Despite laying off hundreds in entertainment in January, the company is still hiring to build out Prime Video, home to mainstream fare like "The Boys" and "Reacher" and live sports programming like NFL's "Thursday Night Football."
Amazon recently listed 255 job openings in Prime Video on its site, including 100 in the US, from program managers to software developers.
These salaries represent annual base pay, which varies by geographic market and doesn't include equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation and benefits.
They include salaries ranging from $64,200 to $245,000 for digital program managers, $115,000 to $223,600 for software development engineers, and $63,000 to $151,700 for an advertising insights manager.
Restaurants from Starbucks to Chipotle have marked up menu prices since the law took effect on April 1.
Other chains have found alternatives to offset the higher wage costs.
Many fast food workers in California have been taking home more money since April 1, when the state's minimum wage for those workers went to $20 an hour.
But restaurant owners, eager to protect profits, have raised the menu prices that consumers pay to help offset the cost.
Often, fast-food joints are operated by franchisees — business owners who run a small group of stores and pay a company like McDonald's for the right to do so. That means that individual franchisees may choose to pass on the higher pay costs, while others don't.
California's new law applies to chains with at least 60 "limited-service" locations in the US — that is, restaurants where customers order and pay for their food before getting it instead of sitting down and being waited on.
Here are the restaurants — and specific franchisees — who have decided to raise menu prices since California's new minimum age kicked in:
McDonald's: Scott Rodrick, who owns 18 Northern California McDonald's restaurants, said he would raise prices. He was also considering changes to his stores' hours and putting off planned dining room renovations to save money.
Burger King: Burger King restaurants in California raised prices by 2%, according to a report from Kalinowski Equity Research that examined prices at several fast food chains in the state before and after April 1.
Chipotle: Prices at the Mexican grill chain rose 7.5% in California after the law took effect, per the Kalinowski report. The company's CFO said on an earnings call in February that Chipotle would increase menu prices because of the higher wages.
Wendy's: Menu prices at Wendy's rose 8% in California, according to Kalinowski.
Taco Bell: Menu prices rose 3% after the new wage law took effect, Kalinowski found.
Fatburger: Marcus Walberg, whose family runs four Fatburger franchises in Los Angeles, told BI in January that he was planning to raise prices between 8% and 10% in response to the new wage law. He also planned to cut PTO for employees and freeze hiring, he said.
Vitality Bowls: Brian Hom, the franchisee in charge of two Vitality Bowls locations in San Jose, increased prices between 5% and 10% after the law took effect, he told BI. He has also stopped hiring and reduced the number of workers on duty per shift.
Indeed, some restaurant operators say that they've already raised prices more than usual over the last year or two in response to inflation and are worried that another round of increases would scare off customers. One Burger franchisee told BI that he's instead installing ordering kiosks at his restaurants to save money on wages.
Lynsi Snyder, the president and third-generation owner of In-N-Out, told NBC's "Today" earlier this month that she pushed to limit menu price increases in response to both higher wages as well as general inflation.
"I was sitting in VP meetings going toe-to-toe, saying, 'We can't raise the prices that much, we can't,'" she told "Today." "When everyone else was taking jumps, we weren't."
Do you work at a fast food restaurant and have a story idea to share? Reach out to this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com
A rendering of The Line, which developers say will be a key part of Saudi Arabia's Neom project.
NEOM
Saudi Arabia just took its Neom roadshow to China.
Neom officials visited Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong in an attempt to court Chinese investors.
No deals were announced, but one attendee said the event helped demystify the futuristic project.
Saudi Arabia took its Neom roadshow to China amid ongoing speculation about the scope of the project and its finances.
Neom officials visited Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong last week in an attempt to court Chinese investors and shed more light on the mysterious megacity.
While no deals have been announced, one attendee told AFP that the exhibition helped make Neom "less mysterious."
