• An Israeli news channel fired anchor Lama Tatour over comments on a rescued hostage's appearance.
• Tatour commented on Instagram about Noa Argamani's post-rescue look after 245 days in captivity.
• She said Argamani's eyebrows looked better than hers.

An Israeli news channel fired an anchor after she made comments on Instagram about the appearance of one of the recently rescued hostages, according to Israeli media.

Lama Tatour, an Arab-Israeli actor who hosted the Arabic cultural show "Perspective" on Keshet 12, posted an Instagram story on Saturday discussing how Noa Argamani looked after her release.

Argamani was kidnapped during the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack while attending the Nova music festival.

In now-viral videos, she was seen being abducted on a motorcycle by Hamas militants, shouting, "Don't kill me."

On Saturday, after 245 days in captivity, Argamani was rescued alongside three other hostages. Images and videos of her reuniting with her family were shared widely online and in the media.

Tatour commented on these images in an Instagram story written in Arabic on Saturday.

According to a translation by Haaretz, she wrote: "This is what a girl that's been in captivity for nine months looks like???"

Tatour added: "Look at her eyebrows, they look better than mine?? Her skin? Her hair and nails???"

She went on: "What is this????? This is what innocent women and children are being killed for in Gaza??????"

Tatour's Instagram account is now private, and Business Insider was unable to reach her for comment.

Israeli news network Kan reported that Khaled Natur, the show's producer, announced her dismissal on Saturday.

According to Kan, Natur said the network strongly condemned Tatour's words and that her work on the show had been terminated immediately.

Keshet did not immediately respond to BI's request for comment.

• Úrsula Alvarado, a 52-year-old Peruvian-American artist, lost her home when she got divorced.
• She moved into a studio, but was quickly priced out of Alexandria, Virginia.
• She applied to a nonprofit community and now pays $1,500 a month for a two-bed apartment.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Úrsula Alvarado, a 52-year-old Peruvian-American artist who lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2016, I had just divorced my husband of 30 years and was forced to live at a friend's place. I was homeless.

My friend told me I could stay at hers indefinitely until I got back on my feet. But I felt frustrated because I didn't know where to go.

Coming from Peru, and as an immigrant, I wanted to pursue the American dream. For that, I needed to become independent and live in my own place.

My divorce hit me hard

When I came to the US for the first time in 2011, I arrived without knowing anything. I came here with a lot of excitement, but it didn't quite work out. I endured almost six years of bad marriage.

It was a marriage of over 30 years. He came to the United States first. I left my art business in Peru to be with him.

In 2016, I got a divorce. It was very hard. I had to leave his house. I eventually moved into a tiny studio apartment in Alexandria that cost me $1,700 a month.

The only requirement was to pay three months' rent upfront, so I took it.

But rent started going up by $100 each time landlords renewed the tenancy agreement. I felt financially and emotionally affected.

My daughter and I felt deprived of privacy, so we decided to move out. But we couldn't find anything. We were priced out of the city.

A friend told me: "Why don't you apply for housing with Affordable Homes and Communities?"

I went, and the building manager at the time told me that she was going to put me on the waiting list because there were so many people waiting to rent.

I was on the applicant's list for about eight months. They eventually called me.

I was very excited. I fell in love with the building structure. I loved it.

The moment I walked in, I felt like I was in paradise.

I have two rooms, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. It's not big, but I have more room for myself, and I wanted my daughter to have some privacy.

We'd just come out of a difficult situation. We wanted something for ourselves.

But what I fell in love with when they opened the door were the windows and the light.

I am an artist. It's the perfect place to paint, with pine trees outside my window changing colors every season, a school outside the building, and Latino shops.

I realized it was the perfect place for me when the pandemic hit. All the residents and I were like in a freezer for almost two years of confinement.

My distraction was the windows and painting — watching the seasons and the weather change.

I am only paying $1,500 a month in a city where the average rent is at least $2,100, and my rent has never gone up.

There are weekly meetings with all the neighbors, including Paul Bernard, president and CEO of AHC since 1965, so we can express our concerns.

This, for me, is very valuable.

One imagines that a partly government-funded building must be neglected and full of people with poor living conditions. This one is not.

Once, an Uber driver asked me, '"Oh, do you live here?" He was stunned that I was living in one of the country's most expensive cities.

Now, when I think back to that time with my husband, the words he said that made me feel so small have made me stronger.

I felt fear, I felt very lonely. Not anymore.

• Gen Alpha tweens are driving a surge in skincare sales, spending significantly in Sephora stores.
• Gen Alphas that BI spoke with weren't convinced antiaging was behind their enthusiasm.
• But insecurities passed down from millennials and Gen Z are at least part of the story, experts say.

