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.
A performance improvement plan can be an opportunity for growth — or the end of your time at a company.
PeopleImages/Getty, Tyler Le/BI
A former program manager was placed on a performance improvement plan (PIP) at a major tech company.
It was an unexpected wake-up call, but they did experience friction with a new manager beforehand.
They saw the PIP as a kick in the butt and met the challenge but left by choice a few months later.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with a 36-year-old former program manager-turned-entrepreneur in San Francisco. The source's name and employment history are known to Business Insider but are not named to protect their privacy.
I worked at alarge, household-nametech company in San Francisco for three years in two different roles — first in an HR function and then as a program manager on a team of five people.
It was a wake-up call and very unexpected, but it became a turning point in my career.
Working at a top-tier tech company was amazing
Working for that company wasn't something I'd always envisioned for myself, but my roles felt purpose-driven and aligned with my goals, which were to be a catalyst for diversity and inclusion and to open doors into tech for communities of color.
The company has a very direct, results-oriented culture — excuses are not tolerated and excellence is the standard. This, combined with flawless execution at such a scale, created a unique vibe that I was drawn to and made it an honor to be part of the team.
Before I was placed on a PIP, I saw the warning signs
After returning from a conference, I was told that a senior leader wasn't happy with my demeanor. I felt out of place at the event while others were bonding, and it washardfor me to fake my emotions. No one shared feedback with me at the conference, but I knew that I hadn't been present mentally.
The company's workplace culture wasn't at its best at the time, and team morale was lower than it had been in previous months. I felt disconnected from the work and my team's mission.
An HR leader suggested I prepare my résumé, which I interpreted as meaning I could get fired. Instead, in a meeting soon after, my manager told me I was being placed on a performance improvement plan and requested that I document all my work moving forward, including weekly action items, meetings, and interactions in a weekly report tied to my next big conference project.
Fear and shame were my initial reactions. Taking responsibility for my mistakes was easy; the hard part was not dwelling on my disappointment or beating myself up over it.
Once the shock subsided, I gave myself an honest self-assessment. I decided to focus on what I could control and use this as an opportunity to improve my communication, focus, and work style.
I tried to view the PIP as an opportunity
I started working with a career coach to assess my work habits and uncover blind spots that were limiting my productivity — especially overcoming procrastination and understanding my communication style.
We crafted a plan around SMART goals and setting healthy boundaries, did exercises to help me navigate confrontation, and discussed ways I could improve task management.
As outlined in the PIP, I documented my progress and tracked my wins. I found it helpful to journal as much as I could each day and write down things I was proud of to help reinforce my confidence and sense of self-worth.
I also prioritized networking and building relationships. I volunteered for projects, participated in committees, and met with colleagues in different departments and peers at different companies. I told certain peers I was close with — and a few senior colleagues that I trusted — about my PIP.
My PIP was a much-needed kick in the butt, and I came out on top
I was on the PIP for about two months. I treated it like a challenge I was determined to overcome, but the anxiety caused significant weight loss. It was a mentally, emotionally, and physically demanding experience. My partner at the time noticed and was concerned for my well-being.
In the end, I wasn't terminated. After I completed the project, my manager gave me positive feedback.
Although I accept responsibility, I think a significant factor in my getting put on the PIP in the first place was miscommunication and a lack of alignment with my new manager, whom I began working under less than two years into my time at the company.
I struggled to adapt to department restructuring and didn't feel adequately supported. I really missed my original manager, who was a great mentor and someone I trusted.
Friction with my new manager was difficult to overcome
My new manager and I had different work styles, which sometimes led to friction. The turnaround times for my new manager's deadlines were aggressive to me, and I missed a couple in the early stages of them joining the team, which didn't set the right impression.
The team was pretty lean at this point, and we had a lot of internal organizations that needed stakeholder management. My manager instructed that I take on the added workload in addition to my other projects, and I didn't feel equipped to do this effectively. It felt like my scope was rapidly increasing, and my performance was being rigorously tied to a new set of key metrics overnight.
