Category: Business

• Narendra Modi continues to be prime minister, but how he won was a major blow to the leader.
• His ruling party expected to smash the polls but couldn't secure a majority without the help of allies.
• With his allies now kingmakers, Modi must now balance his governing with securing their loyalty.

Narendra Modi has been prime minister of India for 10 years.

On Tuesday, he extended his tenure by another potential five years when his ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, secured a majority in the lower house of parliament with its allies.

That's the key to everything being said about the world's biggest election — without his allies, Modi would have lost control of parliament and, by extension, India.

It's why the election results have been a shocking blow to Modi and the BJP despite them winning.

Anyone seeking a majority in India's parliament — the prerequisite for naming a prime minister — needed to win 272 out of 543 seats. And this time, the BJP won only 240, relying on smaller parties under a coalition called the National Democratic Alliance to carry it past the finish line.

For a BJP that previously enjoyed a majority on its own with 303 seats in 2019, that's a stark shift in its grip on power. Its alliance only managed to secure 293 seats, just 21 more than needed for a majority.

The result was especially humbling for Modi because the NDA was projected to slam-dunk the election with a whopping 400 seats. The incumbent seemed so confident that he declared victory three days before the result announcements, saying his voters turned out in "record numbers."

Now, though, his allies hold the enviable position of being the difference-maker in deciding who leads India. Should they all ditch Modi for his rivals in the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, they could oust him from leadership.

Two of the biggest players in that gaggle of kingmakers, the Telugu Desam Party and the Janata Dal (United), hold a combined 28 seats and are led by politicians known for switching loyalties, per Bloomberg.

Modi now must ensure his coalition holds so he can remain in office, and is set to enter talks with allied leaders to secure their support.

His weakened hold on India's parliament was big news to observers concerned about the rise of his ideology, Hindutva, which promotes building a Hindu nation and has been criticized as right-wing and anti-Muslim extremism.

So why did the stock market tumble?

Tuesday's result surprised a world expecting Modi to trounce his opponents and widen his lead in parliament.

India's stock market posted its worst day in four years after the announcement, dropping by as much as 8.5% on Tuesday before ending the day at 5.9%.

Why the loss of faith? Experts aren't expecting monumental change for India's economy, but a coalition government will likely be far less nimble with major policies.

"India's economic and security drivers will remain unchanged. However, a coalition government will often take big decisions more slowly and be less inclined to push states to meet national objectives in areas like the energy transition," wrote Richard Rossow, chair of US-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

And with uncertainty hanging over the BJP's hold on power, questions are growing about what India's policies might soon look like.

Experts like Jeff Lande, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center, think it's highly unlikely we'll see any reversal in the overall direction of India's economy.

Modi's heavy investment style and capital expenditure should still continue, Lande wrote.

"Policy and political decisions will likely be delayed," he added. "Industry, particularly multinational corporations, and partner governments may hold off on some decisions as they wait and see how the new government develops."

This year's shock result also casts doubt on whether Modi can decisively coalesce enough momentum to rocket the Indian economy forward and allow it to one day catch up with China's.

The country has lagged behind Beijing's rapid growth since the 1980s, and Modi wants to lay the groundwork for India to become a global manufacturing hub in the next few years.

But Kapil Sharma, acting senior director of the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center, said the BJP slipping is good for India's economy as a whole.

The votes show that the average Indian citizen isn't feeling the economic benefits that Modi's policies have brought to the wider nation, and the ruling party will have to govern with extra care to maintain its lead, Sharma wrote.

"The BJP and its coalition government are now operating in a 'now or never' moment," he wrote.

As for foreign policy, most experts say Modi's allies are unlikely to fundamentally alter India's approach.

Rossow of CSIS said Chinese aggression should continue pushing India to work closely with the US.

"The United States' willingness to share advanced weapons systems, contribute to India's domestic defense manufacturing, and offer assistance during periods of military tension with China provides a strong foundation that should withstand political change," he said.

Most experts say the election results show that the world's largest nation still holds onto its democracy.

