Category: Business

• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is projected to win a third term as the country's leader.
• The multiparty alliance, led by his Bharatiya Janata Party, is expected to win a smaller majority.
• It's the result of a six-week election that saw a bitter feud emerge between the BJP and its rivals.

Narendra Modi is on track to secure a historic third term as India's prime minister, but with a narrower victory than had been expected.

A coalition led by Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is expected to win around 300 seats in the Indian parliament, which is lower than the 400 seats it was expected to win in some exit polls, Reuters reported early Tuesday.

The opposition INDIA alliance, led by the centrist Congress party, is expected to make gains and is projected to win around 220 seats, the report said. In the Indian parliament, a party or coalition that wins 272 seats can form the government.

The final votes were cast on Saturday in the seventh phase of the election, which saw people in eight of India's 36 states and territories take their turns at the ballot.

Modi had expected a landslide

Modi and the BJP had long been projected to win decisively. Exit polls, though sometimes inconsistent, showed the party extending its control of the lower house.

Modi had set a goal for his BJP-led alliance to secure 400 seats, up from about 350 won in 2019.

The incumbent was so assured of being reelected this year that he declared victory on social media three days before the official results were scheduled to be announced on Tuesday.

"I can say with confidence that the people of India have voted in record numbers to reelect the NDA government," he wrote on X.

A bitter battle for power

The weekslong election involved a bitter feud between the BJP and its main opposition, the Congress Party.

The Congress Party has formed its own bloc with about 20 opposition groups to oust Modi, campaigning on promises to relieve the nation's unemployment woes. However, the new alliance is undermined by differences in ideologies and contested leadership.

Modi, a polarizing but popular leader, has spent much of the election blasting the Congress and its promised policies in controversial attacks. At one point, he accused the opposition of planning to take India's wealth and redistribute it to the Muslim minority.

While not specifically criticizing Muslims in his rally speeches, he has used terms such as "infiltrators" that are widely believed to allude to the minority.

His party's ideology, Hindutva, promotes building a Hindu nation and has been criticized as a nationalist movement that foments hate speech and right-wing extremism.

BJP's rivals have also accused the party of attempting to stifle opposition leaders. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, of the Aam Aadmi Party, was recently arrested on corruption charges in handing out liquor licenses. Kejriwal was granted bail until the end of the election.

India's voting population is the world's largest, with 969 million people eligible to cast their ballots. That's more than twice the entire population of the European Union.

They're building data centers pretty much everywhere these days. The sprawling, windowless buildings are the physical engines of the internet and the cloud; more are now under construction than ever before, and the new breed is bigger and hungrier. A typical center used to consume 10 megawatts of electricity; now they're being built to suck up 10 times that much. Last year all the data centers in the world had room for 10.1 zettabytes of information — roughly 456 billion Wikipedias. And with the rise of artificial intelligence, which requires vast quantities of data and power, the global capacity of data centers is expected to double by 2027. If you don't live near a data center, you will soon.

But cloud computing and AI aren't the only things driving the push for "hyperscaled" data centers. About 65% of the capacity in global centers is owned by just three companies: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Like the railroad magnates of old, they're racing to control the market, because they understand something that has eluded the rest of us. Data centers are more than just vast digital warehouses. They're the essential infrastructural technology on which pretty much every other company in the world must run. 

When companies need pretty much any computing service these days — networking, security, data processing, platforms, you name it — it's easier and cheaper to just rent it from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. The more data centers those companies have, the more of those services they can offer, and the more storage and number-crunching capacity they can provide. By trying to corner the market on data centers, they're not just creating bigger warehouses for data — they're aiming to be a one-stop shop for all of the tech a company needs.

That's even more true of AI startups. When an innovative newcomer needs access to the large language models that are required to train and run generative AI, they pretty much have to go through Big Tech to get them. And now the tech giants are making venture investments in those startups by offering them "credits" for using the company's cloud. That's how Microsoft made a chunk of its investment in OpenAI, for example — by giving the startup access to its data centers. It's a lucrative inducement to join a proprietary ecosystem.