That observation came from Leonard Chan, chair of the Hong Kong Innovative Technology Development Association, who also told the news agency that reactions to the ambitious project at an invitation-only reception were "mostly neutral."
Chan may not be first in line for The Line, however. "I'll visit for fun, but I won't live there. It's like something out of SimCity," he told AFP.
A private showcase provided attendees with an "immersive experience" exploring The Line, the 105-mile-long futuristic city, along with Oxagon, which promises to redefine the "traditional industrial model," Trojena, Neom's mountain resort; and Sindalah, a luxury island in the Red Sea that opens to the public later this year, per a press release.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Saudi Arabia had significantly reduced estimates for the number of people expected to live in The Line. Officials cut the number of residents expected to live in the "horizontal skyscraper" from 1.5 million by 2030 to fewer than 300,000, according to the report.
Tarek Qaddumi, Neom's executive director, said that the population target of nine million would be achieved in time, per AFP.
Representatives for Neom did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.
Wider concerns have reportedly been raised about the cost of the trillion-dollar investments in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 project.
The financial realities of the project that could cost as much as $500 billion have started to cause alarm within the Saudi government, Bloomberg reported. Saudi Arabia has also started borrowing to help fund Neom and other Vision 2030 "megaprojects," The Wall Street Journal reported in February.
The Neom project is also planning to issue bonds for the first time, Bloomberg reported last week. The megacity project could raise up to $1.3 billion by selling Islamic bonds, or sukuk, the outlet reported, citing unnamed sources.
The Neom roadshow has also visited Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, New York City, Boston, Washington, DC, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, and London.
Ground personnel upload luggage and cargo containers onto an Emirates Boeing 777-300 ER aircraft at Dubai International Airport in March.
Horacio Villalobos
Severe flooding caused by the heaviest rain in 75 years brought travel chaos to Dubai Airport last week.
The ongoing fallout has prompted Emirates CEO Tim Clark to issue an apology to customers.
30,000 bags still need to be returned to customers, he said.
Emirates, the world's largest airline group, is still trying to return 30,000 leftover bags to customers affected by the torrential rains and flooding that brought Dubai Airport to a standstill last week.
Over the weekend, the airline's president, Tim Clark, acknowledged that Emirates' response to the disruption had been "far from perfect" and apologized to customers.
"I would like to offer our most sincere apologies to every customer who has had their travel plans disrupted during this time," Clark wrote in an open letter posted online on Saturday.
Calling the previous week "one of the toughest for Emirates operationally," he said that the airline had been forced to cancel nearly 400 flights and delay many more after storms brought the region's highest rainfall in 75 years.
"Flooded roads impeded the ability of our customers, pilots, cabin crew, and airport employees to reach the airport, and also the movement of essential supplies like meals and other flight amenities," Clark wrote.
Cars are engulfed in water on a busy road in Dubai.
GIUSEPPE CACACE/Getty Images
In total, 1,478 flights had been cancelled at the world's second busiestairport by Friday morning, according to Reuters.
While planes remained stuck on flooded taxiways, submerged roads surrounding the airport left some passengers stranded in the airport.
To accommodate disrupted passengers, Emirates said they had secured 12,000 hotel rooms and issued 250,000 meal vouchers.
Despite the chaos and a government warning telling people to stay at home, Emirates flight attendants in Dubai were also told to report for duty.
However, Clark acknowledged that many passengers had been frustrated by the congestion, lack of information, and confusion at terminals.
In an effort to handle the ongoing fallout, he said that a task force had been created to sort and return 30,000 pieces of left-over luggage to its owners.
The airline officially resumed regular flight operations at Dubai Airport on Saturday, but warned it would still take several days to clear the backlog.
Non-UAE-based carriers were still facing restrictions over the weekend. Foreign airlines with more than two flights in 24 hours were issued with a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) instructing them to reduce operations by 50%, Indian news agency PTI reported.