Gautam Nair, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard, called Tuesday a "watershed moment" that showed Modi's nationalist message wasn't resonating with voters.

Rossow said that despite Modi extending his influence over key institutions such as the courts, voters are still making their choices count. "This election, even if Prime Minister Modi retains power, shows the power of India's democracy," said Rossow.

• Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, is leaving the company after one year.
• Benarroch was a close advisor to CEO Linda Yaccarino, previously working together at NBCUniversal.
• He is known as a hard-charging executive and his style has upset people at both NBCUniversal and X.

X chief executive officer Linda Yaccarino's head of business operations, Joe Benarroch, is leaving the company, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Benarroch was a close advisor to Yaccarino and held significant influence over her decisions, people familiar with the pair told the Journal.

Before joining X, previously known as Twitter, the two worked together at Comcast company NBCUniversal, where Benarroch reported to Yaccarino, who was advertising chief at the time.

Benarroch is known as a hard-charging executive and his style has upset colleagues at both NBCUniversal and X, according to the Journal, who cited anonymous people who worked with him.

Benarroch would be leaving X a year after starting at the company. He worked at NBCUniversal for nearly five years and was at Meta before, according to his LinkedIn profile.

X and Benarroch did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request to confirm the news.

In January, Benarroch said that X planned to hire 100 full-time content moderators in Austin and focus on combatting content related to child sexual exploitation. The news came days before Yaccarino appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on online child safety.

His departure comes after Elon Musk's social media platform announced recent changes to encourage people to use X more.

In late May, an X executive said that they would make "likes" on the site private, so that people could like more "edgy" posts without worry of blowback. Earlier this week, X said it would allow adult content on the platform as long as it came with a warning and was posted consensually.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin has started wearing body armor when out at outdoor public events.
• Officials told The Moscow Times that Putin's security team had recommended the measure.
• "God protects the cautious," said one official.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin has started wearing body armor at outdoor public events, The Moscow Times reported on Tuesday, citing officials who had seen Putin at these events.

"This year on May 9, the chief was clearly wearing concealed body armor during the parade," an official said of Putin's appearance at this year's Moscow Victory Day parade. "And that precaution, I think, is necessary."

Putin, who won his fifth term as Russia's president in March, was seen greeting generals at the annual military parade in a live broadcast on May 9. The 71-year-old's movements in the video looked rigid, and Putin was seen adjusting his clothing around his right shoulder several times.

"Putin's upper body frame looks unnatural and his shoulders appear rather wide and square, showing no shape of the back and shoulder blades," security consultant Jade Miller told The Moscow Times.

"In my professional opinion, Putin is wearing some form of ballistic protection during his time attending the parade," she said.

Putin started donning a bulletproof vest in 2023, according to the Russian newspaper. Officials told The Moscow Times that Putin's security team, the Presidential Security Service, had recommended this arrangement.

"God protects the cautious," said another official.

Representatives for the Russian foreign ministry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.

This isn't the first time reports have emerged about Putin's fears of getting assassinated.

In September, Putin's former security officer, Vitaly Brizhaty, said in an interview with independent Russian outlet TV Rain that Putin once hired armed divers to look for potential assassins along his private beach.

Brizhaty, who defected to Ecuador after Russia invaded Ukraine, said that Putin was so paranoid that he didn't allow anyone but one of his bodyguards to operate his washing machine.

But Putin might not even fully trust his bodyguards, per Brizhaty, who said the Russian leader often gave his own security service bogus information about his whereabouts.

"This is how much he fears for his life," Brizhaty said.

• John Oliver recreated a defunct Red Lobster restaurant on his show.
• Oliver criticized private equity firms behind Red Lobster, which filed for bankruptcy in May.
• Oliver also poked fun at the restaurant's Endless Shrimp promotion, which cost the company millions.

John Oliver cooked Red Lobster by purchasing the entire contents of one defunct restaurant and recreating his own version of the struggling seafood chain.

Oliver, who did a segment on Red Lobster during an episode of his show "Last Week Tonight" that aired Sunday, criticized the private equity firms behind the chain, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May.