Gen Alpha is fueling sales in skincare, with many tweens blowing their pocket money on expensive cosmetics.

It could be that they are just the latest generation plagued by worries of aging, made all the worse by social media.

Gen Alpha tweens who spoke with Business Insider are unconvinced that fear of aging is behind their new obsession. They simply love the feel of the products and the act of comparing their new purchases with one another.

But skincare and marketing experts point to body image, social media's emphasis on antiaging, and targeted ads as possible reasons driving the trend, as well as the insecurities of the generations above trickling down and shaping the mental health of the youngest age group.

Gen Alpha's spending power

By all accounts, Gen Alpha is going to be a mighty generation of big spenders.

They're already getting started. Instead of gloopy, bright pink Barbie makeup and garish colorful eyeshadow palettes that millennials and some Gen Zers bought growing up, Gen Alphas — aged 14 and under — are saving up for cosmetics that set them back $50-$100 each or more.

Earlier this year, a report by the consumer behavior data company NIQ found that 49% of the mass growth in skincare sales in 2023 in the US was driven by Gen Alpha. US households with tweens aged between six and 12 grew their skincare sales by 27.2% that year, the report found.

On TikTok, "Sephora" tweens have been enraging older generations, who claim kids are buying up all the sought-after products, clogging up the aisles, and messing up displays.

This has culminated in them earning the slightly disparaging label of "10-year-old girls in Sephora" as millennials and Zoomers brandish them as "insane" and "out of control."

But Gen Alpha skincare enthusiasts are taking their newfound habit seriously.

Janice Miller, a VP at the marketing agency The Bliss Group, told BI her 13-year-old daughter and friends spend "a huge amount of money" on skincare products at Sephora and Ulta Beauty.

"She gets up an hour before I do to do her skincare regimen in the morning, and she also has a regimen at night and never misses it," Miller said.

When Miller asked her daughter what she likes about buying skincare, she said she started getting interested in it because she had acne a couple of years ago. It cleared up after visiting a dermatologist, who recommended special creams, as well as medicated sunscreen and moisturizer. After seeing the effects, she was hooked.

"Whenever there's a special occasion, I ask my parents to get me products, and my friends also give me products, and we sometimes trade," she said. "I had about $1,000 saved up last year, but I've spent most of it on products, so I don't have any money left."

Jenny Grant Rankin, an educational researcher and author, told BI her 14-year-old daughter, Piper Virginia Rankin, also spends all her money on skincare.

Piper told BI she started getting interested in it when she was 11, from family, friends, and social media, and now her routine makes her feel "comfortable, confident, and hygienic."

Usually, she gets her recommendations from her peers on social media, she said.

Antiaging products

Medical and marketing experts are noticing a skincare boom, too.

Valerie Aparovich, a certified cosmetologist-aesthetician and the science team lead at the skincare product scanner OnSkin, told BI there has been "unprecedented Gen Alpha engagement" on the app this year.

Aparovich said she has seen Gen Alpha girls posting "get ready with me" videos on YouTube and TikTok, where they show off and recommend the skincare products they use.

Shayan Cheraghlou, a resident physician at NYU School of Medicine, told BI skincare is a "huge trend" that he has observed at pediatric dermatology clinics, but with a concerning side effect.

"I've seen kids using expensive vitamin C serums that are completely unnecessary for their age group," he said, as well as some antiaging products, such as retinol, that can damage young skin.

There isn't a simple answer to why anyone aged 14 and under is interested in antiaging products.

Miller and Rankin's daughters both said antiaging wasn't something they thought about during their beauty hauls. It may be that young consumers don't understand the difference between the products that are beneficial and the ones that aren't.

However, a recent study by the wellness brand Thorne and YouGov looked into Gen Alpha's sentiment around aging. The survey of nearly 3,000 respondents included 537 US-based 13- to 17-year-olds who were asked about antiaging, skincare, and beauty.

The study found that 15% of the Gen Alpha kids felt depressed about aging and that 51% of them would spend more than $100 a month to slow or combat aging, compared to 24% of millennials and 15% of Gen Z.

Gen Alphas surveyed were also four times more worried about wrinkles and fine lines than other generations.

Where influences lie

It may be that Gen Alpha kids are learning from their parents as children of millennials and Gen Zers.

Zoomers under age 30 are helping drive demand for injectables such as filler and Botox, BI's Eve Upton-Clark reported, with tweakments being the latest status symbol. The number of Botox injections in the US, in particular, jumped by 73% between 2019 and 2022.

It's "worth noting" that millennials were the ones to popularize "get ready with me" content and makeup tutorials on social media, Dr. Geeta Yadav, a board-certified dermatologist and the founder of FACET Dermatology, told BI.

