Category: Business Insider

• Federal prosecutors in Oregon have brought charges against seven defendants conspiracy to defraud Home Depot.
• The complaint says the group rented equipment from the retailer using stolen credit card numbers.
• Instead of returning the items, prosecutors say the crew sold it on Facebook and other marketplaces.

Home Depot's rental department continues to battle the theft of its heavy equipment in schemes where suspects sell the machinery on sites like Facebook Marketplace, prosecutors allege.

Earlier this month, federal prosecutors in Oregon brought charges against a group of seven defendants, accusing them of conspiring in a scheme in which they stole heavy machinery from Home Depot by renting it and not returning it.

According to the indictment, first reported by Court Watch, members of the group would go to the retailer's rental desk at locations in Oregon, Washington, and Colorado to borrow the equipment using stolen credit and debit card information.

Prosecutors also said the defendants would "often use their real driver's license" for the required identification.

But rather than return the equipment, the defendants instead sold it on Facebook Marketplace and other online platforms, according to the court documents.

In each instance, the equipment was borrowed under a one-day rental, GPS tracking devices were disabled, and items were listed for sale on Facebook and elsewhere, the prosecutors said.

The thefts bear a striking resemblance to several cases in the past year, one in Washington, and two in Florida.

In one, Florida prosecutors sentenced a man to eight years in prison for leading a crime ring that rented more than 60 pieces of heavy equipment, such as trenchers, stump grinders, and excavators, which were never returned, costing Home Depot more than $1 million.

Officials said he too used his actual ID when borrowing equipment, the local Fox affiliate reported.

And just last month, Florida's Attorney General brought charges against another man in a strikingly similar scheme that involved 21 pieces of equipment and cost Home Depot more than $460,000.

Beyond the rental desk, Home Depot and other retailers have been raising the alarm in recent years over theft, which cost the industry an estimated $41 billion in 2022.

In response to shoplifters, the home improvement retailer, in particular, has turned to measures including locked-up displays and power tools that won't work unless they've been activated at purchase.

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• Taylor Swift's impact on the economy is having a positive impact on individual companies.
• Swift's name has been popping up on Wall Street earnings calls recently, often referencing how she's helped business performance.
• Detailed below are five times Swift has been mentioned by companies in recent months.

Taylor Swift's impact on the US economy started to become clear last year during the middle of her incredibly popular Era's Tour, and the impact has spilled over to the bottom line for individual companies.

Swift's 60-show tour across the US generated a record $1.04 billion in sales, with a total 4.3 million tickets sold at an average price of $238.95. And now fans are listening to today's release of her new album, "The Tortured Poets Department. 

The knock-on effect of that tour led to a surge in hotel bookings in certain cities, which even caught the attention of the Federal Reserve.

Individual companies are starting to take notice too, with several mentioning Swift on Wall Street earnings calls in recent months to help explain the underlying strength of their business performance.

These are the five times Swift has been mentioned on Wall Street recently:

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• The US Army is contemplating reducing financial aid programs that encourage education.
• Budget cuts to two major financial aid programs could affect over 100,000 soldiers.
• Talks of budget cuts coincide with a time where Army recruitment is falling short of its goals.

The US Army is considering making reductions to two key financial assistance programs that promote higher education, something which has long been a selling point for military service.

Potential budget cuts to the Army's Credential Assistance and Tuition Assistance programs could impact over 100,000 soldiers, policy experts recently told Inside Higher Education.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told the House of Representatives last week that budget changes may be made as the program has become a "catastrophic success," explaining that the program has become widely popular but costly for the Army.

"The challenge we have is we really, frankly, didn't put any guardrails around the program to help us scope it," she said.

Altogether, these programs cost the Army roughly $278 million in 2023.

The Credential Assistance program provides soldiers with $4,000 dollars a year going toward earning various certifications, and the Tuition Assistance program allows active-duty service members to receive $250 per hour of credit.

Wormuth emphasized that she wants to keep these programs but believes the number of credits and certifications soldiers can receive should be capped to manage costs. The qualifications making troops eligible for these programs could also be tightened as another solution.

"Those kinds of guardrails are very similar to what our sister services have done in the Air Force and the Navy," she said. "We obviously want to keep them. That's our number one goal, is to keep everybody. But how we transition them is critically important."

The Army is thoroughly reviewing the program, a service spokesperson told Business Insider, explaining that "we must implement the programs in a way that not only maximizes the benefit for our Soldiers, but also puts rules in place that ensure the responsible stewardship of resources and continued program viability."

Talks of budget cuts come at a time where recruiting for the Army is notably struggling. In 2023, the Army fell about 10,000 soldiers short of its 65,000-person goal.