According to FlightRadar 24's data, all arrivals and departures were largely running to schedule again on Monday morning.
Its efforts to diversify its economy away from oil, centered around Dubai as a tourism hotspot, have helped the country position itself as a major player on the world stage. In a sign of its growing popularity, the number of passengers traveling to Dubai Airport increased by 31.7% in the last year.
Wole Coaxum is the CEO of MoCaFi, which has distributed over $52 million in basic income payments.
Coaxum, a former JP Morgan exec, was inspired by social justice movements in the Black community.
He wanted to create a pathway for economic equality to uplift vulnerable populations.
This is an As Told To essay based on a conversation with Wole Coaxum, the founder and CEO of MoCaFi, a B Corporation that has distributed over $52 million worth of guaranteed basic income payments nationwide. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I was very fortunate in my career to be one of the most senior people at JP Morgan. I was a managing director and the number two guy in business banking nationally when I saw the images coming out of Ferguson. I thought, "It's 2014, and what we're seeing is no different than what was going on in 1968."
The people protesting were making a statement, and it was coming out of a place of wanting change. I thought, "How can I use my time and talents, which is financial services, to bring an economic justice agenda to the social justice agenda?" And that inspired me to start MoCaFi.
Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about universal basic income and guaranteed basic income just before he passed away, and I feel that we as a company are very fortunate to be standing on the shoulders of others to bring these powerful ideas into the marketplace.
We've done about a dozen UBI and GBI programs around the country. We've facilitated programs in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and San Francisco, among others. Some of them are through MGI, Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. We're finding that what we're doing resonates with cities and counties. They see the value of it.
One of the things I would say in response to the redstates opposing this is we're not a political entity. We're just trying to provide a high-quality platform that ensures that a UBI or GBI program fulfills its mission so that the individuals have access to the cash and can move forward. It's hard to argue with the idea of getting resources from government to people more efficiently. Even my most conservative friends can get behind a more efficient government.
We are facilitating payments in a way that reduces all the friction. We have a disbursement platform, and then we have a demand deposit account. We're trying to take individuals receiving a UBI and GBI and bring financial coaching and resources to them. They don't have to operate in cash or cash checks. They can create a MoCaFi bank account that's FDIC-insured. We can open up accounts for undocumented people. We can open up accounts for people regardless of their credit score. Now, they've got a pathway to economic stability.
There's an old narrative demonizing low-income people who receive government resources. That's the wrong lens in my personal view. Most, if not all, Americans are getting some benefit from the federal government. Why is a universal basic income that much different? Why not streamline the process so the most vulnerable among us can get access to those funds?
People use the money for the intended purpose. It increases savings. It decreases poverty. It increases education. It reduces the need for crime. It gives people more dignity. It makes our neighborhoods safer. It enables families to get jobs they couldn't get otherwise because they're paying for childcare or healthcare. The proof is in the pudding.
#stitch with @Renèe | Influencer Marketing these days, Katy Hearn’s products and branding dont move me to purchase. She is a shell of a human behind her husbands wacky joe rogan rants. Not every consumer cares, obviously, because theyre shallow enough to still be following and buying. TikTok influencers stand above IG because of authenticity. When a TT influencer is inauthentic we sus it out. As a larger community, we are also putting our money where our mouths are. And thats rarely with influencers that built their brand on consumerism or falsely built a community on values they are not demonstrating in their new, branded life. #alaninu#katyhearn#qvc @Drew Afualo @Madeline Pendleton @hellotefi
But people are still willing to spend overall. Retail sales increased 0.7% in March compared to the previous year despite prices rising faster than the Federal Reserve's inflation target of 2%.
A disillusionment with what influencers are selling may have more to do with their relatability tanking when it used to be something that set them apart.
Deinfluencing and influencer fatigue
Ashley Rector, the founder of creative marketing agency Quimby Digital, told Business Insider this is why the trend of deinfluencing became so popular last year — influencers who were encouraging their followers not to purchase things.
