Category: Business Insider

• A Cleveland Uber driver took home $17,000 in 2023 after commissions and vehicle expenses. 
• He said he's tried a variety of driving strategies, but that none have made much of a difference. 
• Safety concerns are another reason he's considering quitting ride-hailing. 

George, a full-time Uber driver in Cleveland, was once quite satisfied with his ride-hailing gig. But things have changed.

The 40-year-old, who has been driving for Uber since 2017, is considering quitting and becoming a truck driver, he previously told Business Insider via email.

"I used to sing the praises of Uber and recommend doing Uber to people looking for a business opportunity and one where a decent income can be made — but no longer," said George, whose identity is known to BI but he asked to use a pseudonym due to his fear of professional repercussions.

George said he's tried a variety of earnings strategies in recent years, but that none of them have proven to be both successful and sustainable.

Last year, George made more than $109,000 in gross earnings from ride-hailing, according to documents viewed by BI. But after Uber's commissions, car maintenance, gas, and other driving expenses were accounted for, he took home roughly $17,000, about 16% of his gross earnings. In 2021, he took home roughly 19% of his gross earnings.

He said he typically drives between 45 and 55 hours each week and estimated that after expenses like gas and maintenance, he earned about $17 an hour in 2023 — excluding depreciation and insurance costs.

George is one of several Uber and Lyft drivers who have told Business Insider their gigs are less profitable than they were a few years ago. Many have accused ride-hailing giants of taking a larger cut of rider fares, while some have pointed to growing driver competition and high vehicle expenses. These frustrations have led some drivers to protest and call for higher guaranteed pay.

In February, an Uber representative told BI that "the vast majority of drivers are satisfied" and that "as of last quarter, drivers in the US were making about $33 per utilized hour" before expenses.

Many ride-hailing drivers are actively tracking their income and expenses to make sure driving is worth their time. George shared the top ride-hailing strategies he's tried, what worked and didn't, and another reason — in addition to a declining income — he's considering ditching ride-hailing.

Some strategies have been effective, but none have moved the needle

George said he's tried "cherry picking" — only accepting trips that pay a minimum of $1 a mile. But he said he often finds himself accepting rides below this threshold that take him to busier areas.

Drivers have told Business Insider that it's easier to be picky with rides when one drives part-time and is less reliant on ride-hailing income. A low acceptance rate can also make it difficult for drivers to retain their driver status, which can provide perks like savings at select gas stations.

George said he tries to drive on the weekends as much as possible, when the demand is "incredibly high." But he said this comes with a risk.

"I do it with the advanced knowledge that I could deal with someone puking in the vehicle, reducing how much time I would have to drive due to clean-up requirements and then get back to work once it was cleaned to my satisfaction," he said.

While this concern is often in the back of his mind, he said there have only been a couple of occasions where he's had to clean up after a sick passenger.

George said driving at night — when ride demand is higher and driver supply is lower in his area — has been fairly effective. He's also tried working more during the daytime, when he said ride demand can be fairly high. But he said this strategy didn't meaningfully increase his earnings, in part because he could only complete so many rides.

"I'd find myself in a massively high volume of traffic, and I would either sit with or without my passenger in the car but still lose time," he said. "I prefer the lesser levels of traffic to reduce stress and anxiety caused by others' poor driving and prevent myself from getting involved in an accident."

George added that working high-demand days, like the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and St. Patrick's Day, can be profitable. But there are only so many of these days throughout the year, and when traffic is accounted for, his total earnings aren't always that much higher than a typical day.

"Regardless of my strategy in Cleveland, my earnings pretty much remain the same," he said.

Safety concerns have been frustrating

While his financial challenges are the primary reason George is considering quitting ride-hailing, he said he's also had some safety concerns.

"We drivers know nothing about our passengers, yet the passengers know evening about us," he said. When booking a ride, passengers can see driver names, pictures, license plates, vehicle models, how many trips they've completed, and how long they've been driving for the platform.

"What we see is whatever name is given and a score, nothing else," he added, noting that the passenger's name isn't always accurate.

"I recently had a passenger use 'Yu-Gi-Oh' as their name," he said, referring to the popular card game.

In April, Uber rolled out a new rider verification program in several US cities, not including Cleveland, that will put a blue checkmark on the accounts of riders whose identity has been verified. Uber said the majority of riders will have this done automatically, though some may need to upload an ID to do so.

This program will allow drivers to decline a ride when a passenger's identity hasn't been verified.

"Strengthening rider verification has been a top request from drivers across the country," Roger Kaiser, head of safety at Uber, said in a statement about the update. "Uber's new verification process and verified rider badge that will be visible to drivers are important steps to help provide drivers with more peace of mind while they are out on the road."

Uber said it plans to expand this program to more cities in the coming months.

Regardless of the update, if George's earnings don't improve, he said he will likely try to pursue other options. However, while he makes that transition, he said he has no choice but to keep driving.

"There are a number of frustrations because I only want to better my life," George said. "But because of the situation as it is, I continue to run into a brick wall."

Are you a gig worker willing to share your story about pay, schedule, and tipping? Are you struggling to find a better job? If so, reach out to this reporter at jzinkula@businessinsider.com.

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• More Gen Zers are "disconnected youths," meaning they're not employed or enrolled in school.
• People between the ages of 14 and 24 are in their "decisive decade."
• This decade can determine an adult's economic and social outcomes.

Young Americans are feeling increasingly isolated from their offices and classrooms, and these "disconnected youth" — or "opportunity youth" — may be ill-positioned for the future.

People between the ages of 14 and 24 are in their "decisive decade," Brookings Institution researchers wrote in a report published in April. This period in life is marked by major milestones such as graduation, relocations, new jobs, and formative relationships.

Yet, the report found that more young people today are struggling with their mental health and feeling financially unstable than prior generations. Fewer are enrolling in school, while more are dropping out after enrolling. That's because Gen Zers' teenage and young adult years have been shaped by the pandemic and widespread income inequality.

Richard Reeves, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings who co-authored the report, said in a Monday panel the decisive decade, along with socioeconomic circumstances, can determine young Americans' social and economic stability in adulthood.

"Rather than thinking this period is like a conveyor belt that you just get onto at 14 and drop off again at 24, it's more like a series of stepping stones," Reeves said. "The ability to successfully transition across these stepping stones is highly important for what kind of follows in terms of people's life chances."

Gen Zers who hit adolescence during the pandemic are especially vulnerable, per the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Loneliness and a tough job market are leaving many Gen Zers feeling stuck, isolated, and unsupported. In fact, they're members of the disconnected youth — defined as Gen Zers who are not in school and not working.

Some have disenrolled or taken a break from school, while others have graduated but aren't employed. Nearly 4.7 million young people were disconnected in 2021, according to research firm Measure of America.

Several of these Gen Zers told Business Insider that they're actively looking for work but live in lower-opportunity areas where jobs are sparse, adult support is limited, and mental health resources are few and far between.

"There are these stepping stones that are quite difficult, quite slippery, but some people have someone on each side helping them across those stepping stones," Reeves said. "Others are supposed to do it on their own."

Disconnected youth are at risk of long-term stagnation

Most Gen Zers — who are between the ages of 12 and 27 — are in this decisive decade. For young people in this age group, their living circumstances have major implications for their long-term health, happiness, and economic stability, the Brookings report found.

Researchers analyzed education and employment benchmarks for Americans between the ages of 14 and 24 based on data pulled from the 2015-2019 Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

These benchmarks included enrollment in 9th grade with a 2.0 GPA or higher, high school graduation with a 2.0 GPA or higher, college enrollment or full-time employment three years after graduating from high school, and enrollment or work at the age of 24. The researchers chose to stop their analysis in 2019 since the pandemic disrupted enrollment, work, and living arrangement patterns.

The data shows that just 60% of young adults met these four milestone indicators. Brookings researchers said this has much to do with their family income level.

For instance, young people living in higher-opportunity areas during their teenage years might have better upward mobility as adults. Researchers said they are also more likely to enroll in higher education and land better-paying jobs.

At 21, Brookings found that 94% of those in the highest socioeconomic group — defined as the top quintile of income-earning households — are enrolled in school or working, compared to 78% for the lowest socioeconomic group, including the lowest quintile households. By the time young adults turn 24, just 31% have a bachelor's degree or higher, while 58% work full time.

This education gap impacts future income: National Center for Education Statistics data shows that 25-to-34-year-olds with a bachelor's degree earned $61,600 a year, compared to $39,700 for those with just a high school diploma.

Researchers also said gender, race, and family circumstances shape young Americans' financial futures.

Only half of Black young adults work full-time, compared to 62% of white young adults — and Black, Hispanic, and Asian students have lower rates of school enrollment and employment than white students. Additionally, the report found that young women are less likely to be employed by age 24 than young men.

Researchers said isolation is another contributor to the disconnected youth phenomenon. More Gen Zers live at home than previous generations, and many are experiencing higher levels of loneliness.

Data from the World Happiness Report suggests that young Americans are overall not satisfied with their lives — young adults in North America reported some of the lowest levels of life satisfaction in years, ranking 62nd out of 143 countries for this age group.

Disconnected youth are at greater risk of disability, homelessness, substance abuse, and involvement with the criminal justice system, per the Brookings report.

