Tesla has around 12,000 Supercharger stalls installed across the US.
PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images
Tesla is reportedly gutting its EV charging team, laying off around 500 employees.
The news sent shockwaves through the industry, with one supplier calling it a "kick in the pants."
Tesla dominates EV charging in the US, with many of its rivals switching to its charging network.
Elon Musk has gone "hardcore" again — and it's sending tremors through the EV industry.
The Information reported late Monday that Musk is laying off around 500 employees on its Supercharger team in a move that one supplier has described as a "sharp kick in the pants." The team is responsible for building its global network of superfast EV chargers.
"As contractors for the Supercharger network, my team woke up to a sharp kick in the pants this morning," Andres Pinter, co-CEO of Bullet EV Charging Solutions, an Austin-based EV chargepoint installer that works on Tesla's network, told Reuters.
"Tesla has already been awarded money under the federal government's NEVI program. There's no way Mr. Musk would walk away from effectively free money. It may be possible Mr. Musk will reconstitute the EV charger team in a bigger, badder, more Muskian way," he added.
Over the past few years, Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) has become the dominant charging network in the US, with the company installing15,000 Superfast charging stallsacross the country as of 2024.
Business Insider approached Rivian, Ford, and GM for comment but didn't immediately hear back.
In an email to senior executives at Tesla on Monday, Musk announced the departure of two executives: Rebecca Tinucci, senior director of the company's Supercharger group, and Daniel Ho, head of new products, per The Information. He also castigated executives for not being "hard core" enough in cutting headcount.
Tesla shares dropped early Tuesday as investors reacted to the news. Musk, meanwhile, sought to reassure owners and suppliers by stating that Tesla still plans to grow its Supercharger network, just at a slower pace than before.
However, there are signs that the company is cutting back on new Superchargers. The EV maker reportedly canceled four planned Supercharger sites in New York on Tuesday, according to InsiderEVs.
William Navarro Jameson, who worked as Tesla's Charging Program Lead confirmed he was laid off in a post on LinkedIn.,
He wrote on X that the layoffs offered a "unique opportunity" for others looking to challenge Tesla's charging stranglehold.
"If Tesla is yielding the charging crown, who will step up?" he said.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside normal working hours.
A stock image shows a therapist making notes ahead of a session with a patient.
Tanja Ivanova/Getty Images
Hacker Aleksanteri 'Julius' Kivimäki was sentenced to over six years in prison.
He was found guilty of hacking a therapy company to steal notes and blackmail thousands of patients.
The case was described by the Finnish court as the 'largest ever' in the Nordic country.
A Finnish hacker has been sentenced to six years and three months in prison after he was found guilty of stealing confidential therapy notes to blackmail thousands of patients.
The District Court of Western Uusimaa announced the sentencing of Aleksanteri "Julius" Kivimäki on Monday.
The judges found the 26-year-old guilty of all counts, which included 9,231 counts of disseminating information violating personal privacy and 20,745 counts of attempted aggravated extortion.
He was charged last October, after being extradited from France to Finland.
The company's patient database was then illegally copied, it said.
According to BBC News, Kivimäki demanded a ransom of more than 400,000 euros, or $426,818, from the therapy company in 2020.
The Associated Press reported that the demand was higher — 450,000 euros, or about $480,000, to be paid using bitcoin.
When the company refused to comply, Kivimäki emailed thousands of patients asking them all for 200 euros, or $213, while threatening to publish their confidential therapy notes and personal details online if they didn't pay up, BBC News reported.
According to AP, he said the ransom would increase to 500 euros, or $534, in bitcoin if it wasn't paid within 24 hours.
A trove of confidential information then surfaced on the dark web, including patients' personal details, Social Security numbers, and sensitive therapist and doctor notes from sessions.
One man told WIRED that information discussed with his therapist about his abusive parents and drug and alcohol use was leaked online.
The BBC noted that at least one suicide has been linked to the case.
Kivimäki denied all the charges, but the legal bulletin cited evidence presented in the trial appearing to show his involvement.
For example, he had used a pseudonym to comment on the hacking and extortion in an online message board.
The court also found that Kivimäki had used a server implicated in the crimes more extensively than he had admitted in the trial, and used an encryption key and IP address in a way he had denied in his testimony.
The court also cited a payment of 0.1 bitcoin made by the National Bureau of Investigation in 2020 that appeared to reach Kivimäki.
"The quality of the crime was exceptional, and due to the number of parties involved, it was the largest ever in our country," the bulletin said.
The court proceedings have yet to address compensation claims for the victims.
Brunswick, an international public relations firm, said that healthcare data is disproportionally susceptible to extortion.
A video shared by the zoo shows a soldier thanking them for the peacocks.
VK/Lipetsk Zoo
A Russian zoo said it sent two peacocks to those fighting in Ukraine.
It said it wanted to "brighten up soldiers' everyday life in combat."
But it then deleted the post, saying comments were insulting Putin.
A Russian zoo said it sent two peacocks to Ukraine with the aim of inspiring Russian troops fighting there — but then deleted its post after people mocked Russian President Vladimir Putin in the comments, according to reports.
The Lipetsk Zoo, in southwest Russia, announced the move on social media website VK on Tuesday.
It wrote: "For guys in difficult combat situations, the beauty of birds inspires and brings a piece of joy. This is not an advertisement for the zoo, but a gift from the heart. We hope that the beauty of these birds will brighten up soldiers' everyday life in combat," The Daily Beast reported.
It also shared a video of a masked soldier in front of an enclosure with the two birds.