I learned that this is what can happen when new leadership comes in and sets a new tone for a team. I wasn't prepared for the abrupt shift in pace.
To cope, I leaned more on my side hustle, which fueled me creatively but also impacted my work performance at times. Tapping more into my side business while enduring the rocky workplace culture made me less motivated to go the extra mile at my job.
Looking back now, I understand and appreciate my new manager's changes even though they were uncomfortable at the time. Our dynamic after the PIP was pleasant, but the circumstances left me feeling confused and more guarded than I wanted to feel when reporting to someone.
My PIP experience ultimately left me feeling disheartened
Being put on a PIP solidified the reality that employees are expendable. I left the company on my own terms about two months after my PIP ended. The PIP wasn't the sole reason, but it did accelerate my thinking.
I got a new job at another company as a program manager. My PIP didn't come up in my interview and wasn't a factor, even with the references I gave.
The PIP made me realize the importance of prioritizing mental health and personal development
After going through the initial trauma of the PIP, I learned to confront the areas of my life that needed improvement so I could perform at the highest level possible. It wasn't a pleasant experience, but it gave me a clear road map for improvement and lessons I can share with others.
My PIP experience also solidified the importance of having multiple income streams by highlighting the vulnerability of relying solely on a salaried position. I continued to develop my side hustle, which eventually became my current full-time venture.
Today, I navigate conflict with tenacity and a more positive mindset. Instead of dwelling on the negatives when things go sideways, I focus on the skills I can develop to lead to a better outcome.
The Stratosphere is viewed from downtown on August 13, 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
George Rose/Getty Images
North American downtowns struggle as remote work continues to dominate the white-collar workforce.
A University of Toronto study reveals a gradual uptick in downtown foot traffic.
Downtowns are looking to transition into mixed-use districts and ease their dependence on offices.
As remote work cements its grip on the white-collar workforce, North American downtowns are working to fight off a downward spiral.
Many are attempting the transition from office-only districts to mixed-use neighborhoods with new residents and businesses. But breathing new life into areas dominated by half-empty office buildings is proving challenging.
The largest North American downtowns have generally seen a gradual uptick in foot traffic over the last year, according to a newly updated report from the University of Toronto analyzing anonymized cellphone data.
Many cities are working to turn vacant offices into homes, give restaurants and other businesses tax breaks to move downtown, and otherwise turn office districts into vibrant neighborhoods. But it takes time.
"Downtowns are going through this painful transformation to 24/7 social districts from being office districts," said Karen Chapple, the director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto and the author of the downtown recovery study.
The researchers found that while most cities have seen their office occupancy stagnate, they've seen an uptick in nighttime and weekend activity.
"You've got a really striking picture of many cities where weeknights and weekends are completely back to normal, but the overall recovery rate is being dragged down by the working-hour activity, which is still slow," Chapple said.
Overall, the rate of new downtown activity between March 2023 and February 2024 has slowed and even fallen in some cities. Overall, the median rate of change over the last year was 9.3%, and 50 of the 64 downtowns saw increased activity, the researchers found.
"So many of them have just sort of stagnated in their recovery," Chapple said. The data aligns with office building vacancy rates, she said.
The University of Toronto researchers, along with the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, have been analyzing foot traffic since January 2020 to understand how downtowns are coping with the impacts of the pandemic. Chapple said it will likely take years for many downtowns to attract the numbers they had pre-pandemic. Some probably never will.
"2022 was a big upswing year," she said. "And then in 2023, that upswing slowed dramatically, and in 2024 it's slowing even more because we've reached what people are calling the new normal."
Pandemic-induced remote work has exacerbated the decline of many downtowns that were struggling long before COVID-19 hit, and threatens to send many others into a so-called "urban doom loop." As offices empty and residents leave, experts warn that declines in tax revenue could force the government to cut funding for municipal services, from schools to mass transit.