She said she thinks children in Gen Alpha have been influenced by content creators and their older relatives, similar to how Y2K fashion is having a resurgence.

Dr. Yadav said she thinks there is some component of anxiety regarding aging with this trend, and older generations could be partially to blame.

"Those who came of age in the early 00s and before were subjected to horribly aggressive and demeaning beauty standards, which damaged a lot of women's self-esteem and self-image," she said.

Learning not to pass along that messaging, which is deeply ingrained, can be incredibly difficult, she added.

There have been positive shifts regarding beauty standards, more size inclusivity, and young consumers demanding more skin tone diversity and range with their products. But "aging is one hurdle that we have yet to cross," Dr. Yadav said, especially with so many advances in skincare that make people look younger for longer.

"As millennials continue to age and continue to obsess about looking young, that can send a very loud message to Gen Alpha about aging and beauty standards," she said.

Alexandra Forsyth, a consumer retail and cyber security expert at AFRG, told BI she doesn't believe Gen Alphas are particularly interested in antiaging, but brands are pushing their messaging onto them.

"This raises eyebrows but also prompts serious questions about the influences shaping this young generation," she said.

Forsyth said children, sometimes as young as seven or eight, are posting about their skincare routines. Some tweens spoke with Mashable about their adult skincare habits, and one, named Maeve, suggested the fad was more about having what everyone else has.

"I didn't know I wanted it, and then when I see that someone else has it and how they use it, I realize it's something I'd actually use a lot," she said.

So it may be that they're doing much of the heavy lifting of marketing campaigns themselves.

"It's not necessarily that they're looking toward older people to influence them," Forsyth said. "They're influencing each other."

• Patrick Synge fired one of his employees for secretly working a second remote job.
• He shared how he caught the employee and why he decided to fire them. 
• He said overemployment is "unethical" and hurts worker productivity. 

This as-told-to essay is based on an email conversation with Patrick Synge, the cofounder and CEO of the business process outsourcing and remote recruitment company Metrickal. The business is headquartered in Barcelona and has 10 full-time, fully remote employees, in addition to over 200 contractors worldwide. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm the CEO of a business where every employee works fully remotely. In January, I caught one of them secretly working a second full-time remote job.

Here's how it all played out — and why I decided to fire them.

My business is headquartered in Barcelona, but one of my employees was based in Peru. He was hired in 2022, and in the beginning, he did his job very well. But then, I started to receive complaints from clients about missed assignments and deadlines. He had also become quite unresponsive. These complaints from clients started to become somewhat regular.

When this employee started refusing certain shifts he usually worked, I became suspicious. I had a feeling that he was doing something on the side, but because there was no proof, I didn't want to jump to any conclusions.

So instead, I had one-on-one meetings with him to discuss his job performance. When the same issues continued, I told him that if things didn't change, I'd have to let him go.

While he showed some signs of improvement, his overall performance didn't change much. This put a significant burden on the rest of the team, who had to cover his shifts and deal with missed deadlines.

How I ultimately caught him

In December, unrelated to this particular employee, my company rolled out the time-tracking software called DeskTime.

My long-term goal is to introduce a four-day workweek at my company, and I decided the first step in this process would be understanding how my employees spend their time and what could be optimized to boost productivity.

So our entire team of full-time employees and freelance contractors started using DeskTime. They each had to install the app on their computers, so everyone was well aware that this was being implemented.

After a few weeks, I looked through the tracking data of the struggling employee and noticed there was another company's name — a US business — that regularly appeared in the data. It became clear to me that this employee had worked on some other company's tasks.

I fired them the next day.

The DeskTime data showed that the employee was using software during the workday that was unrelated to his job tasks. It also included a screenshot feature that captured his computer screen — and showed him working on a platform where the other company's name was visible.

Based on the DeskTime data, I estimate that he had spent close to half of his work time working for this other company. It seems that he forgot about the tracking software since once it's downloaded, it doesn't require any manual switching on and off.

To be honest, all the other signs — missed deadlines, lack of flexibility, and unresponsiveness at certain times — had already made me quite certain that he was doing something else during working hours. I would have probably fired him anyway, but the tracked data was the missing hard proof.

I believe he was working for the other company full-time because soon after I fired him, he updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect that he was working full-time at the other company.

Why I think overemployment is unethical

I know some people may judge me, but I really don't support the trend of overemployment. I think it's unethical and just wrong.

First of all, I don't think it's fair to the rest of the team who have to cover up for someone else's low performance. This is why keeping this employee of mine in the company wasn't an option. He wasn't fair and respectful to the team, and that's something I can't tolerate — his actions were just selfish.

Secondly, I don't believe a person can productively do two jobs at the same time, even if you use AI or other tools. Their attention will be scattered, so the quality of their work will suffer. As an entrepreneur, I have to think about my business and clients first. I can't afford to lose clients because someone wants to make extra money.