The soldier said that every soldier would be able to look at the birds and get some "spiritual peace," according to The Daily Beast's translation.
He added that an aviary was being built for the birds, according to Ukrainian outlet Pravda's reporting.
It's unclear if the video was filmed in Ukraine. It's also not clear where the birds were sent, or how close to the fighting they had been.
The zoo later deleted its announcement post, according to The Daily Beast and Pravda.
It told Russian news outlet Rise that comments were left that insulted Putin.
The zoo blamed Ukrainian bots for the comments — a common excuse that Russia gives for online comments that insult Putin or criticize Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
It said that "insults against the president are unacceptable," per The Daily Beast.
Some commentators were confused by the move, with one writing, according to The Daily Beast: "What are peacocks going to do there?"
Russia has heavily restricted information that its citizens can get about the war, and has punished Russians who speak out against it, leading to little visible dissent in the country.
While some protests have taken place, with thousands of people arrested, Russian citizens have largely not been seen to oppose the invasion.
Putin has also put in place a law that effectively criminalizes any reference to the fighting in Ukraine being a "war" or "invasion."
Microsoft's OpenAI investment may have been prompted by concerns over Google's AI progress.
In a 2019 email, a Microsoft exec said he was "very, very worried" about Google's AI capabilities.
The emails were made public as part of the DoJ's antitrust case against Google.
In 2019, Microsoft became "very, very worried" about Google's AI capabilities, newly unearthed emails show, and that may have been what spurred it to invest in OpenAI.
In one lengthy email, Microsoft's chief technology officer Kevin Scott told Satya Nadella and Bill Gates that Google's AI-powered "auto-complete in Gmail" was "getting scarily good."
He added that Microsoft was "multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML [machine learning] scale."
The emails, which had the subject line "Thoughts on OpenAI," were made public on Tuesday as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google. A large section of Scott's email was redacted.
In response, Microsoft CEO Nadella said the email highlighted "why I want us to do this" and copied Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood into the chain.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.
In 2019, Microsoft made an initial $1 billion investment into its now multi-billion partnership with OpenAI.
Microsoft has since benefited from its well-timed investment.
The speed at which Microsoft released AI products even left some wondering whether arch-rival Google had been left behind.
Google, a pioneer of AI technology, has been trying to counter the narrative that it has fallen behind Microsoft ever since. The company released several products to compete with OpenAI's releases, including Bard, an AI-powered chatbot, and an AI model called Gemini.
The 2019 email exchanges also show how Microsoft was keeping tabs on its rivals, with Scott noting that the scale of OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain's AI ambitions were "interesting." Among some of the mentions of what its competitors were doing, Scott mentioned Google's data center designs and distributed systems architecture.
Discussing Microsoft's AI talent, Scott said it had "very smart" people with machine learning expertise in its Bing, vision, and speech team. He added that the teams faced constraints on scaling up their ambitions, which suggests why it saw potential in partnering with OpenAI to bring its AI aspirations to fruition.
Scott added that when Open AI, Deep Mind and Google Brain were competing to see who could achieve the most impressive game-playing stunt, he was "highly dismissive of their efforts," but "that was a mistake."
Read the unredacted portions of the emails below. RL refers to reinforcement learning, NLP is natural language processing, and BERT is bidirectional encoder representations from transformers.
From: Kevin Scott Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2019 7:16:11 AM To: Satya Nadella; Bill Gates Subject: Re: Thoughts on OpenAI
[Redacted]
The thing that's interesting about what Open AI and Deep Mind and Google Brain are doing is the scale of their ambition, and how that ambition is driving everything from datacenter design to compute silicon to networks and distributed systems architectures to numerical optimizers, compiler, programming frameworks, and the high level abstractions that model developers have at their disposal. When all these programs were doing was competing with one another to see which RL system could achieve the most impressive game-playing stunt, I has highly dismissive of their efforts. That was a mistake. When they took all of the infrastructure that they had built to build NLP models that we couldn't easily replicate, I started to take things more seriously. And as I dug in to try to understand where all of the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training, I got very, very worried.Turns out, just replicating BERT-large wasn't easy to do for us. Even though we had the template for the model, it took us ~6 months to get the model trained because our infrastructure wasn't up to the task. Google had BERT for at least six months prior to that, so in the time that it took us to hack together the capability to train a 340M parameter model, they had a year to figure out how to get it into production and to move on to larger scale, more interesting models. We are already seeing the results of that work in our competitive analysis of their products. One of the Q&A competitive metrics that we watch just jumped by 10 percentage points on Google Search because of BERT-like models. Their auto-complete in Gmail, which is especially useful in the mobile app, is getting scarily good.[Redacted]We have very smart ML people in Bind, in the vision team, and in the speech team. But the core deep learning teams within each of these bigger teams are very small, and their ambitions have also been constrained, which means that even as we start to feed them resources, they still have to go through a learning process to scale up. And we are multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML scale.[Redacted]From: Satya Nadella To: Kevin Scott CC: Amy Hood Sent: 6/12/2019 6:02:47 PM Subject: Re: Thoughts on OpenAIVery good email that explains, why I want us to do this… and also why we will then ensure our infra folks execute.Amy – fyi
Scott Lengel launched AdventureGenie after he and his wife, Lisa, became RVers during the pandemic.
AdventureGenie
Scott Lengel, a former Microsoft CTO, launched an AI-powered RV road trip planner, AdventureGenie.
He said when he got into RVing during the pandemic, he couldn't find a great planning tool.