Certain downtowns haven't seen much progress over the last year. San Francisco, for example, has kept its spot in last place for downtown activity, seeing a 21.6% decline in foot traffic over the last year. But others — including several Midwestern cities that struggled in the last few years — have seen their activity levels tick up. Minneapolis is ranked in first place: the Minnesota city has seen a 45.3% increase in foot traffic since March of last year. Chicago, Louisville, and Cincinnati are also among the top 10 fastest-growing downtowns.
Gold prices have hit record highs on the back of strong demand from China's consumers and central bank.
Ni Lifang/VCG/Getty Images
Gold prices have hit record highs, thanks to global uncertainties and expectations of central bank rate cuts.
China's consumers and its central bank are snapping up gold, even as a falling yuan makes the metal pricier.
Other central banks around the world are also buying gold to diversify their holdings.
China's economy isn't in a great place and its currency is floundering. The tumult is sending prices of gold, considered a safe-haven asset, skyrocketing.
Spot gold prices have recently hit record highs — above $2,400 an ounce — thanks to global demand on the back of economic and geopolitical uncertainties. Expectations of central bank interest rate cuts also boost gold's appeal, since the yields on fixed-income assets like bonds typically fall as rates go down.
In China, consumers are dealing with an economy that is struggling to recover post-pandemic and a weak yuan that has fallen about 5% against the US dollar over the last year. This makes gold — which, like most internationally-traded commodities, is denominated in the US dollar on the global market — even more expensive for the Chinese consumer. But consumers and China's central bank can't get enough gold.
Even Gen Z investors in China are getting into the trend as they buy up tiny bottles of "gold beans," Bloomberg reported last month. They're looking for alternatives to China's stock markets, which have been flailing over the last few years.
China's central bank has also been buying up gold, in much larger quantities than Gen Z's few grams of beans.
The People's Bank of China, or PBOC, has been snapping up gold for 17 straight months,with its holdings of the precious metal rising 16% over this period, according to a report from the international trade association World Gold Council. This buying spree coincides with a trend among central banks globally to diversify their holdings to reduce their reliance on the US dollar.
In 2023, China's central bank bought 225 tons of gold, per the World Gold Council. Last month, China's gold reserve rose by 5 tons, taking the country's total stash to 2,262 tons.
China has overtaken India as the world's largest gold buyer
Since China is now home to swarms of gold bugs, the country has decidedly overtaken India as the world's largest buyer of the commodity. The two economies have been jostled in the top spots for years, but China's buying spree last year put India behind.
Last year, China's demand for gold jewelry rose 10%, to 630 tons acquired, while India's purchases fell 6%, to 562 tons, according to the World Gold Council. US consumers were a far third place, buying just 136 tons of gold jewelry in 2023.
It's not just China. World Gold Council data shows other central banks,includingPoland and Singapore, have also been snapping up gold to hedge against global economic uncertainties.
India's central bank bought 16.2 tons of gold last year. The US did not add any gold to its reserves. However, the US already has the world's largest gold holdings, with about 8,134 tons of the precious metal — far more than second-place Germany, which holds 3,352 tons of the commodity.
Despite the gold rush, Georgette Boele, an economist at Dutch bank ABN AMRO, warned about going all-in on the commodity amid record-high prices in an April 15 note.
"The trend in gold prices is positive and the sky seems to be the limit. However we remain cautious," wrote Boele.
She highlighted a seeming paradox in the market: High US interest rates would typically keep gold prices muted, but the opposite is happening.
"Even though these changes have occurred in the past, they tend to be temporary in nature meaning that they could last around three to six months," wrote Boele.
Lofty gold prices now doesn't mean there's a supply crunch, she wrote.
"The amount of central bank buying is not justifying gold prices at current levels," she wrote. Based on that assessment, she said she's keeping her forecast of $2,000 per ounce of gold at the end of 2024, below the current going rate around $2,400.