How to help disconnected youth

Although many disconnected youth struggle with school and work, researchers cautioned against a "one size fits all" solution. Reeves said there are many paths toward success for young people — not every student will succeed in the same higher education or career path.

"It's quite clear from this that there both is not and should not be one narrow track to success, but we should think in terms of opportunity pluralism," Reeves said.

Jonathan Zaff, a research professor in applied human development at Boston University, said the key to helping young Americans is building adult mentorship networks that provide Gen Zers with opportunities. He also suggested schools invest in lifting students' financial and mental burdens, such as providing free or reduced lunch and bus fares.

Some schools are already taking steps to help students be more social and engaged, including investing in mentorship and peer-support programs.

Ian Rowe, senior fellow at the nonprofit policy research firm American Enterprise Institute, said that at his Bronx-based Vertex Partnership Academies, students have a "pastoral connection" three times a day with a teacher who connects with students beyond lessons. He said his school also restricts phones and AirPods during the day so students can better connect with each other.

"People avoid talking to strangers even though it makes them happy," said Lara Aknin, an editor at the World Happiness Report. "People gain so much intimacy, warmth, and happiness from having deep conversations with others, but we shy away from doing that."

She suggested using study groups in schools to foster more regular, in-person contact between students.

Zaff added that young adults need scaffolding to stay connected — whether that means having people at school to help them fill out a FAFSA form or being offered apprenticeship opportunities in high school. He said that adults are important in supporting young people as they make decisions about their lives and futures.

"We want to make sure that young people feel empowered to exact the agency that we know they have," Zaff said.

Are you a Gen Zer who isn't employed or enrolled in school? Are you a parent of disconnected youths? Reach out to these reporters at allisonkelly@insider.com and nsheidlower@insider.com.

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• I flew from London to Madrid with Ryanair on a ticket that started at £35 ($43.70).
• But this nearly doubled after needing a normal-sized bag plus choosing my seat — which ended up being wrong.
• It got me from A to B unscathed, but I'd rather fly with another budget airline for the same price.

When it comes to airlines, my friends often sing the praises of Ryanair — praising its cheap ticket prices, whether it be city breaks or visiting home.

Somehow, I hadn't flown Ryanair before, so last month I booked a trip to Madrid.

But the anxieties from trying to avoid its several surcharges — coupled with mediocre service and booking flaws — left me unconvinced. It actually ended up being more expensive than other budget airlines in the end, primarily because its bag size is miniscule.

Coupled with my train journey to the airport, what started as a £35 ticket ended up costing £90.

If you are planning to fly with Ryanair, I hope this article will help you plan to avoid its pitfalls. Or even if you're not going to travel with them, this piece should give insight into how the carrier keeps its advertised prices so low yet still turns a healthy profit.

The Irish ultra-low-cost carrier Ryanair is Europe's biggest airline by market cap, and has more than 3,600 flights a day.

It's known for its supercheap ticket prices, as low as $18, and outspoken CEO, Michael O'Leary.

The CEO of budget airline Ryanair says his potential $109 million bonus is great value for shareholders compared to the money star athletes make

The booking process was relatively smooth although you have to click past several add-ons like rental cars, travel insurance, airport parking, and transport. A couple of times these appeared as pop-ups which was a bit annoying.

Unlike most airlines, you won't find Ryanair on websites like Kayak or Booking.com. O'Leary has been waging a fiery campaign against online travel agents, calling them "pirates" and accusing them of overcharging customers with hidden fees.

More @eDreams Prime Scams Exposed! 🚫🏴‍☠️

As pirate OTA @eDreams continues to promote their ‘eDreams Prime Membership’, Michael takes a look at even more examples of @eDreams overcharging.

Read more 👉 https://t.co/xhtb4i9JFW#scam #OTApirate@whichUK @antitrust_it @CNMC_ES pic.twitter.com/jkIEDeKGKM

— Ryanair (@Ryanair) May 2, 2024

The night before my flight, I measured my backpack and found it was 10cm (4") wider than Ryanair's limit. I paid an extra £24 ($30) for a larger carry-on when I checked in — otherwise I risked a £70 ($87) fine.

Ryanair's "small bag" option measures 40cm x 25cm x 20cm (15.7" x 9.8" x 7.9"). You'll have to upgrade if you don't want to risk a surcharge just for a carry-on the same size as pretty much any other airline in the world.

If you choose this at the same time as buying your ticket, it's only an extra £14 ($17), so I lost money by not measuring my bag sooner.

And yet, I could've brought my small backpack for free with Spirit, Frontier, Southwest, Allegiant, easyJet, and Wizz Air — to name just a few.

Coupled with choosing my own seat, this meant my £35 ticket was now £67 ($83), practically doubling the cost of the ticket.

Ryanair's checked luggage prices change depending on the route as well as the season. Two carry-on bags cost between £6 and £38 ($7.50 to $47.50), while one 20kg bag costs between £18.99 and £59.99 ($24 to $75).

One particularly silly fee is the option to have your flight details sent via SMS for £2.99 ($3.75)

Ryanair's main UK hub is at London Stansted Airport, which isn't really in London at all. As the crow flies, it's 31 miles away from the center.

To be fair, most "London" airports are outside the city. But Stansted is the second farthest from the middle, only behind Southend, which is much less popular.

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Stansted Airport saw 28 million passengers last year — 14 times as many as Southend Airport, which is about 5 miles farther out.

Since it saves the airline money, Ryanair is somewhat notorious for flying to airports far away from where you actually want to be. Among the most egregious examples are Paris-Beauvais Airport, 55 miles from the city center, and Germany's Frankfurt Hahn Airport, which is almost 80 miles from Frankfurt.

I woke up at 5 a.m. in order to make it to Stansted for my 8:40 a.m. flight to Madrid. Then I took the Tube to Tottenham to catch the Stansted Express, which cost £23.50 ($30) with a young person's discount.

The train to Luton Airport is £16.90 ($21.10), while taking the Tube to Heathrow Airport is £5.60 ($7). So getting to Ryanair's hub airport again increases the cost.

From its starting point at central London's Liverpool Street Station, the train takes 48 minutes to reach the airport. I thought it was comfier than the usual commuter train. It also has level boarding and plenty of luggage space.

I finally arrived at Stansted and luckily I didn't need to drop any bags or check in. Remember to check in on the Ryanair app at least 2 hours before the departure time, or you'll be charged £55 ($68) at the airport.

This fee was £10 when it was first introduced but has since risen. It's a frequent cause for complaints, with the BBC reporting on an elderly couple being "horrified" by the extra costs.

You are allowed to check in at the airport for free if you add the "Plus" bundle that comes with a 20kg checked bag.

I found a bag sizer here, and was surprised when I managed to fit my backpack inside. But I'm still pleased I played it safe because I didn't want to end up in the scenario of getting a fine.

Since my bag wasn't fully packed, it makes sense that it could still fit in the parameters. As Business Insider paid for the flight, I was more motivated to pay extra to ensure there was no fine, which wouldn't have been easy to explain to my boss.

I had priority boarding because it came with booking the larger carry-on option. Nobody seemed to care how big the bags were. Several people seemed to have backpacks much larger than mine as well as their carry-on suitcase.

The priority option includes one larger carry-on and one personal item, so clearly there was leeway with the latter, even on a busy flight.

My roommate flew with Ryanair not long after me, and opted to risk it with a backpack slightly larger than the airline's limits. He was successful.

After being held in a small corridor for a while, we were released onto the tarmac and ambled over to the Boeing 737-800.

Following the jet on Flightradar24, boarding opened almost as soon as it landed — highlighting Ryanair's quick turnaround time which lets its planes fly as much as possible.

Boeing has specifically built stairs that fold out of Ryanair's planes so there's no need for airport operations to bring a jet bridge or stairs, again saving time.

A passenger on budget airline Ryanair was awarded over $30,000 in damages after she fell on 'narrow and steep' plane steps and broke her leg in 2 places

But the biggest surprise came when I boarded and found my seat, 16D, was in an exit row. I had paid an extra £8 to ensure I was in the aisle for the benefit of this review — but had I really gone as far as booking extra legroom?

I double-checked the seating plans. Ryanair's website lists row 16 as a normal one which costs less than an exit row seat. The map for the newer 737 Max 8 was displayed instead of the 737-800's slightly different one.

The fact that I'd paid £8 rather than £15 confused me. I presume this could mean somebody paying for extra legroom in row 18, but ending up in a regular seat instead.

A Ryanair spokesperson said: "As this flight was originally scheduled to operate on a Boeing 737-Max, it was the Boeing 737-Max seat map displayed in this passenger booking flow for this flight to Stansted to Madrid (15 Apr)."

"Due to operational reasons, the aircraft was changed to a Boeing 737-800 model, which has a slightly different seat layout."

A regular seat has 30" of legroom but also doesn't recline. I thought the leather looked pretty worn, although the jet is 13 years old. It was still relatively comfy so I don't have any complaints.

However, one thing which wasn't comfortable was my vision, given the garish yellow-and-navy color scheme along with adverts on the overhead bins.

Another unique design point of a Ryanair jet is the lack of a seat pocket, with the safety card printed on the headrest instead. Again, this is to save time between flights as there's less to clean. Although I prefer the pocket as it's handy for storing a book or a water bottle.

In the exit row, it took me a few minutes of fidgeting to find my tray table, which folded out of the armrest. It can also be folded in half, where there's a dint for a drink holder.