AdventureGenie recommends custom routes, campsites, and activities based on user preferences.
Scott Lengel and his wife, Lisa, were Marriott people.
After spending 23 years as a CTO at Microsoft, Lengel retired in 2017, at which point he and his wife knew they wanted to travel the world. They visited places like Cambodia, Vietnam, and India, typically traveling by plane and staying in hotels — often Marriotts.
Then the pandemic hit.
Suddenly, they were stuck at home in South Carolina. That's when the couple realized, "We really haven't seen the good old US of A."
Up until that point, they'd never even been camping.
"We figured if ever there was a time to go RVing, to go camping, this would be it," Lengel told Business Insider.
So they rented an RV and set off for Nashville with a couple of good friends. "We just had a blast," Lengel said. "Hanging around the campsite and the campfire and eating and beverages, and just the camaraderie. We just fell in love with the lifestyle of camping in one week."
Within six months, they purchased an RV of their own and started taking it all over. But when the couple tried to plan a six-week, multi-stop road trip to the national parks of the Southwest, they realized it was actually pretty challenging and that the existing resources were not great.
"There has to be a better way," they thought.
A couple of years later, in May 2023, Lengel launched AdventureGenie — an AI-powered RV trip planner. Lengel, who serves as chairman and CEO, said that in less than a year, AdventureGenie has attracted more than 10,000 users, and not just RVers, but also people traveling in cars on all kinds of road trips.
AI can customize trip planning
AdventureGenie is one of many AI-powered trip-planning tools that have popped up over the past couple of years. It's been featured on lists of the best RV- and road-trip planning AI tools.
AdventureGenie is set up to help people plan their trips in three phases, which Lengel said was based on talking to thousands of people about how they plan their trips.
First, you can shape your trip. You can tell AdventureGenie things like where you want to start, where you want to end, how many miles you want to drive in a day, and any places you know you want to stop along the way. AdventureGenie will create a custom route based on your preferences and what the program knows about you, either from what you've told it or from past trips you've planned.
AdventureGenie
Second, you can select your campsites. AdventureGenie uses AI to compile information about campsites and make recommendations based on your preferences. In addition to generating an overall score on a campsite, AdventureGenie also generates a score that is unique to you, indicating how likely a specific campground is to meet your personal needs.
Third, is finding things to do. For instance, if it knows you like eating at local restaurants, hiking, and biking, as Lengel and his wife do, it can point out those attractions.
The biggest thing AI brings to AdventureGenie's trip planning is the customization, Lengel said. Instead of looking up a generic road trip planner that is the first hit served to everyone on Google, AdventureGenie can create itineraries that are unique to you.
"It feels as if you have a copilot or a travel planner sitting by your side and knows what you're looking for and customizes it for you," Lengel said.
AdventureGenie
He said that when RVers first use AdventureGenie the "jaw-dropping" moment for them is when it fills in the blanks on a trip with stops along the way.
In the past, if you wanted to road trip from South Carolina to Yellowstone, you'd have to look at a map and try to plot out stops based on how many miles a day you want to drive. But you'd also have to manually figure out whether those stops have campsites that suit your needs, or if they have any other attractions that make them worth passing through, or how far off the highway they are.
Lengel said new AdventureGenie users often say it saves them so much time planning their trip just by filling in their route.
"That's pretty darn rewarding for us," he said.
From Microsoft to tech startup
Lengel, who came out of retirement to launch AdventureGenie, said working on this startup has been a major change of pace from his days at Microsoft, which he also loved.
"We're a startup at our core, and it's a lot different than when I was working for an organization that had 150,000 employees and an incredible budget," he said. "We all wear lots of hats, which has been exciting, thrilling, and even challenging from time to time."
These days, he and his wife are on the road three out of four weeks a month, though now it's usually for work, visiting trade shows and meeting with RV user groups.
However, they do still make a point to do some fun things, too.
In mid-April, Bloomberg reported the debt-laden seafood chain and home of beloved cheddar biscuits was considering filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Red Lobster is being bogged down by increased labor costs and expensive leases on its restaurants. Some observers were quick to blame the financial woes on its decision last year to make its "Endless Shrimp" promotion, which used to be an occasional, limited-time offering, permanent. The move was not a smart one. While Red Lobster increased traffic somewhat, people coming in to chow down on all-you-can-eat shrimp was a money bleeder. The company blamed Endless Shrimp for its $11 million losses in the third quarter of 2023, and in the fourth quarter, the picture got even worse, with the restaurant chain seeing $12.5 million in operating losses.
But the story about what's gone wrong with Red Lobster is much more complicated than a bunch of stoners pigging out on shrimp (and, later, lobster) en masse. The brand has been plagued by various problems — waning customer interest, constant leadership turnover, and, as has become a common tale, private equity's meddling in the business.
"If anything, the Endless Shrimp deals are probably as much a symbol of just either desperation or poor management or both," Jonathan Maze, the editor in chief of Restaurant Business Magazine, said.
Red Lobster first opened in Lakeland, Florida, in 1968 and was acquired by the food conglomerate General Mills in 1970. General Mills then spun the chain off in 1995 along with the rest of its restaurant division, which included Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse, as Darden Restaurants. In 2014, amid flagging sales and pressure from investors, Darden sold Red Lobster for $2.1 billion to Golden Gate Capital, a San Francisco private-equity firm.
If anything, the Endless Shrimp deals are probably as much a symbol of just either desperation or poor management or both.