"This is where the real business is," says Cecilia Rikap, an economist who is the author of a new report called "Dynamics of Corporate Governance Beyond Ownership in AI." "The more AI is consumed, there's more cloud consumption, and therefore not only more money for these companies but more digital technology that is intertwined and tangled inside their infrastructure."

And that entanglement is what worries many economists and legal scholars. Regulators call the problem "locking in." Changing from one data ecosystem to another isn't like moving your office to a new building; the programming interfaces between Microsoft Azure, say, don't just port over to Amazon Web Services. Getting into one is easy, but like the Hotel California, you can never leave. Once a tech giant gives a startup access to its cloud services and its large language models, it has pretty much assured itself a form of control over a fledgling firm that might one day have grown into a competitor. "Market leaders benefit from early-mover advantage coupled with network effects and high switching costs that lock-in customers," a congressional subcommittee warned in a 450-page report back in 2020. The rush to build data centers is, in no small part, a move by Big Tech to secure the keys to the coming AI kingdom.

In the short term, the rise of data centers has actually been a good thing for startups. "Until recently, the perception among academics was that the rise of cloud computing was great for startups and innovation," says Matthew Wansley, a law professor at Yeshiva University who studies competition and regulation. "It used to be that if you were a startup, you had to build your own servers. That's a huge, fixed up-front cost."

That's not true anymore. The price of cloud-computing services has fallen every year since 2006, when Amazon opened its cloud. And it absolutely crashed in 2014, as a team of economists noted, when Microsoft and Google started advertising their competitive prices. From 2010 to 2014, AWS database prices dropped by 11%. Over the next two years, they plunged by 22%.

Cloud computing also made it easier for startups to get funding. Venture capitalists adopted a "spray and pray" approach to investing, meaning they placed bets on more companies but put less money into each one. They also ratcheted back their direct involvement in running the companies, trusting the marketplace to sort out the winners from the losers.

The whole scene has been especially great for AI startups. "Smaller companies like us could get access to compute power and the scalability that the larger service providers offer," says Jonas Jacobi, CEO and cofounder of ValidMind, a fintech company. "You have a few large players dominating the AI space, but there are startups trying to compete with them as well. The only reason they can is because of the cloud vendors."

The trick, Jacobi says, is to write code that can work with any of the three providers, so you don't get locked in to a single company. You have to stay "neutral to the tech stack," he says. Sure, one of the tech giants can always swoop in and build their own version of your software. There's data suggesting that Amazon has made it a standard operating procedure to "engulf" the products of small, open-source competitors and repackage them as part of its own suite of services, as it did with the Elastic search engine. "But that's part of the journey as a startup," Jacobi says. "It's just up to us as a company to be faster and nimbler."

But over time, economists warn, nimble won't be enough. In the battle to create foundational tech — the "key complementary assets" of the business — AI startups will inevitably lose out to the tech giants that control the data centers. "AI is a general-purpose technology," says Rikap. "It's being applied to everything. But what type of AI we get and what type we don't get is going to be affected by the power of just three companies. It's an intellectual monopoly. What they are controlling is data and knowledge." By locking startups into their systems, Google and Amazon and Microsoft can effectively play favorites, offering better deals and cheaper services to the companies in which they have the largest stake. 

Over time, economists warn, AI startups will inevitably lose out to the tech giants that control the data centers.

Rikap has also found that their growing control of data centers also gives Big Tech an incentive to work together to share information and protect their joint interests. In a paper with Bengt-Åke Lundvall, an economist at Aalborg University in Denmark, Rikap notes that articles in technical and academic journals from researchers at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon consistently had coauthors employed by their competitors. Now, for sure, computer science is a small world. But the joint authorship, Rikap says, is "a pure way to tell they are collaborating and know what each other are doing" — a hallmark of anticompetitive behavior.

For the moment, there is still reason to hope that innovation can win out over monopolization. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are still competing on price and features, which is good for everyone. And in Europe, where regulators are taking a more aggressive approach to tech generally and cloud computing in particular, the Big Three are busy pointing fingers at one another. A Google Cloud exec recently denounced Microsoft as a "monopoly" and a "walled garden," and a trade group that includes Amazon filed an antitrust complaint over Microsoft's cloud-computing licenses. As they vie for market share, the companies aren't in lockstep yet — and that creates an opening, albeit a small one, for nimble, faster competitors.