After we took off, I went to explore the bathroom. It was a pretty good size and I thought there was plenty of room for my 5'9' frame. Ryanair had its own no-smoking notice written in eight different languages.

Stories of Ryanair passengers having too much to drink or smoking in the bathroom aren't uncommon in the British press.

Video shows police hauling a Ryanair passenger off a flight after he was caught smoking in the plane's toilet

I was also pleasantly surprised to see the bathroom had company branded bottles of soap, which felt almost too luxurious for Ryanair.

Shortly after the trolley service began, the seatbelt sign came on for turbulence. The trolley was only a row away from me, but never returned even when the seatbelt sign went off again.

I didn't plan on spending even more money by buying food or drink — not to mention scratch cards or duty-free cigarettes — but I was surprised that I was never even given the chance.

I wasn't that impressed by the flight attendants overall.

There were no greetings when we boarded and the whole affair was quite unsmiling.

Of course, it's a strictly no-frills airline, and they work long shifts so I'm not disgruntled, but it's worth noting the cabin crew on similar airlines like easyJet and Wizz Air are definitely friendlier in my experience.

I enjoyed the flight and there weren't really any problems, although tannoy announcements hawking duty-free products were a bit annoying. With no in-flight entertainment or airline magazine, I was happy to read a novel.

Another quirky feature came as the cabin crew collected everyone's trash. Instead of using a large garbage bag, they used several small carrier bags including one from British newsagent WHSmith. This just seemed inefficient.

We touched down in Madrid on time, after two-and-a-half hours in the air. It was definitely a bumpy landing though. On the row in front, a passenger's headphones appeared to be jerked off their head. But hey, we got from A to B unscathed.

There wasn't too much to complain about because you know not to have high expectations with Ryanair. However, I was still surprised by the restrictive bag size, lackluster service, and increasing costs. Unless there's a good deal on, I'd rather choose another budget airline.

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On one side of the gravel road, a prairie's worth of grass stretches toward distant wind turbines. On the other side, scattered eucalyptus trees dot the otherwise empty fields. All this nothing lies an hour north of San Francisco, far from the nearest subdivisions and schools and strip malls. It's a specifically Californian kind of empty.

But in Jan Sramek's eyes, it's full. Where others see only blue sky and dusty farmland, Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader, sees row houses and apartments. Art galleries and sushi bars. Bike paths and parks. A vibrant, bustling, energy-efficient community with all the charm of a 19th-century village — and all the fiber-optic internet and self-driving cars of a 21st-century megalopolis. Sramek sees the city of the future. He sees California Forever.

"Downtown would be here, where the highways cross," he says, pointing to his right. Only 37, he's dark-haired and tall, standing next to his gray Tesla Model Y, arms outstretched, his vision materializing before him. "And we're putting a second downtown closer to Rio Vista," he adds, gesturing toward that town, invisible in the distance.

Sramek pauses. There's no futuristic city before him, no urban utopia. Only 50,000 acres of scrubby real estate. It might, he realizes, seem a little crazy.

"It's a lot less crazy than when I had the idea in 2017," he says. "You always have doubts."

Those doubts, as it happens, are widespread. The revelation that a mysterious investor had quietly become the largest landowner here in Solano County, a sparsely populated swath of small towns and fertile fields wedged between Napa and Sacramento, caused an uproar among the locals. Things only got more heated when Sramek, backed by a who's who of Silicon Valley billionaire investors, was outed as the driving force behind California Forever. Opponents of the project accused Sramek and the tech tycoons — including the LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen — of using "strong-arm mobster tactics" to bully locals out of their land. They've assailed Sramek at public meetings and are fighting a ballot resolution that would rezone the property to accommodate his vision.

Development, be it residential or commercial or industrial, is always a battle between past, present, and future. Some interests favor the status quo; others lobby for change. The problem is America is in urgent need of change. There's not enough housing to go around. Cities are trapped in a doom loop. Sramek believes that the only solution is to build a shiny new city on a hill — and that he's the guy who has the juice, and the land, to get it done. "We are tied to the mast," he says. "You'll move here, right?"

Such unwavering confidence helped forge Sramek's reputation as a financial wunderkind, someone who set out at an early age to be the European equivalent of Peter Thiel. But to those who know him from his days in London and Zurich, California Forever represents a strange and unlikely new chapter in Sramek's short and not entirely successful career. The question is not just does Sramek, working with an impressive team of urban planners, have the answer to what ails America's cities. The question is also: Does he really have a shot at building it, where all others have failed?

In England, back in the early 2000s, Jan Sramek was a name to conjure with.

He was born in the Czech Republic and grew up in a small town called Dřevohostice. His mother was a teacher, his father a mechanic. His grandparents worked in the local steel mill. In 2004, at the age of 17, Sramek bailed on all that. He enrolled in boarding school in the city of York, in England, and two years later took 10 A-level exams, the British university entrance tests. Sramek got A's on all 10. Nobody takes that many A-levels, let alone scores A's on every one of them.

A-level exams are a crucial part of Britain's socioeconomic infrastructure — ace them, and they're like the chain that pulls a roller coaster uphill, a mechanism for upward mobility. When a working-class kid from Eastern Europe did it, the feat earned a mention in the national press. For years Sramek was a role model for other English kids with aspirations. His name would pop up on forums where students discussed strategies for getting into their dream universities. Only have three weeks to ace an exam? "Jan Sramek says it can be done. You have to focus and be disciplined." If Jan could do it, maybe you could, too.

The A-levels got Sramek into the University of Cambridge — which he left after just a year, for the London School of Economics and "the City," the square mile of London that's Europe's answer to Wall Street. "Party boy Jan is youngest Rising Star in Square Mile," one tabloid reported. While in school, he kept busy launching his own business ventures. There was AlphaParties, which he touted as the go-to organizer for parties at some of London's glitziest establishments, though Sramek claimed that he himself never drank or smoked. There was a careers website called Nicube. But his main focus was the internship he landed in London with Goldman Sachs.

In a 2008 blog interview for a series titled "Tycoons of Tomorrow," Sramek said he slept only five hours a night. His role model, he said, was Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and early investor in Facebook. Asked what motivated him, Sramek responded, "racing against myself." His advice for other budding entrepreneurs: "See everything in terms of risk-reward, almost like a trade. Determine your entry, exit and stop loss. Know when to get out." He was 21.

All the Goldman interns hoped to convert the entry-level position into a full-time gig. Sramek actually pulled it off. In 2009, he became a trader on the firm's emerging-markets desk. In his spare time, he cowrote "Racing Towards Excellence," a bro-ish self-help book. The next year CheatSheet reported that Sramek was being mentored by "several of London's most powerful hedge fund managers who are clearly grooming him for the very top." New York magazine ascribed to Sramek a "cocksure arrogance." This very publication called him a "prodigy."

Maybe it was a little early for all that. "It was a bit of cart before the horse," says a friend of Sramek's from Cambridge who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There was a lot of attention around this guy, but he hadn't really delivered much in the real world." Jonas Rave, a colleague at Goldman Sachs, says Sramek was charismatic and confident. "It's the curse of the gifted child who's told from an early age that they're amazing," Rave says. "There's a lot of early success that makes you believe you can do anything."

Sramek left Goldman after a bit less than two years — a tenure so short that internet trolls and a few fellow bankers cocked their eyebrows at what might have gone wrong for the wunderkind. His managers, though, back up Sramek's account that the decision to leave was his. "He was a very gifted, high-potential employee, but he had very ambitious goals," says Guy Saidenberg, a former Goldman partner who oversaw Sramek's division. "I think he was a bit frustrated at the speed he was being promoted and given responsibilities."

Sramek moved to Zurich, where he followed in the footsteps of many former traders: He tried to launch a hedge fund. At first he planned to use a technology-guided "Moneyball" mentality to improve traders' batting averages. But after testing the software with actual users, Sramek and his cofounder pivoted. Now it was an education startup. They changed the name from Erudify (as in, perhaps, "to make more erudite") to just Better.

Better did not live up to its name. Sramek's next venture, a kind of supercharged version of Evernote called Memo, got him noticed by Silicon Valley. The investor Marc Andreessen described Memo as "when ideas have sex." But it failed to procreate, and Sramek found himself out of ideas. So at 30, after five years of working on failed startups, he did what Europeans often do when they can't find a way to succeed on the continent. He set out to reinvent himself in California.

Sramek had spent years reading about the Bay Area's success as a hub of jobs and innovation. But when he finally moved there in 2015, he found longtime residents protesting Google buses. San Francisco was attracting the smartest people in the world, paying them egregious amounts of money, and building precisely no places for them to live. So they were fighting over the existing housing stock.

"As an outsider, it was easy to see how we messed up the housing market here in a really profound way," Sramek says. "Instead of everyone getting excited about good-paying jobs, it was: Yeah, good-paying jobs, but we're going to be displaced."

The most pleasant parts of Bay Area cities, the kinds of places young people and young families might want to go, were prohibitively expensive. "My girlfriend and I were making good money, and we struggled to live in Hayes Valley," Sramek says, name-checking what's arguably the cutest neighborhood in America's cutest city. "It was a tournament with a fixed number of slots."