To raise enough cash to make the deal happen, Golden Gate sold off Red Lobster's real estate to another entity — in this case, a company called American Realty Capital Properties — and then immediately leased the restaurants back. The next year, Red Lobster bought back some sites, but many of its restaurants were suddenly strapped with added rent expenses. Even if Darden had kept Red Lobster, it's not clear it would have taken a different route: A press release from the time says it had contacted buyers to explore such a transaction. But in Maze's view, the sale of the real estate was sort of an original sin for Red Lobster's current troubles. He compared it to throwing out a spare parachute — chances are, you'll be OK, but if the first parachute fails, you're in deep trouble.
"The thing that private equity does is just unload assets and monetize assets. And so they effectively paid for the purchase of Red Lobster by selling the real estate," he said. "It'll probably be fine, generally, but there's going to come a time in which your sales fall, your profitability is challenged, and your debt looks too bad, and then suddenly those leases are going to look awfully ugly."
That time, according to recent reporting, is now. With struggling sales and operational losses, the leases are an added headache that is helping push the company to the brink, though bankruptcy may help Red Lobster get some wiggle room on them.
Eileen Appelbaum, a codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank, and a longtime private-equity critic, said in 2014 that private equity wouldn't be the solution to Red Lobster's ills. She isn't surprised about how this is all turning out.
"Once they sell the real estate, then the private-equity company is golden, and they've made their money back and probably more than what they paid," she said, noting that this was a common theme in other restaurants and retailers and adding: "The retail apocalypse is all about having your real estate sold out from under you so that you have to pay the rent in good times and in bad."
After the real estate move, Golden Gate sold 25% of the company in 2016 to Thai Union, a Thailand seafood company, for $575 million and unloaded the rest of the company to an investor group called the Seafood Alliance, of which Thai Union was a part, in 2020. Golden Gate likely came out ahead, but the same can't be said for Thai Union, which also controls the Chicken of the Sea brand. It is now looking to get out of its stake in Red Lobster and took a one-time charge of $530 million on its investment in the fourth quarter of last year. In 2021, Red Lobster refinanced its debt, with one of its new lenders being Fortress Investment Group, an investment-management group and private-equity firm. According to Bloomberg, it's one of the "key lenders" involved in debt negotiations now.
Red Lobster has had to deal with waning customer interest, constant leadership turnover, and private equity's meddling.
Keith Bedford/Reuters
Beyond the pandemic-related troubles that hit restaurants across the country, analysts and experts say that Red Lobster's particular problems are attributable to a mix of poor brand positioning and unstable leadership. The seafood-restaurant business is a tough one in the US, and people who are hankering for lobster or fish are increasingly going to steak houses that offer those options, said Darren Tristano, the CEO and founder of Foodservice Results, a food-industry consultancy.
"What's truly happened with Red Lobster is that the consumer base has changed and Red Lobster hasn't," he said. "Red Lobster isn't losing to a competitor in their space — they're losing to competitors outside their space."
John Gordon, a restaurant analyst in San Diego, said Red Lobster had been on the decline for 20 years but that it didn't "fall on the knife" until Thai Union got it. "They were totally unprepared to hold a casual-dining restaurant," he said. Kim Lopdrup, Red Lobster's longtime CEO, retired in 2021, and since then, the restaurant hasn't had much in the way of stable leadership. His successor resigned after only a matter of months, and the role remained vacant for more than a year before someone else was appointed. He's left, too, and now Jonathan Tibus, an expert in restructuring, is at the helm.
"One of the problems is that Thai Union just had no credibility in terms of recruiting a new CEO," Gordon said.
Essentially, Red Lobster finds itself in a landscape where there just aren't a lot of bright spots. Add on the weight of the debt and lease obligations the company's private-equity owners saddled the brand with, and a turnaround becomes a gargantuan task.
"It's hard to blame leadership when you have a problem that is unsolvable — I mean, getting the consumer back in the door, increasing traffic. All-you-can-eat shrimp can only do so much," Tristano said.
Red Lobster did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Golden Gate declined to comment. Thai Union pointed to a press release about its intention to exit its investment and said it didn't wish to comment further.
One bad promotion should not doom a restaurant chain like that.
As to what drove Red Lobster to the edge, it's clear that despite not being a very good idea, the blame doesn't fall on Endless Shrimp. Years of changing tastes, tough industry conditions, and poor brand management all contributed to the chain's difficult position. But plenty of other restaurants have faced similar issues and aren't on the verge of bankruptcy. What separates Red Lobster is a decade of private-equity and investor tampering. Pinging from owner to owner makes it hard to settle on a turnaround vision. The company faces challenges that necessitate a long-term view that requires patience — the kind that the short-term-focused Wall Street often struggles to tackle. Whether Red Lobster can turn it around from here remains to be seen: Even if it files for bankruptcy protection, the chain may not disappear. Plenty of companies go bankrupt and keep on keeping on.
"You've got to at least be able to pay your bills, and what's happened over the last five years is the cost of operating a restaurant has taken off," Maze said. "One bad promotion should not doom a restaurant chain like that."
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
Emma Kanngiesser is a 22-year-old content creator on OnlyFans who earns most of her money from messaging.
60% of her conversations are non-sexual and her most loyal fans are often busy corporate men.
Kanngiesser quit her job and works eight hours a day from a co-working space to build her business.
This is an as-told-to story with Emma Kanngiesser, a 22-year-old content creator on OnlyFans. The revenue has been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I started posting on Instagram when I was 14. When I turned 20 in 2021, I started working out more and posting pictures that showed off my body. I grew my profile to 120,000 Instagram followers.