There's also a tendency, over time, for mature technology companies to shift from trying to innovate themselves to simply charging other people who innovate. Among economists, that's known as "rent-seeking behavior," and it looks an awful lot like what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are doing with cloud computing and data centers.

So what's the best way to make sure Big Tech doesn't use data centers to short-circuit innovation? Researchers point to Google, which is offering a friendlier kind of partnership to startups. "The Google Cloud Division partners with promising database start-ups, contributes to open-source projects, and collaborates with open-source foundations," two scholars recently observed. It's an "architecture of participation," they say, that enables Google to profit while fostering the growth of new companies and ideas.

Even more important, the Federal Trade Commission, aware of the threat posed by data centers, has ordered the Big Tech companies to hand over information on their AI investments. Just as new laws eventually caught up to the pricing practices of the railroads in the 1880s, today's regulators may well catch up to the futuristic, technological tangles of cloud computing. One reason to think so: The lead author of that 450-page House subcommittee report about Big Tech's anticompetitive behavior was a lawyer named Lina Khan. Today's she's the hard-charging head of the FTC.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

• Rep. John Rose of Tennessee made a passionate speech defending Donald Trump on Monday.
• But all eyes were on Guy, his 6-year-old son, who stole the show with his backstage mischief.
• Guy just graduated kindergarten, and Rose said he was asked to smile for his little brother.

Politics can be tiring. The 2024 election, set to be a contest between two of the nation's oldest-ever candidates, is marked by undertones of war, a doozy of federal crimes, and increasingly divided voters.

Guy Rose, 6, is showing us all how he copes.

As his father, GOP Rep. John Rose of Tennessee, took the podium on Monday to blast former President Donald Trump's New York prosecutors, the boy, sitting behind, pulled a range of faces for the camera.

First, he flashed the camera with a winning smile, then appeared to lose interest before seemingly cooking up a fun idea.

"Regardless of one's opinion of the current Republican nominee, we'd be well-served to remember the long and cherished tradition we have in the country for settling our political differences at the ballot box," said Rose.

Meanwhile, Guy launched into a series of goofy faces, tongue wagging, eyes rolling, and complete with dramatic hand gestures.

His dad continued to speak, saying May 30 — the day Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies — would go down as "one of the more infamous days in American history" because of "flimsy" charges brought against Trump.

Behind Rose, Guy appeared to get bored, fishing a toy out of his pocket and fidgeting with it, occasionally giving the camera a cheeky glance.

C-SPAN captured the boy's adorable antics for only about five minutes as his father spoke, but they've since gone viral.

According to Rose, the faces apparently stemmed from an encouragement for Guy to smile at the camera for his little brother, Sam.

The Associated Press reported that Guy just graduated kindergarten last week and that his brother and mother, Chelsea, are back home in Tennessee.

Rose's opposition jumped in with criticism for the congressman on Monday evening, writing on X that "we too would be mocking him while he spoke."

Doug Andres, spokesperson for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, suggested that Guy might have been trying to tell everyone something about the Illuminati.

Rose, now 59, was likely about 53 when his wife gave birth to Guy. The congressman was 45 in 2011 when he married Chelsea Rose, who was then 21 and a college senior, according to The American Prospect, a liberal political magazine.

He founded the IT training company Transcender Corp and was president of Boson Software, a similar firm based in Nashville. Rose was also Tennessee's agriculture commissioner from 2001 to 2003 before he became a congressman for the state's 6th district in 2019.

Rose generally aligns with his party in votes and politics, more recently defending Trump and supporting Israel.

• Authorities are blaming an intern for a construction firm in China for a tunnel collapse.
• The intern, Wang Nianpu, is named "mainly responsible" and criminally liable while his bosses face fines.
• Wang was supposed to deliver an important stop-work order but failed to do so, investigators said.