So Sramek started reading — in two years, he claims, he devoured 500 books about urban development. (You can do the math and decide for yourself whether that sounds plausible.) The standout, he says, was "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." Sramek, like generations of readers before him, was taken by Jane Jacobs' emphasis on the value of vibrant, diverse streetfronts and the need to mix residences with retail. He traveled the world, studying the most popular neighborhoods in the most vibrant cities, from Atlanta and Phoenix to Copenhagen and Barcelona. "I'd just walk them for two days and see what worked," Sramek says.

Sramek exudes a specific kind of brainy charm. He's good-looking and speaks English with a slight Eastern European accent; he wears brown suede desert boots and sports a suitably weathered black Goruck GR1 backpack, an emblem of techy, tactical coolness. He's also a quick study. Embracing the ideals of the modern city, he decided that what is needed is cheaper housing (to reduce inequality), solar power and wind farms (to reduce carbon emissions), and more densely populated, walkable neighborhoods (to support shops and restaurants, create jobs, and reduce commute times). Yet it's hard to build places like that nowadays, thanks to a host of zoning and land-use rules designed to protect the environment and promote public input.

Sramek's new business idea was pretty far removed from his youthful grindcore mindset. Forget software startups; in the real world he'd do real estate. Sramek thought he'd build in the interstitial and vacant spaces in cities. Planners call that infill, and it's a fashionable idea in urbanism — supplying the "missing middle" between single-family homes and bulky apartment buildings. There was only one problem. Bay Area cities have created a process for permitting new buildings so byzantine, slow, and expensive that if the great New York builder Robert Moses were alive and trying to work in San Francisco, he'd be more Power Broken than Power Broker. Sramek's idea got nowhere. So to take his mind off his troubles, he went fishing — literally.

An avid angler, Sramek had been spending time on the waters of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the northwestern corner of San Francisco Bay. To get there, he and his girlfriend would drive through Solano County, dotted with a mix of old farms, strip malls, half-empty downtowns, and industry in various states of disarray. On one fishing trip, Sramek noticed an empty diamond-shaped space between Travis Air Force Base and the town of Rio Vista. To make his point, he calls up a satellite view of the land on his Tesla's screen — which is a bit disconcerting, given that he's driving.

"You can see that it's the only yellow patch on the map," he says. On the satview, everything around the empty diamond is the beige-gray of city or the lush, irrigated green of maintained land. It seems like the middle of nowhere — until Sramek zooms out. "It's in the middle of everywhere," he says triumphantly.

The yellow diamond is between San Francisco and Sacramento. Between Silicon Valley and the ski-and-sun resorts of Lake Tahoe. It's the geographic center of the Bay Area megaregion. And it's almost as big as Toledo, Ohio.

That was the key that unlocked the problem Sramek had been struggling with. The way to solve the housing crisis that's killing Silicon Valley, he decided, wasn't with small-bore infill. "It was never going to be enough," he says. "But what if you could build walkable neighborhoods on a greenfield site?" Why fix an old city like San Francisco, in other words, when you could build a brand-new one an hour north in Solano County?

As he leans against the Model Y, looking out at the wide, flat space his company owns, Sramek's eyes unfocus a little. "This is not a good place for a subdivision," he says. "It's not connected to an existing town. It doesn't have jobs. It doesn't have entertainment or retail." It becomes something only if you bring in thousands of people, homes, jobs, shops, schools, and houses of worship. "You have to want to build it at that scale."

Sramek named his new company after Flannery Road, a gravel road running across the site, and convened a top-notch team of urban planners to assist him. "Jan has a pretty extraordinary vision for seeing this opportunity and putting it together," says BH Bronson Johnson, the project's sustainability engineer, who has worked on big urban projects like Treasure Island in San Francisco and Google's since-canceled Sidewalk neighborhood in Toronto.

Sramek was certainly thinking big. The idea was to provide homes for Bay Area techies and jobs for Solano County. But he couldn't convince anyone to invest in the project. So he took out a loan and bought the first bits of the yellow part of the map himself. He won't say how much the loan was for. "It was a lot of money," he says. "If this didn't work, I would've been in deep trouble."

That loan also paid for feasibility studies on the site. The engineering analysis concluded that it was the ideal place to build a new city: too lousy to farm, no tectonic activity, high enough to withstand even the direst estimates of sea-level rise. Armed with the detailed studies, Sramek made another run at wealthy investors. "I think I wore people down," he says. "They would say, 'This is a good idea, and here are 150 reasons it won't work.' And I would take them one by one. At some point, people run out of questions. And then they invested."

Sramek impressed the titans of Silicon Valley, just as he had charmed his way into the upper echelons of high finance in his college days. "It's really about investing in the people behind those big ideas," says David George, the partner at Andreessen Horowitz handling the firm's investment in California Forever. "Jan is a man on a mission, and a student of history, geography, and what makes cities special."

With the help of some of the biggest names in Big Tech, Sramek was able to acquire the land he needed for California Forever. Now all he needed was permission to build something on it. But that, he soon discovered, might take California forever.

In 2022, Marilyn Farley started hearing rumors. Farmers in Solano County were getting pressured to sell their land.

A retired city councilwoman, Farley was no stranger to fighting out-of-town developers. Way back in 1984, a local group named the Solano County Orderly Growth Committee formed to block a San Francisco developer who wanted to build a new city, from scratch, on mostly empty land near Travis Air Force Base. To keep others from trying the same thing, the committee — which Farley would join a few years later — passed a ballot measure to prevent virtually any development outside of Solano's seven existing cities. That rule, which remains on the books, is the biggest obstacle to Sramek's plans for California Forever.

Alarmed by the rumors of a new development, Farley set out to investigate. She found the agenda for a closed meeting of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District that suggested the agency was negotiating a land sale to a mysterious entity called Flannery LLC. But an attorney who had worked on the deal wouldn't tell Farley anything — they had signed a nondisclosure agreement. "It was all very perplexing," she says.

The land purchases roiled the county. Given the site's adjacency to an Air Force base, Solano County's congressman took his worries to the national press. Was this, perhaps, an effort by China to gain a foothold?

The frenzy forced Sramek's company, Flannery Associates, to finally reveal itself. Over the past half-decade it had quietly spent $900 million to become the largest landowner in the county, stitching together 140 properties. When a handful of landowners refused to sell, Flannery took them to court, accusing them of colluding to force the price higher. In response, the landowners claimed that Sramek had pitted family members against each other as a tactic to strong-arm farmers into selling their land.

If Sramek had been hoping to win over the locals, he was off to a bad start. He had effectively staged a secret land grab with stealth funding provided by some of the world's wealthiest tech barons. "We understand why that looks, on the surface, odd," he now concedes. But he points to another California visionary who secretly bought up land before unveiling his dream of Tomorrowland. "When Disney was building Disney World, that's what he did," Sramek says. "And you all love Disney World."

Forced into the open, Sramek shifted his strategy to one of transparency. He released a preliminary plan, began personally answering emails from concerned citizens, and met with Farley. She describes him as cordial, though she was immune to his charisma. "I feel like he has his mind made up," Farley says. "He knows what he wants to do. He has money, and he's used to getting his way."

Things got even uglier last November, when Sramek attended a public meeting about the project at the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum. The audience tore him to shreds. Why did Sramek buy all that land in secret, they demanded. Why should they trust him? One person who attended said Sramek sounded like Lyle Lanley, the con artist who sells the town of Springfield a monorail in a classic "Simpsons" episode.

To others, Sramek came across as unapologetic and arrogant, treating Solano as an engineering challenge instead of a real place. "A lot of these founders and investors speak very logically," says Sam Houston, a Vallejo resident who was also there. "It all makes sense to them. But this is more than just logic. This is where people live."

The more experienced members of Sramek's team weren't surprised by the backlash. "Having been to hundreds of community planning meetings in my career, what I have seen in Solano County is absolutely common," says Gabriel Metcalf, the head of urban planning for California Forever. "You've got to go and take your lumps. You've got to be willing to make the argument."

Sramek realizes he screwed up. "I didn't want this to be about me," he says. "I didn't do a good job of telling the story." And if he can't undo the damage, there may never be a California Forever. To get around the anti-development law Farley's committee helped pass in the 1980s, Sramek is pushing a ballot measure that would rezone his property. He has tried to appease locals by agreeing to invest in Solano's battered downtowns, and he has moved his wife and two young children to the area. He's also begun playing up his working-class roots. Whether Sramek has the Midas touch may, ironically, come down to whether he can master the common touch.

But those moves have failed to allay the concerns of many local leaders. Rep. John Garamendi, the congressman who was worried about a Chinese government invasion, still isn't on board. He says the newest version of Sramek's plan doesn't account for the water and roads and schools that California Forever's 50,000 residents will need. Like many locals, Garamendi continues to distrust the larger motivations of Sramek and his Silicon Valley investors. "What he's doing is a scam," Garamendi says. "He's not going to build a city. He's taking 16,000 acres, maybe 20,000 acres, and getting it rezoned. Then he's going to sell that land to somebody that is a developer."

If California Forever has an existential problem, it's not that it's too ambitious, or that its investors are rich hypocrites who would never trade their 10 acres in Atherton for a row house in Foreverville. It's that the project, despite its lofty claims, isn't really a city. It's a glorified subdivision that's designed to look and function like a city.