As social media marketing evolved, so did the opportunity for influencers to work with more brands.
"They accepted deals with brands that weren't aligned, they put up campaigns that were not thought out, and consumers could tell that it wasn't aligned," Rector said.
"When someone feels like you are selling them for the sake of selling, they inherently lose trust."
Samantha Zink, the founder and CEO of the talent management agency Zink Talent, told BI the influencer industry has changed massively since it began in the early noughties.
Back then, it was "more about passion than profit," she said, while now content creation is a fully-fledged career with commissions and subscriptions.
"This shift has made influencer engagements seem less special because what was once a hobby or a passion project is now a necessity to earn a living," she said. "Influencers, some of whom are supporting families, must engage in brand collaborations to sustain themselves."
This evolution may mean some don't view influencers as relatable as they once did.
Research from Meltwater, an online media monitoring company, referred to this perceived lack of authenticity as "influencer fatigue" in 2023.
They found social media users wanted "real, unstaged content to engage with"
Influencers may be losing their command over Gen Z in particular, Yahoo News reported. Data shared with the outlet from a YPulse study found that 45% of 13 to 22-year-old respondents felt influencers don't have the sway they used to.
Influencers at the beach (stock photo).
Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images
The influencing days aren't over
This doesn't mean influencing is over.
It's more about the way it's done is evolving, and only creators who understand this will be successful.
A report from Influencer Marketing Hub this year found there was a strong preference from brands to work with small nano- and micro-influencers due to their higher engagement rate and the trust built with their communities.
Sophie Wood, the director of strategy at influencer marketing agency Fohr, told BI the influencer bubble hasn't burst, it's just changing. Deinfluencing in itself is influencing, she said, just in a different direction.
A decade ago, bloggers were the new, shiny type of celebrity that everyone wanted a piece of. Then the influencer boom happened, YouTube took off, TikTok was created, and now millions of people can be given that label.
Smart creators are looking for ways to keep their communities thriving, such as joining platforms such as Substack to give a section of their loyal fans a more intimate look into their lives.
"Those are people who actually have something different to say," Wood said.
Hannah Witton, a YouTuber who has been making content for over a decade, for example, moved away from YouTube last year to Patreon, and many of her subscribers followed.
She told BI influencers, like everyone, will change over time. It's hard to be "relatable" to everyone, but the way to keep followers happy is for influencers to continue sharing things authentically, even as their interests change.
"I think the key is to be honest about changes and take your audience along for the ride," Witton said. "Naturally, some people will fall off, but many will stay, and new people will always come."
In these more niche communities, fans are more than happy to see the influencers they love making money and recommending products, Wood said. It's not that ads are bad, she said, you just need to be able to do it well.
"They're proud of their influencer," she said. "They're like, get your bag. I love this ad. You make the best ads. That is the golden standard."
Viewers don't want to be lied to
Transparency is really important, as some influencers have come under fire recently for not being honest and open about ads — not disclosing that they were paid to promote certain products or trying to hide the disclosure hashtags behind the video's caption.
"Audiences are very smart and I think they don't want to feel duped," Wood said. "They're going to be like, this influencer thinks I'm dumb to believe this ad when I know that this is not something she would create."
Jessica Dante, an influencer and the founder of Love and London, agreed that trust dwindles when viewers see something they perceive as a "money grab."
She also believes people focus on "relatability" a little too much, but that people look for honesty and integrity in whatever they watch.
"Because TikTok has enabled people to go viral for something that maybe isn't authentic or true, this is especially the case," she said. "It's why influencers are often called out when they aren't being truthful or haven't told the whole story."
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request by BI for comment.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a weekly cabinet meeting in the prime minister's office in Jerusalem on June 25, 2023.
Abir Sultan/Pool Photo via AP
Israel planned a larger counterstrike on Iran, but scaled it back after pressure from its allies.