I really don't mind people having side hustles to earn extra income. But this should be something they do on their own time and that doesn't affect the quality of their day job.

Are you working multiple remote jobs at the same time and willing to provide details about your pay and schedule? Has a coworker or employee of yours done so? If so, reach out to this reporter at jzinkula@businessinsider.com.

• Workers aged 50-64 are most likely to be fully on-site or work from home full time, new data shows.
• Workers in that age group are least likely to work hybrid, compared to nearly a third of workers aged 20-29.
• Supercommuting has increased by 32% post-pandemic, with older workers divided on work preferences.

America's older workers aren't the type to spend some days at home in pajamas — they're more likely to go all in on the in-office hustle.

New data from the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, a monthly survey that has been running since May 2020, found that workers aged 50-64, which spans older Gen X and younger boomers, are fully on-site the most — and are also the most likely to work from home full time. The survey examined where workers of different ages clocked in from February through May 2024.

This contrasts with Gen Zers and younger millennials, who are the least likely to be fully on-site and most likely to be hybrid.

According to the data, which measured over 13,200 workers, those aged 50-64 were fully on-site more than two-thirds of the time, over 11 percentage points more than those 20-29. Meanwhile, those 20-29 were most likely of any age demographic to work hybrid at nearly a third, almost double the rate of those 50-64.

Still, those 50-64 were most likely to work fully remotely, while those 20-29 were least likely. The authors defined a full workday as six or more hours.

Overall, about 27% of all paid days in May 2024 were worked remotely, down slightly from earlier this year. Among employees able to work from home, nearly 38% have zero work-from-home days, while those in the finance and information sectors are likelier to have two to three remote days. Employees able to work from home predict that a year from now, their employer plans for them to work 2.2 days each week from home.

This data comes as supercommuting — workers traveling over 75 miles to their jobs — is on the rise, according to research by Stanford University economists Nick Bloom and Alex Finan. Supercommuting increased by 32% post-pandemic, while the share of commuters over 40 miles across the country's 10 largest cities also saw a large uptick.

Jose Maria Barrero, one of the survey's lead researchers and an assistant professor of finance at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) Business School, told BI that he believes two effects are driving the "polarization" among older workers.

"On one hand, those older workers need less mentoring and networking than younger ones. That means they can afford to be fully remote and might feel really comfortable doing things on their own," Barrero said. "On the other hand, these folks have decades of experience and habit coming into the office. So that muscle memory might push them to come in more often than younger workers who embrace hybrid."

Indeed, many older workers BI has spoken to are divided on whether they want to be in-office or at home — but they're willing to leave roles that don't cater to their preferences. Dennis C., a 65-year-old, quit a six-figure job when his managers wanted him to return to the office three days a week.

"When they said that I was going to have to come back, I sent them an email saying I'm retiring," he previously told BI. He took a slight pay cut to move into a fully remote role.

Conversely, 62-year-old Charles Bond decided to retire early rather than work remotely. He said he didn't want to bring his work home with him, and he liked being around others on his team; they're still friends.

"I need to be around people. I enjoyed my team. I worked there 27 years," Bond previously told BI. "There were people there that had worked there just as long as me, if not longer. They were like a family. They were like my second family."

Do you strongly prefer in-office or remote work? Contact these reporters at jkaplan@businessinsider.com and nsheidlower@businessinsider.com.

Open up Instagram and see how quickly your feed is interrupted by a piece of suggested content or an ad. It will likely be the second or third thing you see. Open up Facebook, and you'll see much the same thing: recommendations to join random groups, AI-generated content, or comments from scammers hawking cryptocurrency.

Over on Google, you'll find similar decay. Search results are worse than ever, chock-full of spam, generic affiliate-monetizing content, and unhelpful links. Worse still, Google is now testing using AI-generated answers in search results, leading to recommendations to put glue on your pizza.

One might think the outright deterioration of their core products would be a problem for these companies, but Meta (home to Instagram and Facebook) and Alphabet (Google and YouTube's parent company) are still raking in cash. Alphabet beat first-quarter expectations in late April and announced its first-ever dividend, along with a $70 billion stock buyback. Meta's first-quarter profits more than doubled from the same period last year thanks to $36 billion in advertising revenue, a 27% increase from the year before.

The fundamental disconnect between the user experience and the companies' financial results is the result of what I call the Rot Economy — a push by executives to turn companies into insatiable revenue-growth machines at the cost of consumer happiness and product functionality. This disastrous mindset has hollowed out Silicon Valley's ability to innovate and caused regular people to grow increasingly frustrated with everyday tech.