Chinese authorities have named a construction intern as likely criminally responsible for a pipe network collapse that killed three construction workers.

Wang Nianpu, an intern working as a quality inspector, was one of three people marked in an investigation report as liable for the collapse in December along a main road in central Jinan City.

The report, seen by Business Insider, was filed in early May but went viral after local media reported the case over the weekend.

It said the workers were killed in a tunnel that collapsed because a steel support beam was missing. An excavator was plowing through soil at the entrance, causing steel plating inside the trench to fall and crush the trio.

As a result, dozens of local government officials, Wang's senior colleagues, and bosses face fines, warnings, or formal admonishment.

Only Wang, a technician, and a site supervisor were named for criminal investigation.

The report singled out Wang, saying he was "mainly responsible for the occurrence of the accident" and that he was previously detained but released on bail pending his trial.

But it wasn't his role as a quality inspector that landed him in trouble.

According to the investigation run by Jinan's Emergency Management Bureau, Wang's supervisors discovered a safety hazard in the tunnel on December 28 and signed an order to stop work for the next day.

Wang was instructed to deliver the order to construction crews on December 29 but failed to do so for "personal reasons," the report said.

Authorities said the tunnel collapsed the next day.

The report found that the work carried out in the trench broke regulations and recommended a $151,000 fine for a Qingdao branch of PowerChina Construction, which was overseeing the site.

It's unclear who was Wang's direct employer. PowerChina Construction is a state-owned company and worked on the project with several subcontractors, including Chengda Lighting Engineering and Hengxin Construction Supervision.

Wang's case went viral on Weibo, China's version of X, on Tuesday, becoming the top search topic on the platform for several hours, per data seen by BI.

"I'm shocked. This type of accident is blamed on the person with the lowest salary?" one Weibo user wrote. "You're asking him to take the main blame when he can't even sit at the table for meals."

"It's no longer a joke that interns must bear important responsibility. It's a fact," wrote another.

Local media outlet Red Star News, citing labor experts from law firms in Beijing and Hunan, wrote that the "status of an intern should not be a prerequisite for a person to be exempted from criminal punishment."

• The NYSE will cancel trades after a glitch caused halts for 40 stocks, including Berkshire Hathaway.
• The glitch caused Berkshire Hathaway to appear to trade at a 99% discount.
• The technical issue lasted two hours and was linked to the Consolidated Tape Association's software.

The New York Stock Exchange said it will cancel trades made after a glitch caused trading halts for 40 stocks on Monday morning — including Berkshire Hathaway, which appeared to trade at a 99% discount.

Class A shares of the Warren Buffett company appeared to trade at $185.10 per share before a trading halt kicked in. Trading can be paused before a news event, due to regulatory concerns, or if a stock moves outside certain price bands, which is what happened to Berkshire Hathaway.

A handful of trades took place at the discounted price in the minute before the halt started, according to LSEG data. NYSE said that all Berkshire Hathaway trades made at or below $603,718.30 would be canceled.

Class A shares of the conglomerate closed at $627,400 on Friday. The stock reopened at $648,000 at 11:36 a.m., and closed at $631,110 on Monday.

The technical glitch, which came from the Consolidated Tape Association's real-time stock quotes, lasted for about two hours and was fixed by about 11:45 a.m.

The NYSE allows traders to flag "clearly erroneous" trades and seek compensation, if necessary. Last January, a glitch on the NYSE led to dramatic price swings for more than 250 firms and was traced back to a staffer who left a backup system running.

The CTA oversees the dissemination of real-time price information on several exchanges. It said that Monday's glitch could have stemmed from "an issue with Limit Up/Limit Down price bands that may have been related to a new software release."

The NYSE issued similar cancellation notices for at least 12 other firms, like fast-casual chain Chipotle, and exchange-traded funds, including a Pimco bond ETF.

• Alexandra Karplus credits office jobs in New York and Singapore for many of the friendships she's formed over the years.
• Since she started working from home, her personal relationships with coworkers aren't as strong.
• She still wouldn't want to go back to office life. 