Drawing from Jane Jacobs, Sramek and his team of urban planners have created an idealized version of modern urban living. There are townhouses and affordable condos in place of single-family homes, and cozy little coffee shops on the cobblestone streets, and bike paths to everywhere. There's even a "warehouse district," a neighborhood full of the kind of buildings that, in an organic city, would have been repurposed from their industrial-era uses into artists lofts and cafés and boutiques. Everything in California Forever is imagineered, a simulacrum of a city. And because it doesn't have a job base to speak of, the people who live there will have to drive to and from work each day, just like all the other suburban commuters. Sure, they'll have bike paths at home. But outside of Foreverville, they'll still have to rely on highways to get to the real cities.

California Forever may be a subdivision, but it's precisely the kind of subdivision America needs right now.

But here's the thing: California Forever may be a subdivision, but it's precisely the kind of subdivision America needs right now. Rather than slapping up a bunch of energy-sucking McMansions or soulless lots dotted with cookie-cutter houses, Sramek is trying to create something that's both vibrant and sustainable. He may not be able to create jobs in the middle of nowhere — but he can create affordable housing and car-free streets and neighborhoods that are friendly to commerce and community and kids. Dismiss him, if you will, as another plundering, technocratic developer intent on making millions for himself and his technocratic investors. But at least his blueprint for plundering would help solve the housing crisis and reduce inequality and protect the planet.

The folks who live in nearby towns like Fairfield and Vallejo, Sramek points out, aren't against development in principle. After all, subdivisions are already springing up on the edges of what is now Sramek's property. One of those projects, One Lake, is a seemingly typical collection of houses a mile or so from Travis Air Force Base. The first hint that it's different is the blocky apartment building on the edge of town — affordable housing that was part of the deal to get One Lake built. The larger difference is obvious as soon as Sramek drives his Tesla past the "Welcome to One Lake" sign. There's a lake — an artificial one. And on its shore is a gorgeous café, all glass and exposed wood beams, called Journey Coffee. It's a coffeehouse, maybe bigger and airier than one you'd find in Austin or Cambridge, but with a similar menu; the seasonal special is a "minty mocha latte."

It's a Tuesday morning, and Journey Coffee is full. There's a half-hour wait just to get a bacon-and-egg sandwich. Young folks are clicking away on laptops, moms are meeting on the terrace, their labradoodles greeting other coffee drinkers as C-17s cruise the sky over Travis. The patrons are, visibly, from a bunch of different backgrounds. "My wife is Indian," Sramek says. "I've never been to a place that has more genuine integration than Solano."

The point, Sramek says, is that lots of locals in Solano would seek out what he's trying to build: a dense, climate-friendly, aspirationally class-blind town full of shops and schools and children. A charming place that lots of different people can afford. But that's the tragedy of America today. Places like California Forever aren't being opposed by the people who are desperate for a place to live. They're being opposed by the people who already have a place to live and don't want anyone else to live nearby.

"The people who have been opposed to it —" Sramek pauses, trying to choose his words carefully. "When you look at them," he says, "they all look the same."

So who's that? Your basic white boomer NIMBY?

"Yeah, I mean, you said it," Sramek says. "I'll just say it's not a particularly diverse coalition in any measure. It's generally a 70-year-old Sierra Club type. The only thing they care about is the open space behind their house."

It's a harsh critique — the idea that the same privilege that sent white people scurrying to the suburbs a half century ago is now driving the opposition to affordable housing. And it's a strange argument to hear coming from a former Goldman trader and a darling of Silicon Valley. If Sramek is a technocrat trying to impose his will on the good progressive people of Solano, he may well be more faithful to their ideals than they are. Yes, he's not from around here — just like he wasn't from London, or Zurich. But if Europe didn't work out for him, well, maybe he can bring a bit of Europe to California. And given the doom loop facing American cities today, that might not be the worst thing.

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• Megayachts have become a status symbol for the richest of the rich.
• In recent years, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have splurged on enormous boats.
• These are the biggest yachts owned by tech billionaires.

The average Joe celebrating a personal renaissance after, say, the end of a long-term relationship or when approaching a fresh decade might commemorate it with an ankle tattoo or a sports car. But if you're a billionaire, you may instead spend hundreds of millions on a yacht.

A few years after he and his wife divorced, Jeff Bezos shelled out on a megayacht. Last year, Bezos debuted the 127-meter vessel "Koru," a Māori symbol that signifies a fresh start — perhaps referring to that with his fiancée Lauren Sanchez.

Earlier this year, just before his 40th birthday, Mark Zuckerberg became the rumored owner of a yacht originally built for a Russian oligarch.

Superyachts have increasingly become ultrawealthy status symbols, providing highly secluded leisure and networking sites. They are — even more so than real estate — the single most expensive asset you can own.

"It's a bit of a celebration of your success in life, of wealth," Giovanna Vitelli, the vice president of the Azimut Benetti Group, the world's biggest producer of superyachts, told Business Insider.

While many tech billionaires have bought yachts, the richest of the rich, like Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, have gone bigger. Their boats are virtual palaces at sea, decked with amenities like gyms, spas, pools, nightclubs, and movie theaters.

A look at these megayachts — broadly defined as over 70 meters long, mostly custom-built, and often costing nine figures — offers a glimpse into how the .00001% lives. It's something few others will ever get to experience. Even chartering a yacht of this size for a week typically costs upwards of $1 million.

One major thing that hundreds of millions of dollars can buy is privacy. There are likely yachts that have not been publicly recorded or registered — for example, Evan Spiegel is rumored to own the 94-meter megayacht Bliss. In an industry ruled by discretion, deciphering who owns what is typically an exercise in stringing together many clues.

Here are the largest yachts owned by tech billionaires, listed in order of length.

Jeff Bezos: Koru and Abeona

Amazon founder Bezos' $500 million megayacht, the 127-meter Koru, made a splash last year as it crisscrossed the Mediterranean in its first summer at sea, with its 75-meter support vessel Abeona in tow.

The sailing yacht, which is hard to miss thanks to its massive size and unique design, was host to Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sanchez's famous friends. The couple held an engagement party on board, which reportedly drew guests including Bill Gates, Ari Emanuel, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Just a week later, they were seen on the streets of Dubrovnik, Croatia, with Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry, and Usher.

Even before its completion, Koru made headlines. It drew the ire of some Dutch people, who vowed to hurl eggs after it was announced a historic bridge in Rotterdam might be taken apart to allow the Oceanco boat through. Luckily, the shipyard made alternative plans, and an egg crisis was averted.

Among yacht world insiders, Koru is widely praised for its craftsmanship.

"I heard back in 2018 or something that somebody had ordered a classic sailing yacht," one superyacht expert told BI. "You order 125 meters, that's not really going to be classic. But it is. I think it's pretty cool."

Mark Zuckerberg: Launchpad

Earlier this year, the yacht world was rife with rumors that Zuckerberg purchased Launchpad, a 118-meter superyacht originally designed for a sanctioned Russian businessman.

The ship made her maiden voyage in March, going from Gibraltar to St. Maarten and mooring in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Little is known about her interior, but photos show a large swimming pool and helipad. Her price, too, has been kept under wraps but is said to be nine figures.

Eric Schmidt: Whisper

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt made waves last year when he agreed to buy the Alfa Nero, the yacht of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, for $67 million in an auction conducted by Antigua and Barbuda. But he backed out of the deal following legal issues over its true owner. He quietly purchased Kismet instead. The 95-meter-long Lürssen-built boat was formerly owned by the Jacksonville Jaguar's billionaire owner Shahid Khan. Schmidt renamed her Whisper.

The ship, which can fit 12 guests and a crew of 28, features a master deck with a private jacuzzi, full-service spa, lap pool, movie theater, and outdoor fireplace.

While her final sale price was not public, she was listed for 149 million euros (about $161 million at current exchange rates), and at a charity auction in January, one week aboard the ship went for $2.4 million, according to industry outlet Yacht Charter Fleet.

Barry Diller: Eos

Barry Diller, the chairman of digital media company IAC, co-owns the megayacht Eos with his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, who is immortalized by a figurehead sculpture by Anh Duong.

One of the largest private sailing yachts in the world, the three-masted Lürssen schooner measures 93 meters long. She took three years to be built before being delivered to Diller in 2009, and since then, little has come to light about her interior and features.

The power couple has hosted many celebrities on the Eos, which spends its summers crisscrossing the Mediterranean and New Year's Eve in St. Barts. Over the years, guests have included Oprah Winfrey, Emma Thompson, Anderson Cooper, and Bezos, leading some to believe she provided inspiration for his Koru.

Jim Clark: Athena

Netscape founder Jim Clark purchased the 90-meter sailing yacht Athena in 2004.

"I could easily have built a 50- or 60-meter motor yacht that would have had the same space as Athena, but I was never really interested in building a motor yacht," he told Boat International in 2016. "To my eye, she's one of the most gorgeous large sailing yachts, maybe the most gorgeous large sailing yacht in the world."

Athena has room for 10 guests and 21 crewmembers, and the only change Clark says he'd make in her design is adding more space for his kids.

"If I was forced to change something, I would convert the office on the lower deck into a children's room," he said.

The former Stanford professor tried to sell it at various points — listing it for $95 million in 2012, $69 million in 2016, and $59 million in 2017 — but it has yet to change hands.

Larry Ellison: Musashi

Oracle founder Larry Ellison has owned several superyachts over the years, including the Katana, the Ronin, and the Rising Sun — which he sold to fellow billionaire David Geffen.

