years.

Still, that would pale in comparison to the number of vehicles potentially owned among the 9.4 million drivers and couriers globally on the Uber platform.

An Uber spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Robotaxi markets are seeing more riders

Publicly available robotaxis are limited to a handful of cities, but in areas where active AVs are present, both CEOs reported that overall demand is growing faster than in areas without self-driving taxis.

“In markets where AVs operate, rideshare is growing faster than — and I’m talking about comparable apples-to-apples markets — than markets where AVs are not operating,” Risher said.

There are a lot of reasons that demand could be growing where robotaxis are active.

Robotaxis are still a novel technology for most people. In San Francisco, Waymos have become a tourist attraction.

There’s also potential for complementary effects, such as human drivers taking care of longer trips. In addition, they could be making other vehicles more available since robotaxis operate 24/7.

“Early results indicate that AV rides expand total market demand and, ultimately, help reduce reliance on personal vehicle rides across a massively under-penetrated transportation market,” CJ Macklin, a Lyft spokesperson, told Business Insider.

Profits yet to come

Both CEOs agree that autonomous vehicles are a massive investment.

Khosrowshahi highlighted the need to build a fleet of robotaxis, which he said will be funded in part through the margins seen from Uber’s existing premium services.

In addition, Uber’s partnership with Nvidia, in which Uber will provide driving data to train the chipmaker’s autonomous AI models, envisions a future where any OEM car will be robotaxi-ready. Khosrowshahi said this will be beneficial to Uber if owners decide to contribute their cars to the platform.

Risher pointed to the operational investments required to keep robotaxis available for customers. For Lyft’s partnership with Waymo in Nashville, customers will be able to hail a robotaxi on both Waymo’s proprietary app and the Lyft app.

However, Lyft will oversee the maintenance of all Waymo robotaxis through its subsidiary, Flexdrive. The company invested in a depot that could cost between $10 and $15 million for that operation, Lyft’s Chief Financial Officer, Erin Brewer, said during the latest earnings call.

Risher said that the partnership structure will allow robotaxis to be “accretive” from the start.

“With Waymo’s utilization of services provided by Flexdrive and the anticipated increase in overall ride volume on both networks, we expect the unit economics will be accretive,” Macklin, the Lyft spokesperson, said.

Overall profitability, however, may take some time.

“AV is not profitable,” Khosrowshahi said. “And any new product that we introduce into the marketplace starts off in a position where we’re losing money and we’re unprofitable.”

In other words, the robotaxis are here, but the money’s yet to come.