President Joe Biden persuaded Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call, per The New York Times.
The counterattack was in response to Iran launching over 300 missiles and drones at Israel.
Israel planned a much bigger counterstrike on Iran but dialed it back after intense pressure from its allies, including the US, according to senior Israeli officials who spoke to The New York Times.
Three officials, speaking anonymously owing to the sensitivity of the discussions, told the Times that Israeli leaders had considered striking multiple military targets across Iran, including some near the capital, Tehran.
The barrage followed an attack on April 1, attributed to Israel, on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Damascus, Syria, which resulted in the death of several Iranian military officials.
According to the Times, Israel ultimately opted for a more limited strike on Friday, which avoided causing significant damage, after President Joe Biden and British and German foreign ministers urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to show restraint.
According to three Israeli and Western officials who spoke to the Times, during an early-morning phone call, Biden encouraged Netanyahu to view the successful defense against the Iranian attack as a victory that required no further escalation.
Citing Israeli sources, the newspaper reported that Netanyahu left the conversation opposed to an immediate and powerful retaliation.
The officials said Israel's contained response still underscored the sophistication of Israel's military capability, demonstrating the ability to strike Iran without entering its airspace and to penetrate its air-defense systems, the Times reported.
Israel also hoped to demonstrate its ability to target parts of Iran that house nuclear facilities, such as the uranium enrichment site in Natanz, according to the newspaper.
Thus far, the limited response seems to have prevented a major escalation in the region.
Contacted by Business Insider, the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment.
"I have seen no evidence for aliens and, with ~6000 satellites orbiting Earth, I think I would know," Musk wrote on X on Monday.
The billionaire responded to a recent interview that Tucker Carlson gave on the podcast "The Joe Rogan Experience," which aired on April 19.
Carlson told host Joe Rogan that he thinks aliens "have been here a long time" and claimed that "there's a ton of evidence that they're under the ocean and under the ground."
It seems, however, that Musk disagrees with Carlson's theory.
I have seen no evidence for aliens and, with ~6000 satellites orbiting Earth, I think I would know
This isn't the first time Musk has publicly contemplated the existence of extraterrestrials. In June 2018, Musk said in an X post that "it is unknown whether we are the only civilization currently alive in the observable universe."
But this, Musk said, meant there was "added impetus for extending life beyond Earth."
"The scariest answer to the Fermi Paradox is that there are no aliens at all," Musk wrote in July, referencing physicist Enrico Fermi's questions about why humans have yet to discover aliens.
Musk has a vested interest in discovering what's out there in space beyond what appears to be a personal interest in aliens.
Starlink has played a critical role in the Ukraine war, where Ukrainian soldiers have used it to operate its drone fleet and communicate in conflict zones.
All I can really say about the appointment at my kid's allergist is that it occurred. We waited weeks to get in, got some tests, received a diagnosis and a treatment plan, had a weird insurance thing that wasted our time. American healthcare took place.
Then I got a survey.
The email contained the usual set of questions. How would I rate the service I received? How likely was I to recommend them to a friend? But I've gotta say, getting asked how satisfied I was with the care provided by a pediatric allergist was baffling to me. My child received necessary medical treatment at a speed commensurate with its urgency. It was fine. What aspect of it could I possibly evaluate? I don't need to express an opinion about the chairs in the waiting room.
The whole thing vexed me enough that I started to reallynotice customer satisfaction surveys — and, as I'm sure you've seen, they are everywhere. It seems like every interaction I have with a money-involving organization also comes with a polite request for my feedback. A restaurant. A hotel. A shop. The insurance company that wasted my time. Every time I buy something or interact with someone: another survey. While I was pitching this story to my editor, his email dinged. A survey! How'd we do? How long was your wait time? How satisfied were you with the knowledge and professionalism of the salesperson who served you?
