• Li Auto workers are facing layoffs or minimum wage due to weak electric vehicle sales.
• China's auto sector is struggling with overproduction, impacting domestic and international markets.
• Western concerns over subsidies and overcapacity add pressure as Chinese EV makers seek new markets.

As China grapples with manufacturing overproduction, some workers at one of China's auto plants face a difficult choice about their jobs.

Newlywed Lisa told Nikkei on Tuesday that in her brand-new factory for Li Auto, more than 1,000 employees like her were given the choice of either quitting or receiving minimum wage until business improves.

"We were told that our pure electric vehicle sales are weak due to the bad conditions, so the company has to cut production," said 27-year-old Lisa, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to Nikkei. "I will try to find a job. Otherwise, I will be starving to death."

Local media reported last month that Li Auto was planning to cut 18% of its workforce.

Li Auto delivered 80,400 cars in the first three months of the year, up 53% from the same period last year — but down 39% from the last quarter of 2023, per its financial results. The company did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Tesla, by comparison, delivered 386,810 cars in the first quarter — down 8.5% from a year ago, and 20% from the prior quarter.

Li Auto's financials are emblematic of the arc of China's electric vehicle industry. Car makers scaled up production quickly but have struggled to drum up enough demand for all their cars, especially as domestic consumers face a real estate crisis and volatile stock market.

Some of those automakers are looking to other countries as bigger markets, but politicians seeking to protect local manufacturers are cutting China off. Last month, the White House said it would impose a 100% tax on Chinese-made EVs.

Yao Xiaodong, an official for a Chinese EV group, said at a recent meeting that manufacturers could "either go overseas or go bust," Nikkei reported.

Chinese leaders have publicly said that the West's focus on supposed overproduction is election-year posturing.

But Western investors and politicians have been raising red flags about overcapacity for years, saying the Chinese government's huge manufacturing subsidies have led to cheap goods that distort the global market.

"China is now simply too large for the rest of the world to absorb this enormous capacity," US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said at a press conference in April.

China, meanwhile, is primarily concerned about factory underutilization and competition leading to too many unprofitable companies, BI reported last month.

Underutilization or closures of factories like Lisa's means less tax revenue for regional governments who have often borrowed significant sums for local development, fewer materials purchased from other Chinese companies, and an unemployed or underemployed workforce.

• Elon Musk reportedly discussed buying a tiny home from a Tesla board director, per Reuters.
• The Tesla CEO vowed to "own no house" in 2020, but BI found he bought an Austin house in 2022.
• Musk reportedly expressed interest in a factory-made house from Samara.

Elon Musk, who famously vowed to "own no house" in 2020 and claimed in 2022 that he was effectively homeless and couch surfing at his friend's properties, reportedly discussed buying a tiny house from one of Tesla's board directors, per Reuters.

Joe Gebbia, who cofounded Airbnb and prefabricated housing startup Samara, told Reuters that he stepped down from a special committee set up by Tesla's board to examine the company's possible move out of Delaware because of a "potential business transaction" involving Musk and Samara.

Samara sells prefabricated homes that cost from $269,000 to over $414,000.

Gebbia said the transaction was "currently on hold" but had decided to step down from the committee even after company lawyers concluded there was no conflict of interest out of an "abundance of caution."

"I did not want Elon's status as a potential customer of Samara to be used against the committee, so I disclosed that I had put that potential business transaction on hold," Gebbia said in a statement shared with Reuters.

Business Insider was unable to reach Gebbia for comment.

Musk has spoken often about his semi-nomadic lifestyle since 2020, when he tweeted that he was "selling almost all physical possessions" and would "own no house."

The Tesla CEO listed five of his luxurious properties on Zillow weeks later. In an April 2022 interview, he said he didn't own a home and was couch-surfing at friends' houses.

However, Business Insider reviewed court documents from December of the billionaire's custody dispute with his former girlfriend, Grimes, and found that Musk had purchased a house in Austin in February 2022 and still lived there.

Musk has also lived in a prefabricated property in the past. In 2021, he tweeted that he lived in a $50,000 house that he rented from SpaceX. He later said he used another prefab house, made by startup Boxabl, as a guest house.

Samara, which started out as a design studio at Airbnb before becoming an independent company in 2022, offers a range of different models, from a $269,000 studio option to a $414,000 two-bedroom, two-bathroom "Backyard XL" option.

After a foundation is laid and permits secured, the houses are driven to the property by a truck and then craned into place, which takes just a few hours.