Oliver then revealed that his crew participated in an auction to purchase the contents of a previous Red Lobster location in Kingston, New York. Restaurant liquidator TAGeX Brands previously confirmed to Business Insider that Red Lobster shut down dozens of locations across the US in May.

The TAGeX Brands website shows that the Kingston location is no longer available for auction.

Oliver then used the purchased items to recreate the restaurant in the show's studio.

"The frustrating thing is, it seems just about any random idiot could run a Red Lobster better than these companies have done. But there's really only one way to put that to the test," Oliver said before revealing the faux-Red Lobster.

At Oliver's Red Lobster, there was only one item that customers could purchase: Biscuits.

"I'm excited to say we've actually got a finite biscuits promotion on right now where for just $1, you can get one biscuit," Oliver said, seemingly poking fun at Red Lobster's previous Endless Shrimp promotion, which the company said resulted in $11 million in losses in the third quarter of 2023.

Other troubles that have plagued the business over the past few years include high leasing costs, less foot traffic during COVID-19 lockdowns, and multiple Red Lobster executives leaving roles.

Representatives for TAGex Brands and Red Lobster did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.

• Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies in his hush-money case and is set to be sentenced July 11.
• James Comey told CNN that usually, a white-collar crime like this wouldn't end in a prison sentence.
• "But this is a defendant who's begging for a jail term," Comey said.

Usually, a white-collar offense, like the 34 felonies former President Donald Trump was convicted of in his hush-money case, wouldn't warrant a prison sentence, former FBI director James Comey told CNN in a Tuesday interview.

"But this is a defendant who's begging for a jail term by taking a flamethrower, not just to the judge, but to the entire process and the jury," Comey said. "A judge will take that very seriously into consideration when deciding whether to deter this person and to send a message more broadly, that he needs to spend some time behind bars."

Trump is set to be sentenced on July 11 by Judge Juan Merchan. Merchan, the judge's family, as well as witnesses in the case, were frequent targets of Trump's ire during the course of the proceedings — and it's likely Merchan will take that into consideration when sentencing the former president, Comey, speaking to CNN's Kaitlan Collins, said.

Comey said the personal attacks, as well as Merchan's finding that Trump had acted in contempt of the court's orders on multiple occasions, "all of that will be part of the picture that the judge looks at to decide whether a message needs to be sent that involves jail."

Representatives for Comey and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

• Three boys found a young Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton while hiking in North Dakota in 2022.
• The discovery, dubbed Teen Rex, was made in the Hell Creek Formation of the Badlands.
• Scientists said the find was significant as only a few juvenile T. rex fossils have ever been found.

Three boys in North Dakota were out on a family hike when they came across something many adventurous kids only dream of finding: dinosaur bones.

And not just any dinosaur, but a young Tyrannosaurus rex.

The T. rex skeleton was discovered in 2022, when brothers Jessin and Liam Fisher, their dad, and their cousin Kaiden Madsen, were hiking in the Badlands near Marmarth and looking for fossils, according to a statement issued Monday by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, which is set to display the skeleton this summer.

The boys, who were aged 10, 9, and 7 at the time of the discovery, said in a press conference they had been going out to look for fossils for years. This time they were exploring the Hell Creek Formation, a rocky area that dates back 65.5 million years and is known for fossil formations, when they found some large bones sticking out of a rock.

Sam Fisher, the father of Cession and Liam, took photos of the bones and contacted an old high school classmate, Tyler Lyson, the curator of paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, to identify them.

In the summer of 2023, the fossil finders and Lyson returned to the site to excavate the skeleton, which was located on federal lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. About 30% of the skeleton was preserved, the museum said. The initial dig lasted 11 days, and the paleontologists plan to return this summer to look for any additional segments of the skeleton.

The museum said the finding was significant because very few juvenile T. rex skeletons have ever been discovered.

"By going outside and embracing their passions and the thrill of discovery, these boys have made an incredible dinosaur discovery that advances science and deepens our understanding of the natural world," Lyson said in a statement.