"I want to invite you guys over to my place for Thanksgiving," I told a few coworkers while enjoying a picnic at the Singapore Botanic Gardens back in 2008.

It had been a month since I moved from New York to Singapore and I felt happily settled in my new life. I was 27, just married, and thrilled to start the next chapter of my life on the other side of the planet.

A welcoming group of colleagues from around the world — whose ages ranged from just out of college up to almost ready for retirement — had contributed to the easy transition. They gave me tips on how to sign up for phone plans, told me about neighborhoods to check out, taught me Singlish 101, and regularly invited me to join them for lunch, after-work drinks, and even a few picnics.

Additional friends and partners were often invited to tag along, and that afternoon, my husband — as well as one new colleague's fluffy husky — was sitting alongside me on the mat.

"How are we going to host Thanksgiving? We just moved into our apartment and don't even have plates or cutlery," my husband asked.

It was a good question. I hadn't considered logistics, nor had I ever hosted a Thanksgiving dinner. My British coworker Peter jumped in and said he'd be happy to have us over at his place. Everyone was excited to join in, although, with no other Americans in the group, it would be the first Thanksgiving for all of them.

On Thanksgiving day I prepared stuffing and a few pumpkin pies in my new kitchen. Peter had Skyped his mom back in Guildford for a step-by-step tutorial on how to prepare a turkey, and it was in the oven when we arrived. The other guests showed up with more sides and bottles of wine. I left that night with a full belly and a whole new group of friends to be thankful for.

I've met some of my closest friends at work

Fast forward 16 years — plus two children and a new job — and I'm still happy in Singapore. Because the city has a large transient population, I've seen many friends and coworkers come and go — but even this has had benefits.

I've attended three weddings of past colleagues in Bali, one of which was for coworkers who had fallen in love at the office. I've made trips to visit my work friends in their new homes around the world. Those who travel back through Singapore make it a point to plan a get-together when they're in town — usually at their favorite hawker center to eat satay and chicken rice.

Work friendships started back in New York and are still going strong

These types of strong connections with colleagues didn't just start in Singapore. The best part about my first job out of college, when I was still living in Manhattan, was our weekly brainstorming meeting. The team manager would bring a brown paper bag filled with bagels, and we'd sit around a table coming up with new ways to improve the site's content. The website didn't last, but the friendships have. My bagel manager has even made it over to Singapore to say hi.

The next job in New York was the one that eventually transferred me to Singapore. We were publishing inflight magazines from a warehouse-like space in Dumbo, Brooklyn, before it was a trendy part of town. This was where another set of friends came into my life.

When the weather got cold, we would wander over to Jacques Torres Chocolate Factory for hot cups of spicy cocoa. When we closed a monthly issue, my boss would treat the team to pizza at Grimaldi's. The pizza boss now lives nearby in Bangkok. He visits regularly, and my kids think of him as an uncle.

I'm questioning how friendships can grow when we work from home

The pandemic changed everything. At the time, I was producing magazines and web content for airlines. Global travel restrictions and lockdowns had a huge impact on the company, and eventually, management had to let go of the majority of our over 30-person creative team.

I was lucky and grateful to still have a job. At that point in my career, I was the editorial director, and while I didn't make the final decisions, I was the messenger who told people they'd been laid off. It felt like I had betrayed friends, and it also led me to question why I had been loyal to that company for so many years.

In my current job, as the lifestyle and culture editor for Business Insider in Singapore, we work almost entirely from home. We have a space in a WeWork, but we also have a remote-flexible work policy globally. New colleagues are given in-person training when they join the company, but the majority of our day-to-day communication happens online.

There's constant chatter throughout the workday on Slack — colleagues sharing articles, pointing out events, and praising each other's work. We even have a channel to share pictures of our cats.

But while I like my coworkers, and have been in this job for over a year, these relationships have not grown into friendships.

The benefits outweigh the downsides

Research shows I'm not alone.

In June 2022, the Survey Center on American Life surveyed 5,037 American adults about workplace relationships. More than half of those surveyed said they'd met a close friend through their work or a spouse's work.