The large platforms have generally ignored this feedback for one big reason: The tech industry has been taken over by career managers. The upper echelons of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies — OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Adobe, Meta — are dominated not by people who know how to build but by MBAs, management consultants, and pencil pushers.

What can save these companies is returning the tech industry to the people who actually build tech to solve problems, creating sustainable, meaningful markets based on fulfilling customer needs rather than increasingly complex growth machines that make customers' lives worse for profit.

Developers build it, managers tear it up

Builders dominated Silicon Valley's early years. Companies like Apple and Hewlett Packard were literally built in garages, as was Adobe, which was started by two computer scientists who left Xerox and developed PostScript, a pioneering language specifically built for printers. Both HP and Adobe now have CEOs with MBAs, and both companies have focused on creating shareholder value over meaningful innovation.

In recent years, this tradition of growth through development has been replaced by a desire to hack growth by subtly changing how information is presented — say, in notifications or in the content feed — to make users do things or spend more time on a platform. Instagram's founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, both programmers, were promised autonomy when Facebook acquired the company, but in May 2018 they found themselves ruled by a new master: Adam Mosseri, a former vice president of Facebook News Feed, who started his career as a designer and spent most of his time as a project manager. Systrom and Krieger clashed with Mosseri and Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook's encroaching on Instagram's independence, causing them to leave by September 2018. Since then, Instagram has gradually worsened, becoming more aggressively algorithmic and forcing users to see an endless flow of suggested videos, to the point where Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian begged Mosseri to "stop trying to be TikTok." Mosseri is not a technologist or a developer, and the mindset of a person who can't build things but wants to make a company money is always going to be to change the product to make it more profitable rather than more useful.

This pattern of replacing product-driven people with disconnected managers has been repeated across Silicon Valley. And even when nominally tech-steeped executives take the reins at major platforms, the management-consultant, growth-at-all-costs mindset still seems to seep in.

Take Google, for one particularly gruesome example. Sundar Pichai, who became CEO in 2015, was previously a product manager, a powerful nontechnical role that makes calls about a product they have no hand in building. Under Pichai, the current leader of Google's core products is Prabhakar Raghavan. Nominally, Raghavan seems like the kind of person who would be committed to pushing products forward — he's a trained computer scientist who has authored academic papers in the field. But when he joined Google, he specifically did so as management, in what became one of the strangest moments of class treachery in tech-industry history.

In 2019, Raghavan's ad and revenue teams began to clash with Google's main search team, then headed by Ben Gomes, a career technologist who helped build Google's search from the ground up. According to emails released as part of the Department of Justice's recent antitrust case against Google, the search team was formally flagged because its revenue was down and there wasn't enough growth in "queries," as in the volume of searches. Gomes, worried about Google's advertising arm influencing search, wrote that the push to increase queries seemed to be driven by the advertising team's rapacious hunger for growth and that his search unit was getting "too close to the money." Even after a round of changes resolved the search team's review, Raghavan said that "core query softness continued without mitigation" — in layman's terms, people were still not searching on Google enough.

This represents the difference between a long-term, product-focused strategy and a short-term, cash-focused strategy. Having more people searching for more things is a good goal, but you also want to give people the answer for which they're searching. Having to rephrase a query five or six times to find an answer not only is frustrating but undermines the usefulness of the core product. Focusing solely on the number of searches runs contrary to the point of a search engine, as you're optimizing to make a user do "more" rather than help them complete a query.

Google eventually rolled out a more radical change to how ads were shown in search, and just over a year later Raghavan was made head of search, with Gomes relegated to senior vice president of education. Now Google Search is more profitable and worse, elevating spammy content and outright scams, a problem exacerbated by artificial intelligence.

The fundamental difference is that builders are solutions-driven and managers are metrics-driven. The management-consultant mindset is founded not in understanding or respect for technology but in what can be extracted from technology. Fundamentally, management-driven organizations are looking not to build things to fix consumers' pain points but to prioritize a nebulous kind of "efficiency" that only makes products worse.

Vision and focus

People have lost faith in Silicon Valley over the past decade in large part because it has failed to deliver on its core promise: making our lives better through technology. There was a time when Facebook and Google were respectable, profitable businesses that connected the world; chasing the dragon of perpetual growth has turned them against their users, making their products worse as a means of extracting more capital. Useful products are profitable products, but returning to utility will require both these companies and Wall Street to remember that growth is not eternal and that eventually users will be driven out when the products themselves turn against them.

But today's tech products feel built to sell a dream of the future rather than solve a customer's existing pains. The recent AI hype train seems to be totally divorced from reality — a survey from the Reuters Institute at Oxford University found that very few people were actually using generative AI products like ChatGPT. Yet tech continues to try to force questionably useful ideas down our throats based on the idea that someday AI could do something, even though it's not clear whether it's actually possible.