On days I don't post Instagram stories, I get over a hundred DMs. Now, on days when my stories do well, it can be over 300 messages daily. I can't respond to everyone.
I wanted to connect with my most loyal fans on a deeper level because there was no way I could respond to everyone. So,I opened an OnlyFans account in November 2022 while I was still at university. I made $10,000 from OnlyFans my first month.
Less than two years later, I quit my job selling yachts at a real estate agency in January 2024 to focus full-time on my OnlyFans and creator business.
My income jumped to $30,000 a month in January. Over $17,000 came from messages. I've scaled my income to $58,000 a month on OnlyFans in just three months. In March, I made over $47,000 from messages.
I was nervous about posting on OnlyFans, so I started with messaging
I was super anxious to post on OnlyFans, even though my friends and family have been very supportive. A lot of my un-paywalled messages from fans are sexual, and I didn't know what to expect.
I posted a few pictures that were sexier than my Instagram content and started with messaging to ease in. I was surprised by the conversations I was having. My subscribers seemed genuinely interested in my character.
When I started my Instagram and OnlyFans journey, I saw it as a side hustle because I was still a student and had a part-time job selling yachts at a real estate agency. I messaged in my free time a couple of hours a day, and it was always a struggle to squeeze in time for messaging between my other commitments.
But in January 2024, I started taking it seriously because I realized the potential of connecting with my fans.
I got a membership at a coworking space, where I spend at least eight hours a day on OnlyFans. I message about 200 to 300 people daily. I can message so many people because not all my fans are online simultaneously.
How I built up my OnlyFans subscribers
I post sexier pictures or videos of myself on OnlyFans, but I don't have outright sexual conversations — I just flirt and show sexier content than I would on Instagram. My subscription costs around $20 a month.
Some people will leave once they see the sexier photos. But when I start messaging new fans and connecting with them, they find it more exciting to see a sexier picture of me. Creating this relationship with my fans is so important.
When I get a new subscriber, I send them a message asking them how their day's going and their hobbies. Then, I can build on that information and start a genuine conversation. I also share more information about myself, making them feel closer to me and creating a virtual bond.
In chats with new fans or people I speak to regularly, I send photo or video content behind a paywall with a fixed price. They can decide to unlock it. Attaching pictures or videos can be very lucrative.
My most popular request is a greeting video. I film myself telling a fan to have a great day or asking them how they are. For a 15 to 45-second video, I charge $100.
My top fans message me every day, and we have genuine conversations
There are three types of people who spend money with me on OnlyFans.
About 20% are monthly subscribers who don't message. They're curious but may not have the budget for custom photos or videos. I'm happy for any support I get.
50% are guys who spend more money and message me regularly but only stick around for three to five months. They have busy lives and eventually drop off.
The third category is the loyal fans who have never left my side from my first month. They message me daily and spend money regularly. Those are 30% of my subscribers.
Because people can sign up anonymously, it's also a safe space to talk openly with me about their issues and what's going on in their lives. They'll often want my opinion as an outsider without the worry people will find out. Around 40% of my messages are flirty and sexy, while actual friendship and genuine conversations make up around 60%.
My long-term clients are often lonely, successful businessmen
My average long-term messaging client is usually successful because they can afford to spend a lot on the platform. Most have a corporate job with little time to get to know women offline.
They're exhausted from work and just want someone to chat with who will be available at night or when they have a minute to step away. From what they tell me, they're usually not married or in a relationship.
Many of my fans also don't want to go to a bar because it's not guaranteed they'd meet someone they'd be interested in. OnlyFans is an easy and direct way for these men to connect to their dream woman. They can scour the internet for the woman who fits their ideal type and then message her directly.
A day in the life of an Only Fans creator
My day at the coworking space looks like a day at the library for university students. I put my headphones on and post on social media. I'll always take photos and film videos when I'm out with friends or getting ready, so I'll post that content. Once I've posted, I start messaging.
After those two hours, I take a break to work out or get food. And then I repeat that same cycle until the sun goes down and it's time to go home.
Messages and interest in me have increased as I've spent more time on it. You can't form the same deep level of connection with only one or two hours a day. The biggest change is the amount of time I'm spending on it.
I think about my OnlyFans business constantly. If I'm not spending time with family or friends or working out, I'm messaging my fans.
Beautiful women and men are everywhere. What makes a creator stand out is their character — all their little quirks, likes and dislikes, making jokes, or being funny. My connections with my fans have grown as I've had more time to show them more of my personality.
The construction industry is facing a labor shortage of about 500,000 workers this year.
The worker shortage is pushing up housing costs amid a national housing shortage.
Industry experts say the US needs to invest in creating a pipeline from schools to construction sites.
When the pandemic hit the US in the spring of 2020, construction projects of all kinds froze and workers were laid off in huge numbers. But as remote work took hold and many sought larger homes, demand for new residential construction quickly picked up and workers were back on the job.
That momentum has kept up. Over the last four years, the industry has seen a surge in demand for labor amid a nationwide shortage of housing and a surge in new government funding for major infrastructure projects. This year, the construction industry is short about 500,000 workers — and that's "on top of the normal pace of hiring," according to a January 2024 news release from the trade group Associated Builders and Contractors. The worker shortage is now the biggest issue builders are facing, experts say.
"Contractors do tell me that finding workers is their number one problem," Ken Simonson, chief economist at the Associated General Contractors of America, told Business Insider.