Most of the time I'm not asked to evaluate the quality of a product or service. I'm asked to evaluate the experience, the meta-consumption that drives our hyperactive service economy. A tsunami of surveys has turned us all into optimization analysts for multibillion-dollar companies. Bad enough I'm providing free labor to help a transnational corporation improve its share price or "evaluate" a low-paid, overworked, nonunion employee. It's more than annoying. I'm starting to suspect it's unethical.
This isn't just my imagination. We're all getting more requests for feedback. Global spending on market research has doubled since 2016, to more than $80 billion a year. More than half of that money is doled out in the United States, and a fifth of it — $16 billion! — is devoted to customer surveys.
Consider the experience of Qualtrics, one of the largest survey-data companies. In the past year, the firm has analyzed 1.6 billion survey responses. That's a 4% increase over the prior year — and responses for the first quarter of 2024 were 10% above what Qualtrics projected. Its analysis of "non-structured data," which is to say customer-service phone calls and online chatter, hit 2 billion conversations last year. This year the company projects an increase of 62%.
Why are there suddenly so many surveys? Because people have so many options today that they're not bothering to complain when something sucks. They just move on to a different, equally accessible website. A company pisses them off or disappoints them, and poof! They're gone.
"When a customer has a poor experience, 10% fewer of them are telling the company about it than they did in 2021," says Brad Anderson, the president of product and engineering at Qualtrics. "What's happening is they're just switching." So companies are using surveys in a bid to hang on to those unloyal customers. After all,it's way more expensive to acquire a new customer than keep an old one.
The tricky part is marketing research has shown thatthe objective quality of a product, its nominal goodness, matters less than whether it meets customer expectations. "Quality," as one research paper put it, "is what the customer says it is." Customer satisfaction correlates with profitability, with share price, with success.
Now, to get all philosophical for a moment, what even is satisfaction, anyway? People tried for decades to figure that out. Then, in 2004, a Bain consultant named Fred Reichheld came up with an answer. He called it the Net Promoter Score.
Before I tell you what that is, let me ask you a question: On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend this article to someone else?
That's it. That's what the Net Promoter Score does. If you'd recommend something to someone else, it has by definition satisfied you. Mystery solved.
The NPS came along at the same time as the widening use of the internet and social media, which made it very easy to ask about. Phone calls, snail mail — that stuff is time-consuming and expensive. But surveys sent via email and text are fast and cheap.
"People don't choose based on objective quality anymore," says one marketing expert.
In American marketing, NPS became an unstoppable craze. Other metrics followed: the Customer Satisfaction Score, the Customer Effort Score, measurements of the entire Customer Experience. A survey, or monitoring calls to customer service, could reveal loyalty, intent to buy again, the specific parts of the "customer journey" that were most pleasant. "People don't choose based on objective quality anymore," says Nick Lee, a marketing professor at the Warwick Business School. "Value is added by way more than what we would call objective product features."
At the peak of the so-called sharing economy, customer surveys were all-powerful. They went both ways: Suddenly, Uber drivers and Uber riders both had star ratings to care about. Customer surveys were going to fix asymmetrical marketplace information. But of course, the whole thing was frothier than a five-star milkshake. By the late 2010s it was becoming clear that all those reviews and ratings were getting less useful over time. They were subject, it turned out, to "reputation inflation." Eventually everything gets four stars out of five.
The glut of customer surveys has created an additional problem for marketers. Email surveys are like the robocalls of old: You hit delete without even looking at them. "People receive so many survey requests that they're more likely to refuse to participate in any survey," says James Wagner, a researcher at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. It's called oversurveying, and it makes people less likely to respond. Which means that, for statistical validity, companies have to send out more surveys. Which lowers the response rate even further, which means that companies have to send out yet more surveys, in a never-ending doom loop. On a scale of 1 to 5, customer satisfaction with customer-satisfaction surveys is headed to zero.