Samara recently acquired a 150,000-square-foot factory in Mexico, which the company said would enable it to produce 1,000 properties yearly.

Elon Musk, Tesla, and Samara did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside normal working hours.

• India wants to unseat China as the new factory of the world.
• Modi is set to stay in power for another five years, but the results of the election are going to make it harder to beat China.
• However, analysts remain optimistic about the country's long-term growth.

India's economy is on a roll, chalking up 8.2% GDP growth in the last fiscal year and a boom in foreign investments.

The growth is in part thanks to a shift in supply chains and investment flows as companies try to stop relying solely on China.

This has boosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's appeal, sending him to a historic third term as the country's prime minister in the country's general election.

But Modi's win this time around also comes with a huge loss.

While Modi is still hugely popular in India, his party — Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP — lost its majority in Parliament, reflecting resentment among voters amid rising inequality.

"The problem is most Indians have not adequately participated in the fruits of an economy with gaudy headline numbers," wrote Atman Trivedi, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center in a Tuesday note. "Growth is unequal, and jobs are few and far between."

India's unemployment rate rose to 8.1% in April from 7.4% in March, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, a private think tank. The country has a longstanding brain drain issue.

India wants to unseat China as the factory of the world

BJP's likely loss of its majority is a testament to India's political system — but it will also make the dream of becoming the next China harder to achieve.

Decision-making and policy changes in the world's largest democracy, after all, can take far longer than they do in Communist China — a one-party state.

"Coalition governments require compromises. That reality could complicate any plans for ambitious structural reforms on land, labor, or opening India's markets to unfinished and intermediate inputs," wrote the Atlantic Council's Trivedi, who is also a partner at Albright Stonebridge Group.

India's stock markets tanked on the shock election results, with the benchmark Sensex index crashing over 5% in one day on Tuesday following the news. It rebounded on Wednesday.

Despite the knee-jerk reaction, most analysts are optimistic about India's economic outlook given that Modi is still in charge.

"Modi's broader economic reform agenda is likely to remain intact. And so, fears of India's key economic reforms unraveling are overdone," wrote Vishnu Varathan, the chief economist of Asia excluding Japan at Mizuho Bank.

India needs to get rich before it gets old

But India has a longer-term problem: aging.

India is the world's most populous country. With a 1.4 billion population, it has a huge pool of young people; 65% of its population is under the age of 35.

But aging is "rapidly progressing," according to the United Nations Population Fund. By 2050, one in every five persons in India will be 60 years old or above, the fund wrote in a report last year.

So, even though India has grown rapidly in recent years, it will need to grow much faster to get rich before it gets old, Raghuram Rajan, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, told NPR's "Planet Money" in a podcast.

It's not enough to power up India's manufacturing sector in the wake of China's breakneck growth — because so many other countries are doing the same thing, added Rajan, who is a former head of the Central Bank of India and a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

He said India will do better to capitalize on its services industry, especially since so many Indians are English speakers.

Despite its challenges, India is still expected to post healthy growth in the near future. The IMF forecasts India's economy will grow by 6.8% this fiscal year and 6.5% next fiscal year.

• This is a big year for Meta: Facebook turned 20 in February.
• The company's meteoric rise is one of Silicon Valley's biggest success stories.
• Here's how Facebook grew from a website built in a Harvard dorm to one of the world's biggest companies.

Facebook is a classic Silicon Valley success story: It's gone from an idea hatched in a Harvard dorm to one of the most powerful and influential companies in the world.

Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO and cofounder, has an estimated net worth of $170 billion. These days, Meta has more than 2 billion people using its social network monthly and is one of the world's biggest companies.

Here's the story behind Facebook's insane rise from February 2004 through to this year, its 20th anniversary:

Facebook's origin story is famous by now.

The website was created in Mark Zuckerberg's room in Harvard's Kirkland House dorm.

In 2003, Zuckerberg, then a sophomore at Harvard, built a website called Facemash.

"Facemash" was a Hot or Not-style site. Zuckerberg used pictures of his classmates that he hacked from the school administration's dormitory ID files. The site got 22,000 pageviews from 450 people in the first four hours it was up.

A few days later, Harvard ordered it to be taken down, citing copyright and security concerns. Zuckerberg faced disciplinary action from Harvard but was allowed to stay at the school.

Undeterred by the Facemash debacle, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook" on February 4, 2004.

The logo featured Al Pacino's face constructed out of zeros and ones.

Six days after the launch, three Harvard seniors claimed Zuckerberg reneged on an agreement to build a site for them and used their ideas to create what eventually became Facebook.