While the rising cost of housing is in large part a result of restrictive zoning laws and building regulations, the construction worker shortage is also pushing up home costs. Fewer construction workers means less — and slower — residential construction, which in turn leads to higher home prices, according to a 2023 report from researchers at the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"It boils down to that age-old supply and demand in the sense of if there are fewer workers to work on the projects, that's going to elongate the project, the completion, that's going to increase the cost of the project itself," Kit Dickinson, an industry executive at ADP — a human capital management solutions provider — told Business Insider. "Conversely, that creates a great demand for these workers, which can command a higher wage."
Builders and infrastructure projects are in desperate need of all kinds of construction workers, but especially skilled tradespeople. Dickinson said there aren't enough plumbers, pipefitters, or people in other trades to meet growing demand.
Demand for workers is only expected to rise with the construction of major infrastructure and clean energy projects — in part funded by big federal packages, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. Ben Brubeck, vice president of regulatory, labor and state affairs at Associated Builders and Contractors, said the US will see an uptick in demand for skilled tradespeople for these "mega" projects, "not only in their initial construction but also in their operation and maintenance," he added.
Growing the workforce
Both short- and long-term solutions to the worker shortage are key.
"I think the construction industry has long been saying our workforce is rapidly retiring, and it needs to be replenished," Maja Rosenquist, senior vice president of builder and development company Mortenson, told Business Insider. "We need to be as inclusive as possible to make sure that we've got the right workforce in the future."
Simonson said that allowing more immigrants into the country to fill construction jobs is crucial. But the US also needs to create a stronger pipeline of young people interested in pursuing construction as a career, he said. This will require more funding from the federal government, he said, but also more local support.
"It really also comes down to state and local school district policies and individual guidance counselors, teachers and parents to get the message to kids that there are lucrative, rewarding — both financially and in satisfaction — careers in construction," Simonson said.
Brubeck said his organization is trying to promote the trades as a path into the middle class, and potentially to owning a business, as many tradespeople ultimately run their own operations. "We think it's sort of the best-kept secret, the fact that you can earn while you learn. You don't get in this college debt cycle," he said. "And you've got a job ready for you basically right away."
The increasing use of technology in construction could also be a draw for younger generations.
"There's a stronger technology element that people might not be initially aware of and come to understand that construction is a very high-tech industry," Dickinson said, noting the use of technology from the work site to the construction office.
That even includes usage of AI, "to help with planning and bidding on future projects, as well as executing projects," Dickinson said.
Highlighting the diverse work opportunities in construction could also be helpful for employers and builders looking to increase employment.
Rosenquist said it's an "amazing industry in terms of you can pretty much do anything you want to in this industry."
"But I think the general population when they think about, oh, my kids going into construction just has this vision of a hard hat and holding a sign," Rosenquist said.
"These are relatively good jobs, especially if they're jobs with unions," Heather Boushey, a member of the president's Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist for Investing in America, told Business Insider in 2023 about construction jobs. "If they're represented by a union, people can know that their safety issues are being focused on by the union and the like."
Some experts say the federal government is overly concerned with prioritizing union labor, which makes up a small fraction of the broader construction workforce. By requiring union workers for most large federal government-funded projects, "the Biden administration is actually exacerbating the skilled labor shortage that we have because there just isn't enough union labor to do this work," Brubeck said.
Making the industry more appealing to women
Boushey pointed out that the share of women in the overall construction industry has climbed. Experts find attracting more women needs to be a priority in construction.
To do so, that would include more accommodations, which Dickinson said "whether it's nursing stations at the job site or daycare, to making the equipment more tailored to different genders and body types as opposed to a one-size-fits-all."
Rosenquist said that she's encouraged by the future of prefabricated construction, which could be more attractive to women.
"Maybe they're going to the same manufacturing facility every single day for five years versus being on a job site where they're changing locations every five months," Rosenquist said.
But the construction industry has lost some of its edge as compensation in other industries, including restaurants and hospitality, has risen, and remote and hybrid jobs offer cushier, more flexible alternatives, Simonson said. The construction industry is also at a disadvantage because most workers can't do manual labor until they retire.
"I worry that construction is going to keep losing out on workers or have to raise pay even more than the 5% increase that we've seen for the last three years," he said.
US President of the United States Joe Biden delivers remarks on student debt and lowering costs for Americans at Madison College in Madison, Wisconsin, United States on April 8, 2024.
Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images
The Education Department announced $6.1 billion in student-debt relief or 317,000 borrowers.
The relief applies to borrowers who attended any Art Institute campus from January 1, 2004, to October 16, 2017.
Investigations found that the Art Institutes misled students about career prospects and salaries.
Student-loan borrowers who attended a for-profit chain accused of fraud are getting debt cancellation.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden's Education Department announced that 317,000 borrowers who attended any Art Institute campus between January 1, 2004, to October 16, 2017, will receive $6.1 billion in debt relief.
The Art Institutes were a for-profit system that prompted investigations from the attorneys general of Iowa, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Using internal data from the schools, the investigations found that the Art Institutes "engaged in widespread and pervasive substantial misrepresentations that deceived students about the value they would be receiving from their education," according to the department's press release.
While all remaining Art Institute campuses closed in September 2023, some of its former students are still making payments on the debt. Wednesday's announcement changes that.
"The Art Institutes preyed on the hopes of students attempting to better their lives through education," Federal Student Aid Chief Operating Officer Richard Cordray said in a statement. "We cannot replace the time stolen from these students, but we can lift the burden of their debt. We remain committed to working with our federal and state partners to protect borrowers."