Fast forward one year to a report on loneliness in the US, released in May 2023 by then-US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. In the report, Murthy said the number of close friendships people have has declined. Murthy connected this to technology, a factor that has led to a decline in face-to-face contact and is also what has enabled us to work from home.

"As we shifted to use technology more and more for our communication, we lost out on a lot of that in-person interaction," Murthy told the Associated Press in an interview last May.

Results from a June 2022 Gallup poll of 16,586 working adults highlighted the positive impact that friendship at work can have on business outcomes. But the poll also found that in the US, just two in 10 employees reported having a best friend at work.

There are benefits to working from home. As a mother, I have time to drop my kids off at school in the morning, as there's no commute. I find a little "me time" with a home yoga session over lunch. There's no one blasting music that's not my jam or stopping me for a meaningless, 15-minute chat on the way to fill up coffee.

Between a mix of one-on-one catch-ups and team-wide Google Meets — none of which ever run longer than the pre-scheduled time slot — it's easy to follow what everyone is working on, and I rarely feel like my personal time is being encroached upon.

However, friendships are much harder to make online, and none of my work relationships in this job have managed to cross the threshold into friendships.

Yes, we have a Slack channel to share pictures of our cats, but I haven't had the pleasure of meeting someone's dog, by surprise, at a team picnic. I haven't been introduced to any of my coworkers' friends or partners, nor has my husband met any of them. Back in the day, I even picked up some basic mahjong skills when an assistant editor invited the whole team over to her mother's apartment to celebrate Chinese New Year.

When Thanksgiving comes around this year, I'm not sure how my colleagues would react to an invitation to the feast. Maybe we can start off with a picnic.

• Donald Trump's felony conviction seems to have only turbocharged his campaign's fundraising efforts.
• Trump's campaign said it raised $53 million within a day within a day of his guilty verdict.
• Donations to the campaign in May nearly doubled the $76 million it and the RNC reaped in April.

Former President Donald Trump's conviction on Thursday hasn't dampened his appeal among donors and supporters.

On Monday, Trump's campaign team said it raised $141 million in donations alongside the Republican National Committee. The RNC is led by former North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley and Trump's daughter-in-law Lara.

According to the statement, the former president pulled in two million donations last month, with a quarter of those donors being new to the campaign. The sum raised is nearly double the $76 million the campaign and the RNC collected in April.

"We are moved by the outpouring of support for President Donald J. Trump," Trump campaign senior advisors Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said. "President Trump raised $141 million in small donations alone this month."

The sudden turn in fortunes comes after a tough week for Trump, who was found guilty of all 34 felony counts in his hush money criminal trial in New York on Thursday. The conviction also made Trump the first former US president to become a felon.

But getting convicted might have been a blessing in disguise for Trump. His campaign said that over one-third of the donations, or $53 million, came within a day of his guilty verdict.

"Unfortunately for Democrats, their rigged political operation has backfired in a historic way, and Republicans are in a stronger position than ever to FIRE Crooked Joe Biden and Make America Great Again by electing President Trump on November 5," said RNC co-chairs Michael Whatley and Lara Trump.

The Trump campaign's bumper haul in May puts pressure on President Joe Biden, whose campaign raised only $51 million in April.

Last month, the Biden campaign ended the first quarter of 2024 with $192 million. The campaign said this was the highest amount raised by any Democratic presidential candidate at this point in the election cycle, per Reuters.

"We'll see how the numbers actually shake out come July," Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa told Axios in a statement.

"But one thing's for certain: Trump's billionaire friends are propping up the campaign of a white-collar crook because they know the deal – they cut him checks, and he cuts their taxes while working people and the middle class pay the tab," Moussa added.

• Instagram is testing a feature that makes some ads unskippable.
• YouTube has a similar strategy, which requires non-paying users to view ads before watching videos. 
• Instagram's focus on new features like Reels may have helped it surpass TikTok in growth.

Quickly scrolling past AI-generated ads on Instagram that you don't care to see could soon no longer be an option.

With Reels, Instagram became more like TikTok. With Threads, Meta paired Instagram with a new X competitor. And now, the social media giant may be taking a page out of YouTube's book.