All of this should make you deeply suspicious of any promises made about the future of artificial intelligence by the current crop of Silicon Valley executives. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has spent the vast majority of his career (badly) managing companies, is not the technical power behind OpenAI, nor has he been successful at anything other than making himself and his friends rich. So it's no surprise that top technical talent like the AI-governance researcher Helen Toner and the famed computer scientist Ilya Sutskever have left the company while people like Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary, and Fidji Simo, the Instacart CEO and former head of the Facebook app at Meta — a career project manager — have come aboard. This might also explain why companies like Google and OpenAI so regularly make promises about AI they can't seem to keep — because the people making the promises don't participate in fulfilling them and don't really understand what it would take to do so.

Silicon Valley has become dominated by people who want to be Steve Jobs while also sharing Jobs' utter lack of respect for Steve Wozniak, the technical mind who made the company succeed. As long as the tech industry is controlled by people who don't build things, it will continue to build products that help raise growth metrics rather than help consumers with tangible problems.

A better tech industry is one where executives default to engineers, where success is derived not just from a company's ability to grow every quarter but from its ability to improve the lives of its customers. Google, Instagram, and Facebook were created by, built by, and grown by engineers who wanted to connect and help people rather than find increasingly obtuse ways to grow revenue.

Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a national tech and business public-relations agency. He is also the author of the tech and culture newsletter Where's Your Ed At and the host of the "Better Offline" podcast.

• Jeff Bezos has reclaimed the title of the world's richest person from luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault.
• Bezos, Amazon's cofounder, now leads Bloomberg's Billionaires Index with a $209 billion net worth.
• Bezos, Arnault, and Elon Musk have swapped places frequently atop the list in recent years.

Jeff Bezos has reclaimed the top spot as the world's richest person once again.

According to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index, the Amazon cofounder has dethroned Bernard Arnault and now ranks first among the world's 500 richest billionaires.

Bezos's net worth is $209 billion, and his wealth has grown by $32 billion since the start of this year as Amazon stock has jumped nearly 25%.

Arnault, the CEO and chairman of luxury goods group LVMH Moët Hennessy, has a $208 billion net worth, slightly behind Bezos.

The pair might have similar fortunes, but the routes to achieve their mega-wealth are vastly different.

Bezos owns space exploration company Blue Origin, and around 9% of Amazon, per Bloomberg, which cites an SEC filing from February.

Elon Musk is the next richest person in the world after Bezos and Arnault, with a $200 billion net worth. The top five are rounded out by Mark Zuckerberg, with a $179 billion net worth, and Google cofounder Larry Page, with a $156 billion net worth.

In March, Bezos briefly overtook Musk, who was then the world's richest person, but the Blue Origin founder has also led the rankings several times before.

Bloomberg previously reported that last month, Bezos gave $117 million, more than half of the proceeds from selling 1.1 million worth of stock over two days, to fund the preschools he founded. In 2022, he pledged to give away the majority of his wealth to charity.

One of the biggest movers on the list this year is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Thanks to Nvidia's soaring stock, he has shot up Bloomberg's rich list to rank 14th with a $107 billion fortune. Huang has added about $93 billion to his net worth in under 18 months.

Representatives for Bezos at Amazon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

• The Federal Reserve is likely to hold interest rates steady in its next decision on Wednesday.
• It follows a strong jobs report and still-high inflation.
• It'll likely take longer for the Fed to cut interest rates given recent economic data.

Americans shouldn't expect interest rate cuts to head their way anytime soon.

The Federal Open Market Committee will announce its next interest rate decision on Wednesday, and following a hot jobs report, there's a strong chance rates will once again remain steady. According to the CME FedWatch Tool, which estimates the likelihood the Federal Reserve will change interest rates based on market predictions, there's a 99.4% chance rates will stay where they are as of Monday.

While the FOMC forecast three interest rate cuts this year in its December projections, Fed Chair Jerome Powell has reiterated throughout the year that nothing is set in stone, and the nation's central bank is willing to hold out as long as necessary until it feels confident the economy has cooled down enough.

"The first quarter in the United States was notable for its lack of further progress on inflation," Powell said during a panel in Amsterdam in May.

"We did not expect this to be a smooth road, but these were higher than I think anybody expected," Powell added. "What that has told us is that we'll need to be patient and let restrictive policy do its work."

The Consumer Price Index increased 3.4% for the 12 months ending April, which means it's still elevated. The next CPI report will be published on Wednesday morning. And the US labor market saw some strength in May — the US economy added 272,000 jobs that month, which was way above economists' expectations.