Will Hubbard, the vice president for veterans and military policy at Veterans Education Success, an organization advocating to protect military and veteran benefits, told Inside Higher Education that these benefits "serve a long-term purpose of being valuable both to the individual and the Service, and therefore, any cuts to this program, now or in the future, would be met with strong opposition."

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• Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a "motion to vacate" against Speaker Mike Johnson in March.
• She argues that Johnson has betrayed the GOP, in part by allowing more Ukraine aid to pass.
• Since then, more Republicans have signed onto her effort, but Democrats could protect Johnson.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn't think Mike Johnson deserves his job anymore. She's no longer alone.

The Georgia congresswoman is getting back-up on the so-called "motion to vacate" she filed against the GOP speaker of the House in March: two more Republicans signed on this week.

These GOP lawmakers argue Johnson is betraying his party, first by passing compromise government funding bills that were not sufficiently hard-right and now by working with Democrats to pass more aid to Ukraine.

But the circumstances are far different from October, when then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted via a motion to vacate for the first time in American history.

That effort, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and supported by 7 of his colleagues, was only successful because every single House Democrat voted for it. Democrats loathed McCarthy, and the ex-speaker did little to incentivize them to protect him from Gaetz's effort.

This time, several Democrats have indicated they're willing to protect Johnson — likely by voting to table Greene's motion — if he passes Ukraine aid, as he plans to do on Saturday.

Greene has not yet forced a vote on her resolution, and it's unclear when she will. If Democrats were to vote for her resolution, she now has enough votes to oust Johnson.

It's unclear who would succeed the Louisiana Republican, and the House could be thrown back into weeks of chaos if Greene is successful.

Here are the Republicans who want to fire Johnson

Marjorie Taylor Greene: The Georgia congresswoman filed her motion at the end of March, the day that the House approved a government funding bill that she hated. She has since taken to blasting Johnson on a nearly daily basis on social media.

Thomas Massie: The Kentucky congressman announced in a conference meeting this week that he would be cosponsoring Greene's motion. An idiosyncratic libertarian who's used to taking lonely positions, Massie is upset with Johnson for numerous reasons, including approving foreign aid and pushing through a bill that re-authorizes government spy powers.

Paul Gosar: The Arizona congressman signed onto Greene's motion Friday to protest Johnson's move to approve more Ukraine aid, saying in a statement: "We need a Speaker who puts America first rather than bending to the reckless demands of the warmongers, neo-cons and the military-industrial complex."

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• Tesla informed some of its recruiters on Friday that they'd been laid off, sources told BI.
• Elon Musk announced a more than 10% headcount reduction on Sunday night.
• Some Tesla staff learned they'd been laid off shortly after. Another group was notified on Friday.

Tesla layoffs hit its recruiting staff on Friday morning.

Three former Tesla workers confirmed to Business Insider that they had been informed of the layoffs via a call on Friday morning. They requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak on Tesla's behalf. More former Tesla recruiters have posted on LinkedIn saying they were notified their jobs had been impacted on Friday.

It's unclear how many employees were affected by this round of layoff notices.

The latest layoff notices come after Tesla announced it was laying off more than 10% of its workforce on Sunday night and notified its first round of impacted US employees that same night, according to the two separate emails viewed by Business Insider.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a companywide email on Sunday that there had been a "duplication of roles and job functions in certain areas" due to the company's rapid growth, according to a memo viewed by Business Insider. The billionaire is known for his cost-cutting habits, including cutting X's workforce in half shortly after buying the social media company.

The same day Tesla announced its initial round of cuts at least two executives resigned from the company. SVP of powertrain and electrical engineering Drew Baglino and VP of public policy and business development Rohan Patel said on X they had left Tesla as of Sunday.

The job cuts come as Tesla is facing slower demand for its electric cars. The company's stock is down around 35% year-to-date. Tesla will post its next earnings report on April 23.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the layoffs.

Do you work for Tesla or have a tip? Reach out to the reporter via a non-work email and device at gkay@businessinsider.com

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• The homes of New York City's young men are being captured on camera — and it isn't pretty. 
• Comedian Rachel Coster is revealing the dirty sheets and trash-covered floors in "Boy Room."
• Each episode reveals "scary" and "stressful" apartments and advice for how they could improve.

New York City-based comedian Rachel Coster, 28, sits on an unmade bed in a cramped West Village apartment and tries to make sense of what she's seeing.

"His shoe rack is a crumpled box and his bedside table is an abandoned suitcase," Coster exclaimed.

This is the apartment of a 25-year-old man.

Welcome to "Boy Room," the new series in which Coster and a cameraperson venture into the unruly habitats of New York City's men and try to offer advice. The show, produced by Gymnasium, airs on social media where it has already become a sweeping success, racking up 76,000 followers on TikTok and 26,000 followers on Instagram in just a few weeks.