According to the department, this group discharge will automatically provide relief to impacted borrowers — including those who had not submitted an individual borrower defense to repayment application, a form borrowers can fill out to request relief if they believe they were defrauded by the school they attended.
The department will begin notifying borrowers of the relief on Wednesday. It will also ensure that impacted loans are put on pause so borrowers do not have to make any payments while the relief is carried out.
"This ensures that they will not face any further financial demands from these loans during the time needed to process their discharges," the department said. "When their discharges are processed, borrowers will see any remaining loan balances adjusted and credit trade lines deleted."
The investigations from the attorneys general found that the Art Institutes advertised that over 80% of graduates landed jobs within six months of graduation when that was not the case. The schools also had inaccurate average salaries — for example, according to the investigations, a former employee said a coworker used salary.com to report a graduate's salary as $25,000 despite the graduate reporting an $8,000 a year income.
Since Biden took office, the Education Department has enacted a range of targeted relief for defrauded borrowers. In June 2022, the department announced $5.8 billion in debt relief for 560,000 borrowers who attended now-defunct for-profit Corinthian College, the largest group charge the department had acted on to date.
In addition, the department has been carrying out relief through one-time account adjustments for borrowers on income-driven repayment plans and Public Service Loan Forgiveness, allowing payments that may not have previously been counted toward forgiveness to be accounted for.
More broadly, the Education Department is working to implement its broader student-loan forgiveness plan after the Supreme Court struck down its first attempt. The new plan, expected to benefit over 30 million borrowers, is in its public comment period, and the department plans to move toward final implementation as early as this fall.
Our yearlong cottage renovation stretched out more than three years. The work still isn't done.
Chris Burnett for BI
As I stood in my newly renovated bathroom, watching water spill over the shower edge and flood the room, I alternated between rage and exhaustion. Even with my untrained eyes, I could tell that the lip of the shower was improperly leveled, which led to water cascading to the floor instead of swirling toward the drain. If it was left unchecked, the long-term water damage would be disastrous.
The giant puddle at my feet felt like a watery manifestation of the shoddy workmanship, mounting expenses, and legal battles my husband and I had endured during the renovation of our 1,600-square-foot cottage. What was supposed to be a yearlong $140,000 renovation ballooned into three excruciating years that cost us more than $500,000 — and the work is still not finished.
Our story is not unique. Homeowners nationwide have grappled with similar construction calamities wrought by unreliable and often unscrupulous contractors. The surge in home renovations post-health emergency, fueled by hit TV shows such as "Property Brothers" and "Love It or List It" that make renovations look like a breeze, exacerbated the situation. According to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, home-improvement spending skyrocketed from $328 billion in 2019 to $481 billion in 2023. With demand soaring, contractors have been in short supply, granting them an unprecedented amount of power. If they leave projects half done or don't do a good job, opportunities still abound and new clients line up at their doors.
In Rhode Island, where my husband and I live, complaints to the Department of Business Regulation surged by 30% from 2019 to 2021, predominantly centered on contractors who accepted payment but failed to complete the contracted work. Between 2021 and 2022, the construction consultancy Arcadis reported a 42% increase in the average value of construction disputes in North America, a historical high. But as my husband and I soon discovered, unless you've made a plan, legal protections for homeowners are close to nonexistent.
When our family bought our 130-year-old property in Northern Michigan in September 2020, we thought we'd be moving in by June 2021. We hoped to use the small cottage as a summer getaway and rent it out for the remainder of the year. We planned to gut it, improve the plumbing, electrics, foundation, and windows, and update the bathrooms and kitchen — a project that several contractors told us should take a year, give or take. Things started out well, but by fall 2021, it became apparent that our contractor had no intention of adhering to the agreed-upon timeline. Our descent into renovation purgatory had begun.
Initial delays were blamed on supply-chain shortages, and while those certainly affected the timeline, we later realized our contractor had misled us about when he ordered supplies and ignored our project for months at a time. The delays were the first of many red flags, yet with a home now ripped down to the studs and few alternative options in the cottage's small Michigan town, we felt powerless to change course.
We initially thought our cottage renovation would last a year.
Christine Chitnis
As the years passed, the budget tripled, we drained all our savings to make payments, and the planned timeline became a distant memory. We felt like the proverbial frogs in the pot of boiling water. Every time our contractor turned up the temperature, we grimly adjusted to the reality of our demise.
We finally demanded to move in during spring 2023. But shortly before, our contractor abruptly requested full payment on all work completed to that date. He threatened to withhold the certificate of occupancy, which is issued by the local government to the building-permit holder and indicates the building is up to code and all the work outlined in the building permit is done, unless we complied. Knowing the cardinal rule of home renovation — never pay in full until the job is over and inspected — we grew suspicious.
My husband and a contractor friend immediately flew in to assess the situation and were horrified by what they found: a botched paint job, improperly installed doors, leaky windows, shoddily installed flashing, and exposed pipes sticking out of the front yard. That's not to mention a long punch list left that included installing storm doors and exterior landings, repairing damaged siding, and covering exposed pipes. Worst of all was the shower that transformed our bathroom into a miniature swimming pool.
It seemed like a slam-dunk case: We paid for a service that wasn't finished.
We refused to pay, and after requesting complete documentation and accounting of all the work, we noticed significant budget discrepancies, such as gaps between what a subcontractor had billed (for example, $11,000 for framing) and what our contractor said he paid them ($18,000). The paperwork included notarized "paid in full" lien waivers from our contractor and all the subcontractors — documents that said we had paid everything we owed.