"We have a very interesting labor market," Julia Pollak, the chief economist for ZipRecruiter, told Business Insider. "It's not the old normal. It's the new normal where employers are slower to fire, slower to hire, and workers are slower to switch jobs. That could be both a good thing and a bad thing.

"It may be bad, partly, because it is driven in part by uncertainty and fear and high interest rates holding back activity," Pollak added. "But, it's good in other ways because some of it has to do with the fact that jobs got better during the pandemic."

The unemployment rate also ticked up to 4.0% in May; the last time it was this rate was back in January 2022. Nick Bunker, the economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said May's rate is "still quite low historically."

Still, Joseph Briggs, an economist at Goldman Sachs, told Business Insider that while rate cuts "have been delayed somewhat by the stickier Q1 inflation, we do think that we're still on track two this year starting in September."

Powell previously outlined what it would take to cut rates. During May's press conference following the FOMC's decision to hold rates steady, Powell said there are two paths that would give the Fed enough confidence to cut rates: more data to show inflation is getting closer to the Fed's 2% target or an "unexpected weakening in the labor market."

"If we did have a path where inflation proves more persistent than expected, and where the labor market remains strong but inflation is moving sideways, and we're not gaining greater confidence, that would be a case in which it could be appropriate to hold off on rate cuts," Powell said.

David Kelly, the chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, also told BI last week two rate cuts could happen this year.

"I think that there'll be enough softness and coolness in the economy for them to begin to cut rates this year," Kelly said. "And if I had to bet, I bet that we will get two rate cuts, one in September and one in December."

Some Democratic lawmakers have been pushing the Fed to cut rates and give Americans some breathing room, especially after the European Central Bank cut rates earlier in June for the first time in five years. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Jacky Rosen, and John Hickenlooper pointed to the ECB's actions as a sign that it's time for the US central bank to follow suit in a letter to Powell on Monday.

"The Fed's decision to keep interest rates highs continues to widen the rate gap between Europe and the U.S, as the lower interest rates could push the dollar higher, tightening financial conditions," they wrote, adding: "You have kept interest rates too high for too long: it is time to cut rates."

• Nandita Gupta became an accessibility product manager at Microsoft after starting her career in a factory.
• Inspired by her grandfather's loss of sight, she returned to school and paid her way with scholarships.
• After connecting with a Microsoft recruiter, she landed a job paying double what she used to make.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nandita Gupta, an accessibility product manager at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm an accessibility product manager at Microsoft. I have electrical engineering and human-computer interaction degrees, and my internship experiences were in manufacturing and robotics research. I decided to pursue human-centered computing with a focus on manufacturing as a career.

I worked as a process controls engineer at a factory that made baby wipes for three years before quitting and returning to school in the fall of 2019.

I started working as a product manager on internal tools at Microsoft in March 2021. Since December 2021, I've worked as an accessibility product manager for Accessibility Insights, a suite of products that helps developers code with accessibility in mind. I lead the product direction, plan future initiatives, and work with teams to create enjoyable and accessible experiences for developers.

Landing my first job at Microsoft doubled my income, and I'm doing what I always wanted to do — make an impact.

In 2019, I found myself at a crossroads as a process controls engineer

As a young girl, I saw my grandfather lose his eyesight, which left an indelible mark on my career choices. I yearned for a purpose beyond manufacturing and dreamed of helping people like my grandfather. There came a moment in my manufacturing job when I asked myself, "What am I doing? What happened to helping people like Grandpa?"

I took a leap of faith and left my stable job to pursue my passion for accessibility. I invested my savings into a single semester of graduate school with plans to apply for scholarships and assistantships, a decision that was both terrifying and exhilarating.

I was determined to apply for every scholarship to earn my degree. When my bank balance headed toward zero, I secured a graduate assistantship and received my first scholarship. In February 2020, I earned the Google Lime Scholarship, worth $10,000, which covered the rest of my graduate program.

As they told me I had been awarded that scholarship over the phone, I cried tears of relief. I had been sinking into depression the previous few months and was consumed by financial worries. Receiving this scholarship was one of the most emotional moments of my life.

The COVID-19 pandemic added new uncertainty

My journey to Microsoft was not easy, but I wouldn't change anything about it.

When the pandemic hit, the summer internship I had lined up was canceled, and my job prospects seemed bleak. I tried to connect with companies and finally connected with a Microsoft recruiter at a virtual networking event. I shared my passion for accessibility and inclusion with the recruiter, and they said it was something they needed at the company.

The meeting led to a quick screening with HR, followed by a four-round interview loop and, finally, a job offer. Taking the Microsoft job doubled my earnings from my last job — my annual income was around $75,000 in manufacturing, and the move to Microsoft brought my total compensation to over $170,000. My work schedule is flexible, and I typically work around 50 hours a week.