Teen Rex, as scientists are calling the fossil, would have been 10 feet tall and 25 feet long, and weighed in at an estimated 3,500 pounds, according to the museum. By comparison, a fully grown T. rex could be 40 feet long and up to 8,000 pounds.

The museum said the discovery of Teen Rex gives scientists an opportunity to study the growth and development of the species and how the animals matured.

The fossil and a documentary that recounts the story are set to be temporarily displayed at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science starting June 21.

• Rep. Rob Menendez — the son of Sen. Bob Menendez — just survived a tough primary challenge.
• Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla ran against him, focusing largely on the elder Menendez's scandals.
• The race also came after machine politics suffered a major blow in New Jersey.

Rep. Rob Menendez of New Jersey— the son of scandal-plagued Sen. Bob Menendez — defeated a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in New Jersey on Tuesday, according to Decision Desk HQ and the Associated Press.

It's a significant victory for the younger Menendez, who had found himself in the fight of his life amid his father's lurid corruption scandal. Sen. Menendez has been accused of accepting bribes in the form of wads of cash and gold bars in exchange for, among other things, acting as a foreign agent. His trial began last month and remains ongoing.

The congressman had been challenged by Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla, who waged a campaign largely based around the elder Menendez. Though the congressman has not been linked to his father's alleged misdeeds, he has defended him amid the charges, and he pointedly declined to offer an opinion on his father's looming independent Senate bid during an interview with Business Insider in April.

"I don't have the capacity to think through, well, what if, what if, what if," Menendez said at the time. "There's a lot that I have to deal with right now."

Bhalla would have made history as just the second Sikh American ever elected to Congress, and the first to wear a turban.

The primary was also a key test for how candidates will run without the so-called "county line" system, which has enabled machine politics to persist for decades in New Jersey. It's essentially a ballot design trick that has allowed party organizations to hand-pick candidates in state elections for decades.

Following a lawsuit from Rep. Andy Kim amid his short-lived primary campaign against First Lady Tammy Murphy, a federal judge struck down the system for the June primary, and it could be invalidated forever. Kim officially became the Democratic nominee for Senate in Tuesday.

That system enabled the coronation of Menendez by party leaders in 2022, despite holding no elected office before.

During one recent debate, Bhalla alleged that he was essentially pressured into endorsing the younger Menendez that year, and that Sen. Menendez was on speakerphone with his son during the call.

• Google's chief privacy officer will be leaving the company in the fall.
• Keith Enright will not be replaced; instead, Google will restructure his role.
• The departures come as Google's privacy policies face scrutiny.

Google's chief privacy officer will leave the company after 13 years, and Google has no plans to replace him.

Keith Enright will remain at the company until the fall, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider. One source told Forbes that the announcement of his departure was met with "shock" from employees.

"After over 13 years at Google, I'm ready for a change, and will be moving on this fall, taking all that I've learned and trying something new," Enright said in a LinkedIn post Tuesday. "I'm incredibly proud of the team we built, and the work we did to keep billions of people around the world safe and in control."

Enright leads the global privacy team in crafting and implementing privacy and data policies across Google's products and services. In 2018, he testified about consumer data privacy to the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, defending Google's privacy policies while acknowledging the company's past mistakes.

Google's head of competition law, Matthew Bye, will leave after 15 years at the company.

Google confirmed the departures in a statement to Business Insider. Both Bye and Enright will not be replaced. Instead, a Google spokesperson told Forbes that the company will restructure its policy and privacy work to include multiple teams.

"We regularly evolve our legal, regulatory, and compliance work as we launch and run innovative services that comply with a growing number of intersecting obligations and expectations," a Google spokesperson told BI in a statement. "Our latest changes will increase the number of people working on regulatory compliance across the company."

Enright's departure comes as Google's privacy policies have been scrutinized

In December, Google settled a lawsuit that alleged the company was secretly amassing data from Chrome users who thought their browsing activity was private, or as Google calls it, in Incognito mode.