A kernel of the show's inspiration came from a road trip Coster once took with a male friend. He confessed his bedroom was so off-putting to girls that he'd reached a breaking point. Coster offered to help when they returned to New York, but when the time came, he was too embarrassed to let her through the door.

"If any boys would let me in, I think I could really help them out," she recalled thinking to herself. Now, she got her wish.

"Boy Room" aims to uncover the logic beneath each room's chaos and envisions an upgraded space

Launched in late March, the series has already visited six subjects, offering spaces that Coster has described as "scary" and "stressful." The sights are also humorous. Navy sheets on an unmade bed, a stray deodorant tucked under a pillow. A floor cloaked in dirty laundry and plastic take-out bags. Wall decorations including a car steering wheel or a Darth Vader mask.

The show uncovers all the strange idiosyncrasies of the ways some men inhabit their spaces, which Coster believes might be the fault of traditional social conditioning. "Girls are raised to take care of the house, generally. It's demanded of us or there's a shame around it," she said. "I don't feel like my guy friends were experiencing the same thing."

One subject, Chris, a 27-year-old living in Brooklyn's Boerum Hill neighborhood, existed in a sea of clutter with random paraphernalia like corks tied together with a string and a pile of wigs sitting under a dresser.

"I get nervous throwing stuff away," Chris explained during the episode.

"Well, let me tell you, it's awesome to do," Coster deadpanned to the camera.

Coster said she has sympathy for many of the men she features and at the end of each episode, offers her advice to improve their space. She recognizes that many, like her, are young and hustling in ambitious careers, and probably have very little time to focus on interior design and cleanliness.

That's an argument that rings true for another subject, Jerome Peel, whose sparsely-decorated bedroom in Manhattan's Chinatown neighborhood attracted a number of detractors on TikTok. He even drew heat from the official Wendy's account. "It just gets worse," the fast-food chain wrote.

"I'm in my apartment 10 hours a day," Peel, 32, told BI. He runs his own fashion brand, Peels, and the popular Instagram account Citibikeboyz, which features Peel and his friends executing daredevil tricks on New York City's bike-share network.

Peel stands by the way he has set up his room, including three nail clippers that sit on a windowsill. "It's so I can clip them out the window," he told BI.

"Boy Room" wants to find the messes that can't be faked

Some subjects volunteer to be on the show, while others are recommended by friends. But Coster said they've denied applicants they believed were exaggerating or faking their mess. Even though subjects have some advance notice of when they will be filmed, Coster said a vetting process lets the team find authentic examples.

Take, for example, recent subject Dan, the 25-year-old West Village resident, whose dresser had a layer of dust so thick it turned the pine-colored wood as white as snow.

"The messes we've been leaning into are the ones clearly made over the course of a really long time," she said. "Like the dust on Dan's dresser couldn't possibly have been just put there."

Coster hopes to take the show outside of New York one day, and explore the messes of men in Boston, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles.

"Although," she said, "I kind of suspect everyone in LA is living kind of nice."

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• Apple just removed WhatsApp, Signal, and other messaging apps from its Chinese app store.
• Big Tech is used to these compromises in order to do business in various parts of the world.
• But it could happen in the US, too, if a TikTok ban bill becomes law.

"We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree."

Remember that quote.

It's from an unidentified Apple comms person, to The Wall Street Journal, explaining why Apple just took four messaging/social media apps — WhatsApp, Threads, Signal, and Telegram — out of its Chinese app store.

If you follow Apple and its complicated, codependent relationship with China, you have definitely heard it, or versions of it before — like when Chinese authorities forced Apple to remove an app used by Hong Kong protesters in 2019.

You've also heard versions of it over the last few years in other countries, as big US tech companies make concessions to local rulers that would never fly in the US. Like when Netflix removed an episode of comedian Hasan Minhaj's newsy show to satisfy Saudia Arabia, or when Facebook removed posts that Turkey's government didn't like.

But now we are getting closer to hearing Apple and other tech companies use the same words to describe their actions in America.

A proposed anti-TikTok law, which has already been approved by the House, has renewed energy (TLDR: The bill may now be packaged along with measures approving aid for Ukraine and Israel, which increases the chances the Senate may pass it; Joe Biden has already said he'd sign the bill if it gets to its desk.)

If the TikTok bill does become law, it won't make TikTok go away overnight in the US.

In theory, TikTok could continue to operate in the US if ByteDance, its Chinese owner, sells it to someone else — though the Chinese government really, really doesn't want that to happen. More practically, the bill would immediately head to the US court system, where it could get tied up for a very long time.

But if the law jumps enough hurdles to become enforceable, Apple would have to remove TikTok from its US app store, as would Google.

That would be an unprecedented move in this country. But Apple has a quote ready in case it needs it.