He purchased his current boat, Musashi, in 2011 for a reported $160 million from custom-yacht giant Feadship.

Named after a famous samurai warrior, the 88-meter-long yacht has both Japanese and Art Deco-inspired design elements. She also boasts amenities including an elevator, swimming pool, beauty salon, gym, and basketball court.

Ellison is known for his extravagant spending — private islands, jets, a tennis tournament — and yachting is among his favorite and most expensive hobbies. He took up racing them in the 1990s and financed the America's Cup-winning BMW Oracle Racing team.

Laurene Powell Jobs: Venus

Steve Jobs' wife, investor Laurene Powell Jobs, inherited a nearly finished 78-meter yacht named Venus when the Apple cofounder died in 2011.

After spending years vacationing on Ellison's yachts, Jobs wanted one for himself. He designed Venus with French starchitect and decorator Philippe Starck, and she was worth $130 million at completion.

"Venus comes from the philosophy of minimum," Starck said of her design. "The elegance of the minimum, approaching dematerialization."

Jobs and Starck began working together in 2007, the designer told Vanity Fair, and held monthly meetings over four years. Venus was delivered in 2012 to Jobs' specification: six identical cabins, a design to ensure spaces of absolute silence, and the most up-to-date technology.

"There will never again be a boat of that quality again. Because never again will two madmen come together to accomplish such a task," Starck told the magazine. "It was not a yacht that Steve and I were constructing, we were embarked on a philosophical action, implemented according to a quasi-religious process. We formed a single brain with four lobes."

Charles Simonyi: Norn

Early Microsoft employee Charles Simonyi has purchased two megayachts from the German shipyard Lürssen: the 90-meter Norn and 71-meter Skat.

Delivered in 2023, Norn is full of luxe features, including an outdoor cinema and a pool floor that lifts to become a light-up dancefloor. It shares a militaristic style with Skat, which Simonyi sold in 2021.

Skats's name is derived from the Danish word for treasure, and it had a listing price of 56.5 million euros and was launched in 2002.

"The yacht is to be home away from my home in Seattle, and its style should match the style of the house, adapted for the practicalities of the sea," Simonyi once said.

Sergey Brin: Dragonfly

Google cofounder Sergey Brin has built a flotilla of yachts, boats, and toys known as the "Fly Fleet."

Named after a once-secret Google product, the largest of Brin's armada is the sleek Dragonfly, which boasts a movie theater and a helipad. The 73-meter-long vessel was built by the Australian shipyard Silver Yachts and can fit up to 18 guests and 16 crew members, according to SuperYacht Times.

Also in his fleet is the superyacht Butterfly, a mere 38 meters long. Often moored in the Bay Area, her crewmembers spend their downtime kitesurfing and giving swimming lessons to local kids.

The rest of his marine lineup includes a smaller boat called Firefly, as well as Jet Skis, foilboards, dinghies, and kiteboards. It takes a team of 50 full-time employees to manage, steer, and maintain the entire operation.

Sindhu Sundar contributed to an earlier version of this story.

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• Port Ellen Distillery has been a 'ghost' distillery for 40 years, inactive but with available stock.
• It's become a cult favorite with whisky fans, and a two-bottle set can cost up to £45,000 ($56,000).
• We visited the Port Ellen on it's reopening day, take a look inside.

The Isle of Islay — an island off the coast of Scotland — has a population of around 3,000 people.

But that doesn't stop it from being a key piece of the billion-dollar scotch whisky industry.

There are nine distilleries on Islay, some owned by conglomerates like LVMH and Diageo, and two more are set to open. Scotch whisky is easy to find on the island; there are even cases lining the airport waiting room.

Multiple people from Islay, from our taxi driver to former distillery workers, still spoke about a cask of Scotch whisky from Ardbeg distillery that was bought by an unnamed collector for $20 million back in 2022.

We were recently there to visit the reopening of Port Ellen. This distillery has only operated for 17 of the last 94 years but has become a cult favorite with whisky aficionados.

The distillery shut down in 1983 and has been sitting dormant, housing casks of aging whisky ever since. Renewed interest in the liquor and diminishing stocks led parent company Diageo to pour £185 million ($230 million) into reopening Port Ellen and another distillery, Brora, and improving its Scotch whiskey experiences.

We visited Port Ellen on the day it reopened in March to find out why people pay thousands of dollars for its single-malt Scotch whisky.

Port Ellen Distillery closed in 1983 due to a slump in the whisky market, which left them with more supply than they knew what to do with.

The distillery was established in 1825 and operated until 1983. Since then, it's been a "ghost" distillery, which refers to a distillery that has closed but still has stock available.

But shutting down gave the whisky time to mature into its signature smoky taste, and it became increasingly sought after by whisky fans.

The limited stock means that it's an expensive product; prices can stretch up to £45,000 ($56,000) for a set of two bottles.

Now it's reopening to the new fans it's gradually gained over the last 40 years.

The distillery is clearly made to appeal to a premium customer. Diageo commissioned artist Harry Morgan to design plinths to showcase its whisky in the warehouse. Visitors can even take a mini version of these plinths home with them as a memento for their coffee table if they have £3,900 ($4,800) to spare.

On one of the plinths was a Port Ellen whisky from 1980, one of only a limited number bottled to commemorate Queen Elizabeth II's visit to the distillery.

Diageo told Business Insider that it bought this whisky back on the secondary market. The company didn't comment on how much it paid to get the bottle back, but its value on the secondary market was lower than usual as it has a sip taken out of it — which the company says could have been from Queen Elizabeth II herself.

The bottle pictured is actually a replica, the real one is too valuable to be displayed, the company said.

Visitors to the distillery will be able to choose from two tours. The least expensive tour comes in at £200 ($250) distillery and the price of the more premium "Atlas of Smoke" experience is available on request

It's a pricer trip than other distilleries on the island, like Diageo's Lagavulin, which charges just £22 ($27) for their classic tours, with their most expensive tour priced at £105 ($130).

The premium tour is made to appeal to a new type of consumer — those who aren't just interested in buying the whisky but want a whole experience alongside it.

For these customers, "It's not enough to just say this is 45-year-old Port Ellen cask. They want to say they journeyed to Scotland, tested all these different whiskies, and to tell you about the experiences they had," said Ewan Andrew, Diageo President of Global Supply Chain & Procurement.

They cracked open one of their casks from 1979 to commemorate the reopening.

Visitors on the Atlas of Smoke tour will also get a chance to draw directly from one of these casks.

Over in the distillery, these copper stills are used to produce the classic Port Ellen-style whisky

These "Phoenix" Stills are precise replicas of the original Port Ellen stills and are used to recreate the classic taste.

The experimental stills are on the other side. That's where private clients can choose to tailor the whisky to their own tastes.

The new experimental stills will allow distillers to change the depth and smokiness of the liquid depending on private clients' tastes.

Since the whisky will take years to mature, there's little concern that the reopening will bring down prices.

The whisky is known by whisky fans, but the company wants to increase awareness to new people.

But they're not worried about the price dipping with the new supply. The minimum age for Scotch whisky is three years old, Andrew told BI, and it takes even longer for the more mature flavors.

'"It's gonna be a long time before you see anything in a bottle from this distillery," said Ewan Gunn, Diageo Global Brand Ambassador for Scotch.

In time with the reopening, the company released 274 sets of Port Ellen Gemini — the two bottles come in at £45,000 ($56,000).

"It's never something we've actively put money behind marketing, it's really just been word of mouth. It's the community that's elevated it to the position of being so highly regarded," said Gunn.

We were given a tour of a secret tasting room in the pagoda, where private clients will be able to try different whisky blends and personalize them to their tastes.

Visitors can't take any photos of the tasting room, and the company won't release any photos either.

The reopening of the distillery brought together former employees and descendants of the original distillery owners.

Iain "Pinky" McArthur, a former employee at Port Ellen and Lagavulin, was a local whisky legend on Islay. He and his former colleagues all admitted that his tours were the most sought-after by visitors.

He eagerly recounted tales of the past when delivery drivers would show up at the distillery at 5 a.m. to pick up the whisky, and they'd both enjoy a glass on the job.

"We're not allowed to do stuff like that anymore — health and safety," he joked.

When he retired in December, his colleagues pitched in to get him a gift worthy of his 53 years of service: a bull for his farm.

"It's quite a tight community here so the skills and the knowledge have been passed down through the generations and refined over time," Gunn said.

The Isle of Islay naturally has the vital ingredients for single malt scotch whisky: barley, peat, and plenty of water. The peat on the island gives the whisky its signature smokiness.

The natural resources and community involvement have meant that whisky has been and remains, part of the fabric of Islay.

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• Kate Tomas uses her powers to consult for businesses and individuals.
• She didn't initially find the work rewarding, but she's found success and meaning in her career.
• Tomas is no longer taking new clients and now shares free advice on social media.

This is an as-told-to conversation with Kate Tomas, a philosopher, spiritual mentor, and practitioner of ritual magic. She has over two decades of experience consulting for businesses, governments, and high-profile individuals.

For as long as I can remember, I've had a different way of experiencing the world.

I had a vague cultural awareness of clairvoyance, but I didn't realize what I was experiencing until I was 16 or 17.

I'd mainly have prophetic dreams, but there came a point where I couldn't walk down the street without getting extra information about people. I'd know if they were struggling with their relationship or if their kidneys were inflamed. It was invasive, especially since I didn't have control over it. Over the years, I've learned to manage and establish boundaries around my intuition.