So we sought legal recourse, terminated the relationship, and ignored the outstanding balance. Surely, we thought, there must be consumer protections for people in our situation. It seemed like a slam-dunk case: We paid for a service that wasn't finished. A year later, we learned just how few protections existed.
The court dismissed the notarized lien waiver as a mere mistake on the contractor's part. The mediator offered trivial solutions to significant problems — "Take a crowbar, rip out the tile, and relevel the bathroom, no big deal. It's a weekend project," he said, as if we hadn't just paid tens of thousands of dollars for our contractor to do just that. The lack of sympathy from the court — and the fact it would cost us double what the contractor was asking for in legal fees to pursue further legal action — pushed us to settle. We paid the contractor the $32,000 he said he was owed, leaving us with an exorbitant legal bill and no closure. While we were able to move in eventually, we remain trapped in a cycle of endless repairs, gathering quotes to rectify the mess left behind by our contractor's poor work.
We've learned the hard way that your protection as a consumer largely comes down to what you do before the work even starts. After talking with other homeowners, I discovered just how easy it was to get taken advantage of.
Amanda Jane Jones began renovating her Utah home in 2020 with a contractor who came highly recommended by neighbors. Everything went well for the first few months, but then work started to slow down, and subcontractors stopped showing up. Jones had been paying incrementally, which felt safe and responsible. But then her young family's rental home went up for sale, and they had to move out. Desperate to move into the home she owned, Jones wrote her contractor a check for $190,000, which he said was needed to meet their move-in deadline. Then he disappeared. One by one, the subcontractors, who had finished their work months prior and had supposedly been paid by the contractor, began showing up at her door requesting payment.
David Jensen, a New Jersey attorney at the firm Greenberg Traurig, told me the first thing you can do to protect yourself is get reliable referrals for a contractor and check that they're licensed and registered as a business. But for Jones, reliable referrals weren't enough.
Your protection as a consumer largely comes down to what you do before the work even starts.
"Once we hired a lawyer and they conducted a background check, it turned out our contractor had gone bankrupt several other times," Jones said. "Each time, he created a new company name with only a slight variation of the first. He'd been to court multiple times, but his license was never taken away."
She recommended homeowners hire a lawyer to run a full background check for insurance coverage, complaint history, and litigation records. "He stole over $200,000 from us," Jones said. "We would have been fine if we hadn't written him that last check, but we fell for his trap." Her family was able to move in, but four years on, the house still isn't complete. Because the contractor already had liens against his assets from previous bankruptcies, their lawyer advised against pursuing legal action — there was nothing they stood to gain.
Jensen, whose practice is focused on construction-contract negotiation, also cautioned against paying in advance, especially without understanding how those funds would be used. "Many residential contractors want money up front in the form of a deposit, and they won't take the job if you don't put up money," he said. "Try your best to negotiate the deposit down and to get clarity about what it is to be used for."
He recommended requesting monthly accounting with detailed line items and progress lien waivers from the contractor and subcontractors. "Often contractors are telling you they need the money for your job, but they are using that capital to finish the job before yours," Jensen said. Accounting for every penny spent is a pain, but knowing where your money is going will save you a lot of pain down the road.
That's exactly what Lisa DiAntonio, a homeowner in Andover, Massachusetts, did. Despite completing several home-improvement and renovation projects with her husband over the years, she lacked the confidence to DIY the renovation of her newly purchased 6,500-square-foot home. Their contractor quoted about $1.8 million for the renovation, with $35,000 for demolition. She put down a 10% deposit of $180,000, and the work began in January 2022. DiAntonio noticed that the demo crew would show up for a few days, and then disappear for weeks. Progress seemed slow, and while she was supposed to receive a monthly bill with accounting, nothing arrived for the first several months, despite persistent follow-ups.
In the wild west of home renovations, it's every homeowner for themself.
"April rolls around, and he hands us a bill for $185,000," DiAntonio said. But according to what had been quoted, only about $90,000 worth of work had been done; the demo alone had been billed at three times the amount quoted. "In our contract, any time something was different than the quote, we were supposed to be alerted," she said. But there had been no warning that the demo was going over budget. Seeing the red flags, she immediately fired him. Because he hadn't followed the contract, they were able to make a clean break and have someone else finish the job. When DiAntonio went to transfer the building permit to her name, she discovered that her contractor had failed to obtain a demo permit.
Ultimately, a homeowner's best protection is a good contract — something we fell short on. Our contract, a mere one-page document drafted by our contractor, provided minimal safeguards and left us with scant legal recourse. If we did it again, we would include rules for how to handle changes to the project, penalty fees for missed deadlines, and clear costs for each job, including labor and supplies. (We discovered our contractor had outsourced much of the work we had paid for him to do himself, effectively double charging us the contractor fee).
Jensen recommended starting with standardized contracts from organizations such as the American Institute of Architects and customizing them to fit your needs. He encouraged including what's called a "right to terminate for convenience" clause, which allows the homeowner to fire their contractor at any time without cause. "At the end of the day, you are at the mercy of your contractor, but this clause is one of the most useful tools I have ever used," Jensen said. "It might not get you your money back or solve all your issues, but it gives you the power to move on from a bad situation."
The home-renovation world is a minefield. Each state has different regulations, legal recourse is slim, and competition for contractors is fierce. The best defense is vigilance — do your research, scrutinize, and demand accountability. In the wild west of home renovations, it's every homeowner for themself.
Christine Chitnis is a photographer, journalist, and author who has written for Condé Nast Traveler, Elle, Vogue, The New York Times, and Travel + Leisure.