"The frontline situation will therefore likely continue to deteriorate in that time, particularly if Russian forces increase their attacks to take advantage of the limited window before the arrival of new US aid," the ISW wrote in a report on Saturday.
The bill, however, will still need to be approved by the Senate and signed by the president before the aid can reach Ukraine.
"These requirements and the logistics of transporting US materiel to the frontline in Ukraine will likely mean that new US assistance will not begin to affect the situation on the front line for several weeks," the US think tank wrote.
Ukraine, the ISW said, would "suffer additional setbacks in the coming weeks," though they should still be able "to blunt the current Russian offensive assuming the resumed US assistance arrives promptly."
Although the US started out as a huge backer of Ukraine, support for the war effort has faltered, in part due to GOP opposition.
US assistance would provide Ukraine with a critical lifeline as it grapples with an invigorated Russian army. On April 10, US Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli said in a House Armed Services Committee hearing that the Russian army "is actually now larger — by 15 percent — than it was when it invaded Ukraine."
"The severity of this moment cannot be overstated: If we do not continue to support Ukraine, Ukraine could lose," said Cavoli, who is also NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.
Representatives for Russia's defense ministry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
Tesla is slashing car prices following a disappointing first-quarter sales report.
JOHN THYS / Getty
Tesla cut car prices in the US, China, and Europe after sales fell.
The company also reduced its software price by a third in the US.
The company's challenges include disappointing delivery numbers, layoffs, and Cybertruck recalls.
Tesla is trying to win back customers with cheaper cars and software.
The electric vehicle maker cut prices in key markets, including the US, China, and Europe, over the weekend, as it faces falling sales and intensifying competition.
The company also slashed the price of its driver-assistance software, Full Self Driving, by one-third, to $8,000 in the US.
The changes come just before the EV manufacturer is set to report first-quarter earnings on Tuesday. Profit margins have fallen dramatically when Tesla has dropped prices in the past.
Tesla lowered prices for most of its US cars, cutting the costs for the Model Y, X, and S by $2,000, Reuters reported.
In the US, the cheapest Model Yand the Model X — both SUVs — are being offered at their lowest prices. The best-selling Model Y now starts at $42,990, per Tesla's website.
The company didn't change the price for the new Cybertruck or the Model 3 sedan.
"Tesla prices must change frequently in order to match production with demand," CEO Elon Musk wrote on X on Sunday.
He's also facing a big vote in June on his pay. Musk's $56 billion pay package was voided by a Delaware judge in January and shareholders will be asked to re-vote on the compensation at the annual meeting, the company said in a statement.
Tesla's stock is down over 40% year-to-date. Investors are concerned about slow sales amid high-interest rates and intensifying competition from EV makers in China.
Elon Musk wanted Tesla to reduce its workforce by one-fifth, Bloomberg reported.
Musk wanted the layoffs to match the drop in quarterly vehicle deliveries.
Tesla delivered 386,810 cars in the first quarter of 2024, a 20.1% drop from the last quarter.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk at one point wanted the EV giant to trim its workforce by 20%, Bloomberg reported on Sunday, citing a person familiar with the matter.
Earlier this month, Tesla said it delivered 386,810 cars in the first quarter of 2024, a 20.1% drop from the previous quarter. The delivery drop was the company's lowest quarterly performance since 2022.
Musk had announced a round of mass layoffs at Tesla last week. In his memo to staff, the billionaire said the company is slashing "more than 10%" of its head count.
"Over the years, we have grown rapidly with multiple factories scaling around the globe," Musk wrote. "With this rapid growth, there has been duplication of roles and job functions in certain areas."
Tesla's growing troubles have raised questions about Musk's ability to run multiple businesses simultaneously. Besides leading Tesla, Musk also has his hands full with other ventures like SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, X, and xAI.
But, Musk has maintained that the layoffs were necessary to keep Tesla "lean innovative, and hungry for the next growth phase cycle," per his memo to staff last week.
"There is nothing I hate more, but it must be done," he wrote.
Representatives for Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.