I thought psychics were underpaid 'cat ladies.'

The truth is that I didn't want to be a psychic. I frankly saw them as underpaid cat ladies who lived in the forests of Wales. I wanted to be a barrister. I was ambitious and I've always been pretty motivated by respect, money, and success.

Thanks to capitalism, I guess, I was forced to use my ability to make money. I started reading Tarot cards for people so I could pay for university. I was good at it and built up a base of clients. Eventually, I moved to London and started practicing.

But I hated it. It wasn't rewarding work. Everybody has the same issues, and certainly, under colonial patriarchal capitalism, the same shit is going to come up most of the time. People are held back from success because of structural oppression. It was frustrating to advise people since only a small percentage were in a position to take action. I could offer comfort, but sometimes, it felt a bit like I was rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic.

I realized, though, that this was a business — and I was good at it. So, I went on to do my Ph.D. at Oxford in Theology. I wanted to understand how Western philosophy defined intuition. I wanted to explore intuition as it pertained to the idea of "gifts from God."

Consulting for businesses was more rewarding than I expected.

The poverty of student life pushed me to make money doing intuitive work. Many clients approached me, and some started asking me to look at their businesses.

I thought, if I could look at life, why not look at business and try to get the same information? So I did it and it worked, and I made an awful lot of money for people.

My advice was so profitable that these clients started recommending me to their friends in other businesses and industries. I had entertainment agents coming to me, including people at big television networks, clients in fashion, and some in finance. I oversaw mergers and acquisitions. I worked with several hedge funds.

Though initially reluctant to consult for businesses, the move helped me find more meaning in my work. By and large, the businesses I worked with are not good forces in the world — they're capitalist extractive machines. What I could do, though, was pivot the mindsets of the individuals I advised to bring positive changes. Sometimes, that was as simple as adjusting the culture to benefit those who needed help.

I work with clients if we have synergy.

These days, I spend most of my time sharing my work for free on social media and working behind the scenes on projects that further liberation. I earn money by advising wealthy people like Hollywood celebrities, agents, producers, etc. I'm excited about art and creativity. I advise on scripts, plot lines, and the endings of television shows and movies.

I work only based on referrals. I usually set up an introductory call with the client. If I'm working with a corporation, I need to be in contact with someone on the board or in the C Suite so I have energetic access to the decision-making process.

I'm paid by results, so I need to know that the energy I'm putting in will be profitable for my client and myself. I only move forward if there's synergy.

From then onwards, I have a call or an in-person meeting once a month. All of my client relationships include absolute access to me in all ways.

My spiritual clients pay me a flat monthly fee ranging from a minimum of £4,000 to a maximum of £20,000. For businesses, I usually work on a minimum six-month contract. I charge a minimum retainer fee of £2,000 per month, but my real income comes through a success fee. The exact fee is pre-negotiated and industry-specific. A good idea might net me £100,000. A supremely good one? Maybe £500,000.

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• Walmart primarily focuses on delivering ultra-low prices, which sometimes means lower quality.
• However, the retailer plans to stock more premium items to attract wealthier shoppers.
• I visited Walmart to see which fancy brands and products it already carries.

There's a reason "Save money" comes before "Live better" in Walmart's well-worn motto.

The Bentonville-based retail giant's primary focus since day one has been to drive down costs and offer rock-bottom prices. Before 2007, its motto was "Always low prices."

The strategy has served it well, even if there are sometimes necessary compromises regarding product quality.

But in recent years, the company has taken steps to shake the characterization of cheapness in favor of value, part of a larger push to attract higher-income shoppers with the sort of products and brands you'd see at Target or Whole Foods.

And now, with the announcement this week of its upscale Bettergoods private label grocery brand, Walmart is leaning more into the second half of its slogan.

Before the new products hit shelves, I visited my local Supercenter to see what premium items the retailer already carries.

Organic produce

Walmart is the biggest grocery retailer in the US, and the category represents 60% of the company's sales. Not only do they carry a full selection of produce, a lot of it is certified organic.

Naked juices

Naked juices can be found at many different stores, but wherever you find them, they aren't cheap. The per-ounce price is almost twice that of regular Tropicana orange juice.

Huge take-and-bake pizzas

Some of Walmart's in-house brands are pretty eye-catching, like these extra large take-and-bake pizzas that have a pound of high-quality toppings.

Rana pastas

There have been stretches where my household will go through a pack or two of Rana a week. The freshness of the pasta enhances an otherwise basic dinner.

Lobster tails

Sam's Choice brand is another private label offering from Walmart, which ranks on par with Costco's popular Kirkland Signature brand.

Cornish hens

Any bird that's not a regular chicken or turkey counts as fancy in my book, since it likely requires some special preparation to get right.

Tazo, Kencko, and boba tea drinks

I haven't tried any of these drinks, but Tazo teas are usually a hit, and the others look appealing.

Newman's Own salad dressing

Opinions may vary on whether Newman's Own counts as "fancy," but the products have a long-standing and well-earned reputation for quality.

Rao's pasta sauces

Next to the Newman's Own pasta sauces are a broad selection of Rao's, which sell like mad at Costco. Rao's recipes are based on one of New York's most beloved restaurants. The sauce brand was acquired by Campbell's last year.

Boom Chicka Pop snacks

After rebranding from Angie's Kettle Corn, Boom Chicka Pop has exploded in popularity in the healthy snack category.

Spindrift, Waterloo, and Bubly seltzers

There was a time when La Croix was the only sparkling water brand with interesting flavors. Now, a variety of brands have entered the market.

A plethora of water enhancers

Water enhancers are another fast-growing product category, and Liquid IV is a popular one also sold at Costco and Target.

Organic kids' drinks

Health-conscious parents on-the-go can also find organic juice and milk in single-serving portions.

A wall of olive oils

I didn't take the time to inspect each offering on the wall of oil, but there was a surprising amount of variety where I would have expected to see maybe two or three choices.

Ben & Jerry's and Van Leeuwen ice creams

Yes, there are fancier ice creams than Ben & Jerry's, but they still rank as premium in my book. As for Van Leeuwen, the brand occasionally makes news for creating really odd flavors, like Ranch, that are sold exclusively at Walmart.

Impossible and Beyond plant-based meats

Meatless Mondays are within reach with plenty of plant-based protein options in the frozen section.

Kerrygold and other premium butters

Like olive oil, a store's butter selection is a chance to shine, and once again, I was surprised to see four upscale butter brands next to the more conventional offerings.

Nutpods and Chobani coffee creamers

Nutpods started as a home-based business before winning Amazon's small business of the year award. The plant-based coffee creamer is now in a wide range of grocery stores across the US.

Chobani and Noosa yogurts

There were several upscale yogurt options, including Chobani and Noosa.

Gerber kid's clothes

As a parent of toddlers, I'd say Walmart does quite well when it comes to children's clothing. This offering from Gerber is made from a special viscose fiber, and Garanimals clothes hold up remarkably well to playground use.

Honest infant supplies

Jessica Alba's Honest makes a point to keep unnecessary chemicals out of its health and beauty products.

A 70-inch 4K TV

Walmart sells a lot of TVs, especially from its in-house tech brand Onn. As flat panel screens become increasingly similar, a 70-inch smart TV for less than $400 stands out.

Rtic coolers

Rtic is right up there with Yeti in the ultra-rugged cooler department. In other words, this is about as cold and tough as it gets.

Quip toothbrushes

From launching as a direct-to-consumer startup almost a decade ago, Quip is now offering its clever toothbrushes at major retailers like Walmart and Target.

Olly vitamins

These fancy gummy vitamins always catch my eye at Target.

Bare Republic mineral sunscreen

Mineral sunscreen for $14 seems straight out of Whole Foods.

Coming soon: Bettergoods

Of course, the big grocery news this week is the Bettergoods brand, which takes a few cues from competitors like Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and Target. Walmart says it has over 300 items arriving this year, with most costing less than $5.

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• Davis Clarke, a risk management advisor at Citizens, has gained quite a following on social media.
• His motivational videos are all about bringing positivity to the everyday routines of office life.
• Clarke says his whole message is about sharing his enthusiasm and uplifting people doing unglamorous, hard work.

You don't have to look far on social media to find people who are sick and tired of their office jobs.

But one office worker has gained a following for his unabashedly upbeat and positive content. And his videos aren't anything crazy — they're all about his daily commute, quarterly meetings, spreadsheet certification, and the other mundanities of the 9-to-5 workday.

Davis Clarke, who works at Citizens Bank in Boston, has become something of a social media sensation with his Instagram videos, amassing 700,000 followers over the last few months. His content is overflowing with motivational content, to the point of corniness or even cringe-worthiness.

But Clarke says he's not focused on trying to build his audience.

"I'm not an influencer," he insisted to Business Insider, who met up with Clarke on one of his lunch breaks. If his message of unfailing, everyday positivity resonates with people, it's because they can probably relate to his unremarkable routine.

In one video, he's walking through downtown on a Monday morning, ready to start "hammering spreadsheets and chugging waters." In another, he's in the office on a Friday. "The heavy hitters of America are about to be shaking in their boots," he tells the camera, "seeing that the young people are actually motivated to work."

"Everyone now has to study, they have to work," he told BI. "And so I'm just going in and saying, 'Hey, it's gonna be a good day.'"