Accessibility resonates deeply with me

Accessibility is not just personal — it's a fundamental human right. My mission is to inspire others to design and deliver products that are accessible and inclusive, ensuring individuals like my grandfather feel seen and valued.

One of the most impactful accessibility initiatives I've been involved in is my collaboration with Zoo Atlanta as a graduate researcher. Our team crafted an inclusive experience for Zoo Atlanta visitors, particularly emphasizing those with visual impairments.

Another exciting project I worked on was Shifting Left to Get Accessibility Right at Microsoft. The case study showcases the importance of proactive accessibility and how the organization implemented a culture of accessibility.

Don't leave a single stone unturned in your pursuit of your dream

It's important to embrace a life-long learning mindset. When trying to pivot my career, I used resources like TED Talks, the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center, and MasterClass to gain insights from experts. I then gave my own TEDx Talk through the TEDx Georgia Tech organization.

It's better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all. Every decision you make will teach you valuable lessons, and even if you don't end up where you originally intended, there will be something to gain.

Have you doubled your income by pivoting your career and want to share your story? Email Lauryn Haas at lhaas@businessinsider.com.

• At WWDC, Apple unveiled "Apple Intelligence."
• It will power useful and friendly features like being able to prioritize notifications. 
• This is a gentler, less scary version of AI. It's for regular people. 

Does AI freak you out? If it doesn't, does a little part of you wonder … shouldn't it? Is AI going to replace you at your job? Will it enable state-run misinformation campaigns? Will artificial general intelligence instigate some World War III scenario that leads to the destruction of the human race, like some AI doomers think? Will it tell you to eat glue?

Don't worry — Apple is here to smooth over your fears about big bad AI, give you a cup of warm milk, tuck you into your cozy bed, and stroke your hair until you fall asleep. At the keynote presentation for its yearly developer conference on Monday, Apple finally unveiled its AI intentions.

Unlike Google's recent event that showed off futurist things like AI search results (which ended up an embarrassment) or OpenAI's keynote in May — which caused a scandal over the similarity of the company's voice assistant to Scarlett Johansson's voice, and where the abilities of its technology seemed uncanny and freaky — Apple's demonstration was familiar and seemed practical, like something you could actually use.

(One couldn't help notice Apple actually had the real Scarlett Johansson in its keynote — in clips for "Fly Me to the Moon," her upcoming Apple TV+ movie.)

It's not 'artificial intelligence,' it's 'Apple Intelligence'

And in Apple's new AI world, we start with one rule: Don't call it "artificial intelligence." It's "Apple Intelligence."

What's the difference, you ask? Haha! Don't worry about the details or Apple's deal with OpenAI! Just focus on the nice, pleasing things it can do.

Apple Intelligence can perform simple and useful functions. One demo involved someone needing to pick up her mom from the airport. Siri can pull up flight details from an email, pull up tracking, and find lunch reservation details that were messaged in a text. Helpful! Not intimidating!

Another feature is in the Mail app. Apple isn't suggesting that it can write an email for you; rather, it can help you lightly revise an email to be in a different tone. (Options include "professional," "concise," or "friendly.")

Apple is giving you the baby steps of generative AI here — not trying to suggest it can do the work of humans, just brush it up a little.

It will also be able to sort your emails into categories: primary, transactions, updates, or promotions, which is great (but also … Gmail has been doing this for a decade). Additionally, it will use AI to prioritize your notifications and allow you to enable a "reduce notifications" mode (ahhhh, yes!).

Apple Intelligence wasn't mindblowing

Still, some of the other generative things were purely goofy/cutesy, like the AI version of Memoji. With this tool, you can create a cartoon image of your friend to wish them a happy birthday. It's truly stupid. Please know that if you send me a generative Memoji of myself, we are now enemies.

These are small enhancements, and a lot of them already could exist in other ways, like recording and transcribing phone calls or photo-editing tools to remove an object from the background of a picture. (Android users are probably laughing right now.)

Nothing was mindblowing or a totally radical new way of using artificial Apple Intelligence. There was no "wow" feature or jaw-dropping moment. It was just a bunch of small, helpful things that will make iPhones and computers a little more convenient to do things they're already doing.

AI for normies

And that's probably a good way of introducing AI to the iPhone-owning normies of the world. People are — rightfully — a little skeptical of AI and worried about extreme advancements that could harm humanity. And with this, Apple gets no embarrassing bad results from AI-generated answers!

Apple was, of course, very proud to thump its privacy bonafides over its competitors — explicitly suggesting that you can't trust other companies. (Well, they might have a point there.)

And all of these new AI features will require an iPhone 15 or the upcoming 16 when it launches later this year. Which, of course, leads to the question: Will any of these new AI features make you want to actually upgrade your phone?