Divya Narendra and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss claimed Zuckerberg had agreed to build a website called HarvardConnection.com for them before abandoning them to create his own site. They eventually filed a lawsuit that was settled in 2008.

As part of the settlement, they received 1.2 million Facebook shares. Those shares were worth $300 million when Facebook had its IPO.

Within a month, half of Harvard's students were members of Thefacebook.

By March 2004, Thefacebook had expanded to other prestigious universities, including Yale, Columbia, and Stanford. Zuckerberg brought in fellow Harvard students Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes as cofounders to help manage the site's growth and build it into a business.

At this point, Zuckerberg was still running Facebook out of his dorm room, but it was time to get serious.

In 2004, he dropped out of Harvard to focus on it full-time.

In 2004, Facebook brought on its first president.

Zuckerberg hired Napster cofounder Sean Parker for the role.

In June 2004, Facebook set up shop in a tiny office in downtown Palo Alto, California.

Back then, the company was known for being as much a party hub as it was a serious startup.

This screenshot was taken from "Now Entering: a Millennial Generation," a 2008 documentary.

The same month it moved into its Palo Alto office, Facebook got its first outside funding.

The $500,000 investment came from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel. Thiel has since become a prominent venture capitalist and political donor.

By this point, Facebook was starting its rapid ascent toward cultural superstardom.

In May 2005, Facebook raised $13.7 million in funding. In 2006, Facebook created its News Feed, a breakthrough and core feature of the site that gave people a real-time stream of what their friends were doing.

In late 2007, Zuckerberg met a Google executive named Sheryl Sandberg at a Christmas party.

At the time, Sandberg was considering taking a new position with The Washington Post. But after meeting her, Zuckerberg decided Facebook needed a chief operating officer, and managed to persuade her to come aboard in early 2008.

Sandberg's hiring was prescient: Facebook was already growing quickly, but the rise of the smartphone brought with it many more users.

In 2009, Facebook moved into a slightly larger Palo Alto office in the Stanford Research Park.

The move came as Facebook's site was experiencing explosive growth. By late 2010, it hit a trillion page views a month.

That year, Facebook would introduce one of the most defining features of the platform and our broader social media landscape.

That's right, we're talking about the "like" button.

The Stanford Research Park space wouldn't hold Facebook for long. In 2011, the social network moved again.

This time it set up shop in a corporate campus once occupied by Sun Microsystems, which had fallen from grace and been acquired by Oracle.

Facebook named the campus' main thoroughfare "Hacker Way," referring to Zuckerberg's famous "move fast and break things" philosophy of the same name.

By this point, Facebook was showing that its social network could play a major role in global politics.

The site's influence was highlighted by the Egyptian revolution of 2011. That uprising was largely organized via Facebook and other social-networking sites.

Zuckerberg himself was also getting more involved in the political scene.

Among his first public political actions was to speak to world leaders in support of spreading internet access all over the globe.

The social network was becoming unstoppable.

Facebook had its historic $5 billion initial public offering on May 18, 2012.

Over the years, the company has snapped up a bunch of hot startups, including photo-sharing hit Instagram.

Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. The photo-sharing app now has more than 2 billion users.

The purchase was a demonstration of how, despite its rise, Facebook has always been on the lookout for the next startup that threatened to disrupt it.

It also bought virtual-reality headset maker Oculus.

Oculus was an early-stage startup when Facebook acquired it in March 2014 for $2 billion.

And it purchased mobile-messaging company WhatsApp — for $19 billion.

Facebook made the acquisition in February 2014, and the service now has more than 2 billion active users.

By the time Facebook turned 10 in 2014, over 1.23 billion people were visiting the social network every month.

A billion of those users were accessing the social network through their mobile devices.

The world had changed, but Facebook had kept on growing.

To support all that growth, Facebook had to move to a bigger office — again.

In March 2015, Facebook opened a new campus in Menlo Park, California. The campus was designed by legendary architect Frank Gehry to accommodate more than 2,800 employees.

For better or for worse, Zuckerberg has an iron grip on the company's voting shares.

The way Zuckerberg has structured Facebook's stock gives him disproportionate voting power that keeps him in charge, no matter what else happens to the company. So he's not losing control of the company any time soon.

Facebook had a rocky 2017, and a rockier 2018, culminating in Zuckerberg testifying in front of the United States Congress.

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, Facebook spent much of 2017 under scrutiny for its role in the spread of "fake news" and misinformation.

When it came out that firm called Cambridge Analytica had improperly obtained the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users, Zuckerberg was ultimately called to the floor of the US Congress to answer tough questions about the social network's business.