In reality, nobody's even sure these surveys are measuring the right thing. "Companies regularly collect customer-satisfaction measures, Net Promoter Scores, things like that," says Christine Moorman, a business-administration professor at Duke University who heads up a semiannual survey of hundreds of chief marketing officers. "But then the question is what do they do with it, and to what strategic ends? Most of them are doing it out of habit, not because they're thinking about the larger strategic questions they have."
Big survey companies don't just dump a giant Excel spreadsheet on their clients and send them an invoice. They offer sophisticated analyses of the data they collect. But unless those numbers are tied to possible changes the client might make, what's the point? "It's a huge arms race," says Lee, the Warwick marketing prof. "If you can give me more data rather than less data, I want more data. But the business model as to whether that data is valuable, it's sometimes questionable. Because people don't know what to do with the data, and they let the agency tell them what it says." Just because a company gets a bunch of survey results doesn't mean it knows what to do with them.
Customer surveys aren't just bad for companies. After reading the copious research on how surveys are actually used, I've come to the conclusion that they're even worse for us, the oversurveyed customers.
Any time a scientist wants to do research involving humans, it's a whole thing. That always comes with risks, from exposing people to an untested drug to simply wasting their time. To get approved by an Institutional Review Board, the potential results have to be worth the risks, to provide some benefit to humanity. That's called "equipoise." And if a proposed experiment on living things doesn't have it, you ain't supposed to do the experiment.
Perhaps customer surveys should be evaluated for "equipoise." What if they're only being used to discipline or fire employees?
Perhaps customer surveys should be evaluated for equipoise. If the companies actually use the data to improve a product or experience, that's good for us subjects. But what if it's used only to improve the company's share value or profitability? Or to discipline or fire employees? That only helps the company. And that doesn't even take into account whether I, the surveyed one, gave my consent for data I provided to be used in that way — a key to ethical research.
"Maybe we should have to pre-tell people what we're going to do with the data before we get it," Lee says. "That would be a way to stop companies from doing it indiscriminately." But he knows that's a nonstarter. "We'd be adding bureaucracy into the system. Never a popular thing to do with companies."
Worse, for vast swaths of services, you and I are the last people anyone should be soliciting opinions from. Things like doctor visits, legal services, or school classes are "pretty hard for the user to evaluate," Lee says. "We ask for customer feedback on these things all the time, but it's hard for a customer to give you immediate feedback, because a customer doesn't know what quality is yet." The college class you hated because it was hard, and at 8 a.m., might turn out to be your favorite academic memory and the foundation for your professional skill set 15 years later. Whether a visit to the mechanic was pleasant doesn't tell you how well they fixed your car. You have to drive around with your new drive shaft awhile to know whether you got shafted.
Lee has unpublished data, which hasn't been peer-reviewed, comparing hospital performance in Britain's National Health Servicewith surveys of both patients and employees. "It's not surprising that the best hospitals have the best patient feedback and best worker feedback," he says. But what is surprising is thatworker feedback, not customer responses, correlates most closely with quality. Users, it turns out, aren't very good at telling what's what.
You know what is good at sorting through tons of data? Artificial intelligence. As email surveys get lower and lower response rates, consumer marketing companies have begun to tout their acumen at applying AI to the unstructured verbiage of online reviews, social-media posts, and call-center transcripts. Maybe these new tools, based on large language models, will be able to coax better responses from oversurveyed consumers. "It's the ability to be able to detect when there's a low-quality answer and come back and ask the customer for more data," Anderson says. "When we ask the second question, 40% of the time the customer engages and provides more data. The number of syllables in the second response increases by 9x."
Now, if I get a callback from a customer-survey robot, there's a good chance most of those additional syllables will be profane. How will I rate my experience getting interviewed by an AI? It might get more actionable data out of me than that email from my kid's allergist did.But I'm pretty sure I won't recommend it to a friend.
Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.
Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns the conservative Twitter clone Truth Social, went public via SPAC in late March. (For those not familiar, a SPAC, or special-purpose acquisition company, is a shell company that goes public with the intention of buying an actual company later. In the Trump case, the shell company Digital World Acquisition purchased TMTG.) When the merger was completed, the stock — which trades under the ticker DJT — popped to over $70 a share. TMTG's market cap topped $9 billion, and the former president's net worth, on paper, jumped to $7 billion.
And then, DJT popped again, but this time in the bad, bubble-bursting way. Its price fell, and then it fell again, and then it fell some more. The stock staged a bit of a rally at the end of last week, but it's still well off of its March highs. As of the end of trading on Friday, TMTG was trading at $36.38 down 54% from its peak and 41% since I wrote about it three weeks ago. Correspondingly, the former president's related wealth gains have come back down to earth. People on Truth Social feel pretty bad about it. Short sellers, if I had to guess, feel pretty good, even if Trump's company is trying to prevent them from betting against it. Anyone investing in TMTG is in for a bumpy ride.
While Trump is a political figure, Trump Media's stock price is not really a political story. Sure, there are some fervent followers who believe that buying the stock is akin to supporting the Republican presidential candidate. More broadly, though, TMTG's fall from grace is more of a business story with a hint of cultural weight that let it achieve some meme-stock-like status.
The thing about TMTG is that it is not a good business. Its total revenue was $4.1 million in 2023, which is a little more than what a single McDonald's franchise makes in a year, and it lost $58 million the same year. When the stock was near its highs, it was trading at something like 2,000 times the company's annual revenue. That is a lot. Nvidia, the high-flying vanguard of the artificial-intelligence revolution and one of the hottest stocks this year, is trading at about 35 times its revenue.
Besides required financial information, Trump's media outfit won't disclose central data points that would give a better picture of how well it is — or, likely, isn't — doing. As my colleague Peter Kafka has pointed out, TMTG refuses to tell investors how many people are signing up for Truth Social, whether they're sticking with the platform, or what's happening in ad sales. In regulatory filings, the company says it "believes that adhering to traditional key performance indicators, such as signups, average revenue per user, ad impressions and pricing, or active user accounts including monthly and daily active users, could potentially divert its focus from strategic evaluation with respect to the progress and growth of its business." In other words, it doesn't think publicly disclosing how things are going will be good for its business prospects, which, I mean, tracks to the extent that the truth is probably bad. (To be clear, other publicly traded social-media companies, such as Reddit and Meta, do not keep a lot of this kind of information under wraps.)
For all the gloominess now, Trump's media company says it has bigger and brighter days ahead. On Tuesday, TMTG announced that it planned to launch a streaming-TV platform where creators who can't find an audience for "unjust" reasons "won't be cancelled." The same day, its stock price fell by 14%, though the next day it bounced.
All in all, for shareholders, this is not a fun roller-coaster ride. The stock is on a steady downward trajectory, and things aren't looking good. The company has filed plans to issue more shares, which would raise even more cash for operations but dilute the value for current shareholders. Trump himself, who owns more than half of the company's shares, is subject to a lockup period that prevents him from selling those shares for six months. This is pretty standard practice for SPACs to prevent pump-and-dumps. The board could speed that up and let him and other insiders sell earlier, which would give the former president a quick cash injection but almost certainly depress the stock's price more. Why hold on to the stock when even its namesake is giving it up? So DJT will likely circle the drain even faster once major shareholders are allowed to sell, and it's not really clear how the company plans to turn that around. Trump, for his part, has some bigger fish to fry, like competing in an election and hanging out in court.
That TMTG's stock price has fallen isn't surprising. It's not a successful business, and it's not clear how many people are ever going to want to hang out on Truth Social, let alone how many businesses would want to advertise there. The speed of the stock's plunge, however, is a bit of a shock. It wasn't a given that the gravity of reality would be such a strong, immediate force. But for now, the Trump Media & Technology Group illusion seems to be coming undone.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.