Google agreed to delete billions of user data records as part of the settlement.

On Monday, 404 Media published a leaked copy of an internal Google database that revealed thousands of privacy-related incidents from 2013 to 2018. The incidents included one where a Google speech service logged audio of an estimated 1,000 children for about an hour.

A Google spokesperson told Business Insider that all the incidents have been reviewed and resolved, meaning any private information has been deleted.

A Google spokesperson told Business Insider that the leak news and announcement of Enright's and Bye's departures are unrelated.

Google has also tried to enhance user privacy with its initiative to eliminate third-party cookies in its Chrome browser.

Enright and Bye did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Donald Trump's legal team asked the judge in his Manhattan trial to lift his gag order.
• Without it, Trump is free to attack Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, the judge's daughter, and jurors.
• Trump already violated the gag order 10 different times, the judge previously found.

Donald Trump's legal team has asked for the judge who presided over his criminal hush-money trial to lift his gag order, which would give him a free hand to criticize witnesses and jurors in the trial.

The former president has spent much of the six weeks of his criminal trial — which concluded Thursday with a thundering guilty verdict on all 34 counts — complaining about the gag.

The order from New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan forbade Trump from saying anything about possible witnesses, staff members at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, court staff, or any of their family members, as well as jurors.

It frustrated Trump, who sought to cast several witnesses as part of a political conspiracy. Before the trial, he used his bully pulpit to frequently antagonize Michael Cohen, the key witness in the trial and his former personal lawyer, who had his own legal problems. And aside from his lawyer's cross-examination, Trump could not respond to testimony from Stormy Daniels, the porn star who was paid to stay quiet ahead of the 2016 election about the affair she says she had with him.

In a letter to the judge Tuesday, Trump's lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, said the basis for a gag order "no longer exists" and that Trump ought to be able to react to comments from Cohen and Daniels, as well as from President Joe Biden.

"Now that the trial is concluded, the concerns articulated by the government and the Court do not justify continued restrictions on the First Amendment rights of President Trump — who remains the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election — and the American people," Blanche wrote.

A spokesperson for the Manhattan district attorney's office declined to comment on the gag-lift request.

In near-daily comments to journalists outside the Manhattan courtroom during the trial, Trump criticized the gag order. He frequently complained he could not use "specific names" in his tirades about the proceedings and that he ought to be able to speak freely because he is a candidate in the 2024 presidential election.

Merchan's orders approved the district attorney's request to restrict extrajudicial statements "for the duration of the trial," which technically ended with the jury verdict Thursday.

But Trump's lawyers didn't immediately ask for the gag order to be lifted. At a press conference in Trump Tower on Friday, Trump continued to complain about the "nasty gag order" he was under.

In an interview with The Associated Press last week, Blanche said he believed the gag had been lifted but that he wasn't sure and wanted "to be careful and understand when it no longer applies."

During the trial, Trump violated the gag order on 10 different occasions, Merchan found. The judge held the former president in contempt of court and ordered him to pay the maximum $1,000 for each violation.

Trump — a billionaire who uses political donor money to pay his legal fees — appeared undeterred, leading Merchan to say he would also consider jailing Trump.

"You are the former President of the United States and possibly the next President, as well," Merchan told Trump at a May 6 hearing in the middle of the trial. "There are many reasons why incarceration is truly a last resort for me. To take that step would be disruptive to these proceedings, which I imagine you want to end as quickly as possible."

In the weeks since, Trump had toned down his rhetoric specifically targeting Cohen and others, although he brought a steady stream of political allies to the courthouse, who made some of the same criticisms before TV cameras.

If Merchan lifts the gag order, it would leave Trump free to more explicitly attack Cohen and other witnesses, allowing him to sharpen his baseless argument that the prosecution was politically motivated.

It would also allow him to attack Merchan's daughter, a political consultant for Democratic politicians. Trump may also resume attacks on Matthew Colangelo, a prosecutor in the case who had previously worked in a senior position in the US Justice Department, which Trump claims is evidence that Biden orchestrated the case against him.