That year, Zuckerberg announced the company would create an Oversight Board that could overrule Facebook's own content management policies and even Zuck himself.

Facebook announced the first members of the oversight board in 2021.

In October 2021, Facebook rebranded.

With an eye towards the digital metaverse, Zuckerberg announced the company was changing its name to Meta.

The metaverse could be accessed by the company's virtual reality headsets, the Oculus Quest line, which was later also rebranded as the Meta Quest.

In 2022, the company lost one of its highest-ranking execs.

Sandberg stepped down as chief operating officer in 2022 after 14 years in the role. She was succeeded by Javier Olivan.

"I don't plan to replace Sheryl's role in our existing structure," Zuckerberg said at the time. "I'm not sure that would be possible since she's a superstar who defined the COO role in her own unique way.

"But even if it were possible, I think Meta has reached the point where it makes sense for our product and business groups to be more closely integrated, rather than having all the business and operations functions organized separately from our products," Zuckerberg added.

The company also suffered another blow that year.

In February 2022, it reported a decrease in daily active users for the first time in its history, going from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion in the last three months of 2021.

And the hits kept coming: The company announced the biggest job cuts in its history in November 2022.

Meta laid off 11,000 workers, roughly 13% of its workforce at the time, in its first-ever mass layoffs.

Rounding out 2022, the company agreed to pay a $725 million settlement to settle claims it shared users' data with third parties without their consent.

As part of the settlement, Meta denied wrongdoing.

The cuts continued in 2023, which Zuckerberg vowed would be a "year of efficiency."

The company announced a further 10,000 job cuts in 2023. Zuckerberg was focused on cutting organizational bloat and reportedly said he hated structures of "managers managing managers."

In July 2023, Meta launched the social networking app Threads.

It's drawn many comparisons to X, formerly Twitter, and has more than 130 million monthly active users, Zuckerberg said during Meta's fourth-quarter earnings in February.

Facebook hit a big milestone this year.

The company turned 20 on February 4, 2024. Zuckerberg himself turned 40.

Now, the company has its eyes on AI.

This January, Zuckerberg said Meta was working on building artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

Meta released its first large language model in the Llama family in February 2023. This April, it announced it's introducing AI assistant Meta AI, powered by Llama 3, to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

Matt Weinberger contributed to a previous version of this article.

Emily Nations found her slice of the good life in April. After her Nashville-area apartment flooded for a third time earlier this spring, she started to look around for a new place to live. She briefly thought about buying a home a few years ago, but that wasn't even a consideration this time around — the costs of a down payment and mortgage were too steep. Instead, she ditched her old lease and signed on at a brand-new apartment complex just north of downtown.

"The market is insane right now," Nations, a 31-year-old who works in hospitality, told me. "It makes no sense to even try and buy."

It may not be an entire home, but there's plenty to love about her one-bedroom unit — the vaulted ceilings, the "huge" walk-in closet, the natural light that spills through her windows. Outside her four walls, the chic collection of modern farmhouse buildings known as Livano Trinity offers a ton of perks: a sprawling gym, a pool with a cabana for weekend hangs, private office spaces, and even doggy day care. An on-site coffee shop serves up free daily brews to first-year tenants, while a New York-style bodega satisfies her late-night cravings.

The final kicker for Nations was the discount she got for signing: two months free. While she'll pay $1,500 in rent most months, she paid only a $95 community fee plus utilities in May and June. In the meantime, she's stashing away funds in case she decides to purchase a home down the line.

Buying a home has never been a cakewalk, but the hurdles to ownership seem more daunting than ever these days: The typical mortgage rate is hovering near a two-decade high, and there are still roughly 30% fewer homes on the market than in 2019. The median sale price reached a record $390,613 in May, according to Redfin. By contrast, a wave of apartment construction has flooded once hot markets with new studios and two-bedrooms, forcing property managers to extend olive branches if they want to lure tenants through their freshly installed doors. Step inside a newish building in places like Nashville, Salt Lake City, or Atlanta, and you'll find leasing agents hawking discounts: Eight weeks free! No fees! Comped parking! That's to say nothing of amenities such as boxing gyms, rooftop pools, and plush lounge rooms. Renters finally have some leverage — especially if they can afford the latest and greatest units.

These apartments aren't cheap, sure, but they can feel like bargains compared with the costs of buying and maintaining a home right now. Household incomes have grown faster than rents over the past year, and tenants making more than the median income now benefit from more options thanks to the influx of new apartment units. Given the divergence, more and more Americans with a taste for the finer things in life and a little cash to spare are opting to rent.