Instagram is testing out a feature that stops some users from scrolling for a brief period of time to watch an ad, a Meta spokesperson confirmed in a statement to Business Insider.

Only some users can see this feature, per posts on X and Reddit, but Meta said the feature could become a permanent addition to the app.

"We're always testing formats that can drive value for advertisers. As we test and learn, we will provide updates should this test result in any formal product changes," the spokesperson told BI.

YouTube employs a similar ad strategy, making users of its free version sit through advertisements before they can watch videos.

Like TikTok, Instagram allows users to scroll past ads that appear in the main feed — or in between Stories — though that may now change.

According to social media posts from users who have been served the new unskippable ads, when users scroll through content, they see a small counter at the bottom of their screen that says "ad break."

"Sometimes you may need to view an ad before you can keep browsing," a text box explaining the feature on the Instagram app says, per a screenshot captured by Morning Brew.

Business Insider was unable to see the ad break feature on Instagram.

Over the past few years, Instagram has been experimenting with new features on its app, including Reels — which recommends videos in a TikTok-like fashion.

The emphasis on short-form video content has resulted in the app deemphasizing traditional photo posts from mutual followers — a practice that has seen mixed reviews.

Regardless, the changes could benefit the app: In 2023, Instagram beat out TikTok in growth and downloads.

• Doug Leone wrote on X that he will support Donald Trump for president in this year's election.
• Leone previously rebuked Trump, saying he'd incited the riot at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
• Leone's endorsement adds him to a growing list of Silicon Valley elites supporting Trump.

Billionaire venture capitalist Doug Leone, a partner at Sequoia Capital who managed the firm until 2022, reversed his previous critiques of Donald Trump on Monday and said he would support the former president and convicted felon's campaign.

He joins a growing list of Silicon Valley elites backing Trump.

"I have become increasingly concerned about the general direction of our country, the state of our broken immigration system, the ballooning deficit, and the foreign policy missteps, among other issues," Leone wrote in a post on X. "Therefore, I am supporting former President Trump in this coming election."

After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Leone had previously renounced his support for Trump, saying the former president's behavior during the riots caused him to lose "many of his supporters, including me," Leone said in a statement to Vox's Recode at the time.

The re-endorsement adds Leone to a growing list of Silicon Valley elites who have said they will be backing Trump following his recent felony conviction in New York. Among them are Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia, and billionaire venture capitalist David Sacks.

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

• Ethan Liebross, a first-year medical student, lives full-time in a DIY-converted van in California.
• Liebross, 24, bought the van for $20,000 and spent $13,460 on the conversion.
• He says he hopes that living minimally will help him become a better person and future doctor.

Some medical students choose to stay in dorms, while others opt to live in apartments off campus.

Ethan Liebross went for a less common housing option: He lives full-time in a van — a 2015 Ford Transit that he turned into a mobile, off-grid home.

"The decision to live in a van by choice is very different from the one that a lot of people have to make because there are people who are really suffering," Liebross, 24, told Business Insider. "I wanted to live as simply and minimally as possible, as a practice to help me become a better individual and a better future doctor."

Although he grew up on a farm in New Jersey, he's no stranger to van life.

During his gap year, he had lived out of another van while working as a freelance writer for local newspapers.

"At that time, I couldn't afford to stay in hotels for a whole year, and the practicality of couch surfing didn't really make sense," Liebross said. "So I decided to convert a little camper van — a Ford Transit Connect — and I traveled around the US."

The experience was challenging but enjoyable, and it left such an impact on Liebross that he decided to do it again when he started medical school.

"I thought if I liked it this much and I really enjoy the simple life, why not give it a try?" Liebross added.

The hunt for a van

But first, he needed a new vehicle — the Ford Transit Connect was too small to be a permanent home for the next four years.

He couldn't stand up inside, and all he had was a cooler that needed ice changed every two days.

"I was sleeping on the floor with no mattress or anything because the space didn't really allow it," Liebross said.