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• Bank of America upgraded is forecast for China's 2024 GDP growth to 5.0% after a strong first quarter. 
• China's breakout from its economic slump may also mean less government support ahead, BofA said.
• BofA doesn't expect a "a full-blown growth rebound" as real estate woes and weak demand are still a problem. 

Bank of America boosted its forecast for China's economic growth in 2024 on the heels of a surprisingly strong first-quarter performance from the world's second-largest economy.

The bank raised its outlook for full-year GDP growth to 5.0% from 4.8% and raised its 2025 forecast to 4.7% from 4.6%. The upward revision comes after China saw 5.3% growth in the first quarter thanks to the county's infrastructure and manufacturing investments, propelling it closer to Beijing's  5% GDP target, BofA analysts led by Helen Qiao wrote on Friday. 

On the investment front, BofA said the FAI index – a key indicator of capital expenditures on fixed assets — confirmed that the investment strength seen in the first two months of 2024 wasn't just another "head fake."

A 9.9% surge in the manufacturing sector and an 8.8% rise in infrastructure drove year-to-date FAI growth to 4.5% year-over-year, despite a 9.5% decline in property investment.

"This is particularly meaningful, as investment usually leads the business cycle in China because this is the one area that tends to benefit from policy support first," the analysts said. 

Still, BofA doesn't expect "a full-blown growth rebound" as China is still in the throes of a real estate crisis and dealing with consumer demand issues.

"The caveat is that other activity data including retail sales and industrial production still points to tepid domestic demand," the analysts said, adding that March's industrial production and retail sales figures fell short of expectations. 

"Bottom-up channel checks and indicators, such as cement production and shipment, also seem to contrast with the strong top-down infrastructure growth." 

With a robust first quarter dataset in hand, policymakers may be less inclined to intensify easing measures, dashing hopes for imminent policy support, according to the bank. The analysts wrote that they anticipate a gradual growth deceleration through the rest of 2024 as policy support wanes.

Apart from the potential for waning government aid, a worsening property sector that's eroding buyer confidence, and a substantial drop in Chinese exports amid geopolitical tensions add downside risks to China's growth prospects, BofA said. 

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• Tesla sent some laid-off staff a new severance offer with additional pay and health insurance.
• The initial severance offer included two months pay and health insurance coverage, two workers said.
• Elon Musk has said he plants to cut more than 10% of Tesla's workforce.

Some laid-off Tesla workers received new severance offers that included more money and longer coverage of benefits on Thursday night.

It continues a tumultuous week for Tesla workers, some of whom missed the layoff email before heading to work on Monday and only realized they were out of a job after a badge scan from security. Others told Business Insider they didn't receive any severance information within the 48 hours Tesla had said to expect it.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared to acknowledge the company had initially sent out faulty severance packages. On Wednesday, Musk sent a companywide email to current Tesla employees saying that "some severance packages are incorrectly low" and the company was working to correct the mistake.

Unlike early severance offers that were sent to some workers on Tuesday night, the new packages appear to vary between employees.

Two workers who'd initially received a severance offer for two months pay and two months of health insurance coverage were notified on Wednesday that their separation agreement had been canceled by Tesla and that an updated agreement would follow, the workers told BI. Within a few hours, the workers received severance offers with slightly higher pay, those workers said.

One worker said they got an extra month of COBRA health insurance coverage and an extra few thousand dollars thrown into their severance pay. Another worker said they were offered three months' worth of severance pay and three months of paid COBRA coverage. Both workers were told they would no longer be employed by Tesla as of April 19.

Meanwhile, a third worker was told in their initial severance offer that was sent out on Wednesday night that they would be employed through June 14 in compliance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, according to the document which was viewed by BI. The act requires companies that have more than 100 workers are required to provide 60 days of notice before a large-scale layoff. In addition to the 60-day notice period, the employee was told they'd receive two months of severance and two months of COBRA coverage that would be paid out after their employment ended in June.

Sixty days' pay is the minimum that companies with more than 100 employees must give laid-off workers if there's no 60-day notice period before mass job cuts, according to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. If an employer lays off an employee but allows them to maintain their employment status for 60 days it can also fulfill the WARN notice period.

The laid of employees are part of a mass layoff at Tesla. Musk told staff the electric-car maker was slashing more than 10% of its workforce on Sunday night, according to an internal memo viewed by BI.

A spokesperson for Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Do you work for Tesla or have a tip? Reach out to the reporter via a non-work email and device at gkay@businessinsider.com

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With bamboo-based products on the rise, we wanted to see how they compared to their plastic and paper counterparts. We went to Taiwan and China for a behind-the-scenes look at how bamboo is turned into cups, lunchboxes, toilet paper, and cutlery — and figured out which of these products have the biggest impact on our environment.

For more on Lastic, visit www.lastico.com.

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