In just a few months, the 27-year-old risk management advisor has found himself getting recognized offline. While meeting with BI in Boston, Clarke was approached by several people walking by, including a college student, an Amazon tech worker, and a middle-aged lawyer, who all asked for selfies.

"It's just inspiring. That's it," Ryker Puls, the Amazon employee on vacation from Seattle, said of Clarke's content.

Invariably, Clarke will ask his fans about their day, where they work, and maybe even the name of their dog. After a few minutes of conversation, he'll often urge them to "stay locked in" or "get fired up."

Tom Ranucci, an IT worker and food blogger, met Clarke at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He described Clarke was "full of energy," someone excited to meet anyone and everyone and chat about anything and everything.

"He's the exact same person" in real life, Ranucci told BI.

The two stayed in touch after college thanks in part to their shared interest in running (Clarke's explosive finish at the Boston Marathon last month went viral). Ranucci never expected his friend's social media following to skyrocket the way it did earlier this year — though he wasn't surprised that the message found an audience.

"In my mind, it was only a matter of time," he said.

For his part, Clarke never expected to become a phenomenon. Besides a barely-used Facebook account, his digital footprint was almost nonexistent until a class project his freshman year of college. The assignment? Build a social media account and use it to show the world the values he cared about.

"When I first set out, I truly just wanted to get people confident and fired up to go after their goals. I try to stay true to that vision," he said.

He isn't under any illusions about the nature of his content. Clarke knows there are people out there doing "way more" interesting things than his daily routine.

"I think just showing normal life, and the good side of it, is what gets people going," he said. "And it's interesting because so many people out there are working hard, doing all these same things every day."

His positive outlook doesn't mean everybody loves his content. Some doubt that he, or anyone, can seemingly always be so genuinely enthusiastic. Other commenters just think it's repetitive or annoying.

But Clarke says he's not worried about the hate — and, if anything, he's glad that it's getting more people to engage with his content.

"It just gives me a chance to say, 'Hey, we're going to try to take someone who's negative and make them pause. Let's show them what we're doing, show them why we're doing what we're doing.' Just try to earn their respect."

He added that he thinks some of the comments are good-natured trash talk, rather than people being "genuinely mean."

"Some people say the comments are like a community of their own, so maybe that's good," he said. "People will be creative, they'll come up with funny things like they'll be like 'bad day to be a spreadsheet,' 'bad day to be a whatever.' I don't think I ever came up with that at all. "

Ranucci said he "certainly" thinks that Clarke's content gets people to approach their boring, everyday routine differently, "just because how infectious his energy is."

"It's contagious," he told BI. "It's like a laugh."

"People see that and, you know, it's hard to not to join right in, and take that same love and passion into what they're doing" in their own lives, he added.

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• Some Americans are choosing to retire abroad because of healthcare costs and divisive politics.
• Many of them are moving to Italy, where the cost of living is more affordable.
• They like Italy's dedication to a work-life balance, especially compared to American hustle culture.

Eric and Christina Schwendeman's relationship got serious the day he brought up retirement.

"I have a long-term plan," Eric, 53, recalled telling his now-wife nearly two decades ago. "I want to work as hard as possible and retire to Italy as young as I possibly can."

At the time, the couple lived in Naples, Florida, which is more than 5,000 miles and a 13-hour long-haul flight from Italy.

"He was like, 'That's my goal. If you're on board for that, then let's do this,'" Christina, 40, said.

The Schwendemans began planning for their life outside the United States about 17 years ago, but an increasing number of Americans these days are following their example.

The US State Department estimated that 9 million American citizens lived abroad in 2020, which is a jump from 5 million in 2010.

The US is no longer a desirable place to retire

There used to be a seemingly clear-cut path to retirement in the United States.

People worked until 65, then left the workforce with the help of Social Security and personal savings. That began shifting in the 1980s when Americans gravitated toward defined-contribution plans — like 401(k)s — instead of defined-benefit plans like pensions. This has shifted more responsibility onto employees to determine how much to invest and save.

"Put simply, the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution has been, for most people, a shift from financial certainty to financial uncertainty," BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote in a 2024 letter to investors.

Millions of baby boomers now struggle to cover their cost of living.

An AARP survey in April found that one in five Americans who are 50 or older have no retirement savings, and more than half of respondents were concerned they wouldn't have enough to support themselves if they retired.

So, as retirement in the United States gets bleak, some Americans are looking elsewhere. Specifically, they are looking to Italy, which ranks among the top 20 countries with the most generous retirement systems.

Americans are settling into quaint Italian towns

For the Schwendemans, the opportunity to leave the United States arrived in 2022.

Eric and Christina worked in the automotive industry, which was severely impacted by the pandemic. About 575,000 jobs in the industry were lost by the fall 2021.

"We could see that the automotive industry was going to take a turn around the same time that we were seeing it in the housing industry," Christina said. "We said, 'It's probably a good time for us to leave our jobs and sell our house.'"

They moved to Clavesana, a small town of less than 900 people in Italy's Piedmont region and purchased a home that sits on just under an acre of land. Eric and Christina did not share the exact cost, but said the home was about 150 euros — or $161 — per square foot.

Although moving to Italy was always a dream, the couple said other factors, including the cost of healthcare in America, also played a role.

Micki Dukinfield, 72, echoed that sentiment. Dukinfield and her husband left Minnesota for Vicenza, a city about an hour from Venice, in November 2023. Their home cost about 188,500 euros or about $200,000.

"I knew that as we got older, healthcare would always become an issue," Dukinfield told Business Insider.

According to Fidelity's 2023 Retiree Healthcare Cost Estimate, a single individual can spend an average of $157,000 on medical expenses and healthcare throughout retirement. For couples, that climbs to $315,000.

"In 2022, despite the fact that neither of us had anything terribly wrong with us, we spent over $6,000 on premiums and medical bills," Dukinfield said. "We're like, 'this is insanity.'"

In Vicenza, Dukinfield said she and her husband spend between $1,500 and $1,600 yearly on healthcare costs. The Schwendemans said they pay about $2,800 yearly while in Clavesana.

Dukinfield also said the US political climate played a role in her decision to move to Italy.

The United States is gearing up for presidential elections in November. It's expected to be another tight race between Donald Trump, who is facing ongoing legal troubles, and President Joe Biden, who is struggling to rally the kind of support he had in 2020.

Colin Esaw, 59, felt the repercussions of the political and cultural divisions while living in Florida, especially under Gov. Ron DeSantis, who ran against Trump in the Republican primaries.

Esaw was raised in Ireland before his career led him to Orlando in the fall of 1994. He's remained in the area for 30 years, holding American and British passports. He told BI that he began noticing a change in recent years.

"When I first came to America, I had no plans on living or being here any longer than I needed to be because of a preconceived idea of what American people were like," Esaw said. "When I got here, I couldn't believe how friendly and welcoming Americans were. It absolutely stunned me."

Now, Esaw said the political tension is too much. Adding to that the rising cost of living, he said he felt it was time for a change.

"I don't like to live in a society like that," he said.

So, Esaw is preparing to retire in Scalea, a coastal town in the Calabria region, within the next two years. He's purchased a condo for about 55,000 euros, or $59,000.

A growing online community is helping Americans move to Italy

Patrizia Di Gregorio has witnessed the uptick in people, including Americans, looking to retire in Italy firsthand. Gregorio, 52, is an Italian-American who founded the international social network Expats Living in Rome in 2001.

The network has become an essential tool for people across the globe eyeing a move to Italy. The organization offers resources for those looking to move, including financial guidance and immigration advice.

It also offers a community through Facebook groups like Expats Living in Rome and Expats Living in Italy, where people can ask questions and share updates on their journeys. The Expats Living in Italy group now has more than 107,000 members.

Gregorio told BI she first noticed increased interest from Americans around the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Before COVID, we had a lot of immigration, but after COVID, we can't even keep up," she said. She said that one Facebook group she created had more than 800 requests to join at one point.

Expats said Americans live to work but that in Italy, they work to live

Moving to Italy as an American isn't without challenges.

A series of hurdles must be cleared: securing a visa, finding a property, transporting goods across the Atlantic Ocean, applying for necessities like healthcare, and — of course — navigating a language barrier.

Both the Schwendemans and Dukinfield are working to become fluent in Italian — which can sometimes make everyday tasks more arduous — but said leaving the United States was the right choice. They cited a better quality of life, which is no longer bogged down by America's unforgiving and overarching hustle culture.

"It's the way they approach life," Eric said, referring to Italian culture.

In Clavesana, locals take "pausa," a two-hour break each afternoon, which contrasts with the average lunch break in the United States, which is 36 minutes.

"You stop working," Eric said. "You go have lunch with your family and your friends."

Dukinfield agreed, adding that the slower pace of life and living in a walkable city have been positive changes. Moving to Vicenza has also allowed her to live near her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild.

"You can walk to the downtown area," Dukinfield said. "We lived in a very nice house on a nice lot in suburbia [in the US], but the only place we could walk to was the Super America or the Speedway, which was three-quarters of a mile away."

The phenomenon Eric described is a popular phrase among US expats: In America, you live to work. In Italy, you work to live.

"I have to say it's pretty much a total dream," Christina said. "Every morning, we wake up and look outside and say, 'I cannot believe we live here.'"

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