It wasn't going to be sustainable, especially since he knew that medical school was going to be challenging, he added: "I wanted to make sure I was getting very high-quality sleep, and I knew I couldn't be running around trying to find ice all the time."

After driving all over New Jersey to visit car dealerships with his dad, Liebross ended up getting a used 2015 Ford Transit off Facebook Marketplace for $20,000.

After that, it was a race against time to complete the van conversion.

"I only had three months before I needed to make it to California for school," Liebross said, adding that he had already spent a month looking for the van.

Even though he had some experience, the scale of this conversion was larger and more complicated than his first van project.

"The whole thing was just one big lesson in problem-solving," Liebross said. One day, he'd be trying to figure out the right inverter to buy, and the next day, he'd be researching how to cut down a butcher block countertop, he said.

"I woke up at 5:30 a.m. most days, and I worked until 9 p.m. at night," he said. "And even when there were family events going on, I couldn't go because I was really tight on time."

Even though things were tricky, he enjoyed the process. Thankfully, he also had some help from his dad.

"We worked together on the weekends or when he came home from work," Liebross said. "It's such an awesome thing to get to work side by side with my dad, who's someone I really admire."

A modern tiny home

Liebross' van, which is equipped with solar panels, is simple and cozy with details reminiscent of a modern home.

Behind the driver's seat is a kitchenette area complete with cabinets, a stainless sink, and a gas range. The sleeping area, with a memory foam mattress, is at the back of the van.

The passenger seat also swivels around, and he finds it useful when he has friends over.

However, there's no proper toilet in the van, he said: "There are a couple of gyms on campus, so I'll just bike over, work out at the gym, and then take a shower."

The hardest part of the build was figuring out the electrical system.

"It was really complex, dealing with a lot of complex physics and mechanics, and it can also be pretty dangerous, so you have to be very careful," Liebross said.

Liebross says he spent $13,460 on the van build. Including the cost of the van, he spent $33,460 in total.

In contrast, university housing rent for a single tenant in the upcoming school year starts from $1,500 a month but can go up to almost $3,500, depending on the location and the size of the apartment. At those rates, the minimum cost for four years of housing could have added up to at least $72,000.

Full-time van life

Liebross drove cross-country with his dad to California and moved into the van about a week before school started in early August.

He's been living in the van ever since.

"It's been pretty good, especially compared to that year I had off. That was roughing it out a lot more, especially in the colder months," Liebross said. "Luckily, I live in sunny California now, so it never got below freezing during winter."

His parents have also been supportive of his decision to live in a van during college.

"I guess the shock really came when I wanted to do it during my gap year," Liebross said. "I'd probably said it to them for months and months in passing — it didn't come out of the blue."

Although his parents, and especially his mom, were worried about his safety, they trusted him to be careful.

"I think overall, they knew that I was really smart about it. I really prioritized my own safety," he said. "And I think now they probably think it's cool and different. They've just been very supportive and I'm really lucky to have them in my life."

Although LA can be scary due to its crime rates, Liebross says he feels safe living in the van because he takes extra precautions.

"I try to be as safe as possible," Liebross said. "I try to be really aware of my surroundings and I don't really tell people where I park or my location."

Liebross parks his van on the streets about 10 minutes from campus and usually cycles to class.

"I don't move around a whole lot because if you leave your spot, you have to try to get a new one," he said. "Driving also isn't the most environmentally conscious, so I try to bike around as much as I can."

A lesson in simplicity

Looking back, Liebross says the entire experience has been gratifying.

Not only did the process feel special because he got to work with his dad, but it was also nice to have the results of his hard work on display.

"I'm really proud of the final outcome," Liebross said. "I really enjoy the challenge of living in a smaller space, biking to take a shower at the gym, and cooking healthy meals with limited resources. It makes you deeply appreciate the little things."

He also hopes that living in a van will help him become more disciplined, creative, and compassionate.

"I've come to the realization that if I really want to practice medicine selflessly and make a difference, I need to create a life for myself that doesn't require a lot of money or things," Liebross added.

Have you recently built or renovated your dream home? If you've got a story to share, get in touch with me at agoh@businessinsider.com.