Trump may also choose to target jurors with his political megaphone. Although Merchan took steps to keep their names hidden from the public, they were not sequestered, and some of Trump's supporters have reportedly sought to identify and threaten them.

But any of Trump's public attacks and lack of remorse for the crimes he was convicted of could also find their way into a sentencing memo from prosecutors, which would allow the judge to weigh them before deciding Trump's punishment for his conviction. The public comments — and previously determined gag order violations — could lead Merchan to issue a harsher punishment.

The sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 11.

• AI researcher Roman Yampolskiy estimates a 99.9% chance of AI leading to human extinction.
• He said no AI model so far has been safe, and it's unlikely that future models will be bug-free.
• Other AI researchers have said been more moderate in estimates about AI leading to extinction.

Podcaster Lex Fridman said in a recent episode that most AI engineers he speaks with estimate between a one and 20% chance that artificial general intelligence will eventually kill off humans.

The prediction varies depending on how you ask. For example, a recent study conducted with 2,700 AI researchers indicated there's only a 5% chance that AI will lead to human extinction.

But Fridman said it's important to talk to people who estimate a much higher likelihood AI could wipe us out — like AI researcher Roman Yampolskiy, who told the podcaster in an interview released Sunday that he pegs it as 99.9% within the next hundred years.

The AI researcher teaches computer science at the University of Louisville and just came out with a book called "AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable."

He discussed the risks of AI for over two hours on Fridman's podcast — and his predictions were pretty bleak.

He said the chances that AI will wipe out humanity depend on whether humans can create highly complex software with zero bugs in the next 100 years. Yampolskiy said he finds that unlikely since no AI model has been completely safe from people attempting to get the AI to do something it wasn't designed to do.

"They already have made mistakes," Yampolskiy said. "We had accidents, they've been jailbroken. I don't think there is a single large language model today, which no one was successful at making do something developers didn't intend it to do."

The first few versions of AI models in the last two years have raised various red flags for potential misuse or misinformation. Deepfakes have created fake pornographic images of female public figures and threatened to influence elections with AI robocalls imitating President Biden.

Google AI Overviews, based on Google's Gemini AI model, is the latest product rollout that didn't stick the landing. The new feature on Google Search was meant to provide quick informative overviews for certain inquiries presented at the top of search results. Instead, it went viral for coming up with nonsense answers, like suggesting making pizza with glue or stating that no countries in Africa started with the letter K.

Yampolskiy said in order to control AI, there needs to be a perpetual safety machine. Yampolskiy said even if we do a good job with the next few versions of GPT, AI will continue to improve, learn, self-modify, and interact with different players — and with existential risks, "you only get one chance."

The CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Sam Altman, has suggested a "regulatory sandbox" where people experiment with AI and regulate it based on what "went really wrong" and what went "really right."

Altman once warned — or maybe he was joking — back in 2015 that "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies."

More recently, Altman has said that what keeps him up at night is "all of the sci-fi stuff" related to AI, including the things that are "easy to imagine where things really go wrong."

Since ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022, various predictions have been made about how AI could lead to humanity's downfall in regard to AI.

But Yampolskiy also cautioned that "we cannot predict what a smarter system will do." He compared humans to squirrels in the context of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, and said AI will come up with something that we don't even know exists yet.

According to Yampolskiy, however, there are three realms of outcomes that he predicts. One risk is that everyone will die, another is that everyone will suffer and wish they were dead, and another is that humans have completely lost their purpose.

The last one refers to a world in which AI systems are more creative than humans and can perform all the jobs. In that reality, it's not clear what humans would do to contribute, Yampolskiy said, echoing some concerns about whether AI will start to take humans' jobs.

Most people in the field acknowledge some level of risk with AI, but they don't think it's as likely that things will end badly. Elon Musk has predicted a 10-20% chance that AI will destroy humanity.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said the real dangers of AI, which are cyber and biological attacks, will come in three to five years. If AI develops free will, Schmidt has a simple solution: humans can just unplug it.