Homeownership is synonymous with wealth in America — rich people live in the land of mortgage payments, not rent checks. This setup has an easy logic to it: Homeowners enjoy equity gains and a sense of stability that rentals simply can't provide. But given the costs of breaking into the for-sale market, combined with the recent deals offered on many apartments, that assumption may be flipped on its head.

The market is insane right now. It makes no sense to even try and buy.

Landlords have always dangled concessions like rent discounts or perks in front of tenants, but the recent building boom is now paying dividends for renters looking to land a deal. Early in the pandemic, cheap borrowing rates and soaring rents encouraged developers to put shovels in the ground — more than 1.6 million new apartment units hit the market between 2020 and 2023, Yardi Matrix, a data and research firm for commercial real estate, found. The company expects another million or so units to be completed in 2024 and 2025, which would equal levels not seen since the 1970s. Much of this construction is concentrated in the kinds of sunny, cheap places that everyone dreamed of moving to during the pandemic: Houston, Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix, and Charlotte, North Carolina, among others. This boom in supply means that people in these markets may not be so desperate to land just any open unit, forcing landlords to cut deals. The typical asking rent nationwide is up only 0.7% from last year, according to Yardi Matrix, and markets such as Austin; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Tampa, Florida, have seen rents drop over the past three months. About one-third of rentals listed on Zillow are offering concessions, compared with about 10% in 2019.

"This is a much more commonplace tactic that landlords and property managers are using to get people through the door," Nicole Bachaud, a senior economist at Zillow, told me. "They're like, 'Hey, ignore that high rent price. Look, you can have this nice free thing up front.'"

Developers these days tend to focus on building new class A units, an informal classification that encompasses the newest, nicest buildings with the best amenities, which typically rent for about 30% more than class B and C units. The result is that class A units account for more than half the apartment market, compared with one-third in the early 2000s, according to Moody's Analytics. At the same time, the number of high-income renters — those earning more than $150,000 — jumped by 82% between 2015 and 2020, a RentCafe analysis of Census Bureau data found. Rich renters simply have more choices than moderate- and low-income earners.

We have people that have the incomes, make multiple six figures, but they still value getting these deals.

Joel Sanders, the founder and CEO of Apartment Insiders, a Nashville firm that helps renters like Nations find new digs free of charge, told me the city's apartment market was seeing its largest supply increase ever, which has nudged landlords to pursue a "heads in beds" strategy that favors filling units rather than jacking up rents. That bodes well for his clients.

"We have people that have the incomes, make multiple six figures, but they still value getting these deals," Sanders told me.

High-end apartments that offer amenities up the wazoo — and rent breaks, to boot — represent a tantalizing alternative to the for-sale market right now. Recent shifts in the housing market mean that the holy grail of homeownership is looking more and more like a poisoned chalice. While the number of homes for sale is rising, many sellers are loath to budge on prices after watching all their neighbors cash in during the market's peak. And the combination of spiking mortgage rates, eye-watering home prices, and increased postpurchase costs for things like maintenance and insurance has tipped the buy-versus-rent debate firmly in favor of cutting rent checks.

"The cost of renting far beats the cost of owning," Doug Ressler, the manager of business intelligence at Yardi Matrix, told me. "If I'm a guy that really wants to try and pinch my pennies and not really be tied down to a home, per se, that's what I'm going to look at."

And renters can put those cost savings to work. Sure, they may be missing out on the value of building equity in a home, but David Brasington, an economist at the University of Cincinnati, previously told Business Insider that average returns in the stock market over the past 50 years had well-outpaced home-equity gains (though he also noted that the stock market is more volatile and doesn't provide you with a place to lay your head at night). Renters may choose to sock away money for a better time to buy or invest the funds they'd otherwise be spending on stuff like a new roof or interest on a home loan.

The sheer number of new units hitting lease-up right now is enough to encourage apartment operators to continue offering perks to draw in new tenants and prevent the existing ones from jumping to the next best thing. But as with all good things, the golden age for America's wealthy renters must also come to an end. While the number of multifamily units expected to be completed next year is a still robust 459,000, according to Yardi Matrix, the end of this construction wave is in sight. Developers are feeling the pinch of higher interest rates and are wary of flooding markets with more supply. As a result, they were on pace to start construction on 245,000 units this year as of March, according to the Census Bureau, down from highs of more than 600,000 in 2022. This means that you can expect the sweetheart deals for renters to trail off near the end of 2025 and into 2026, Ressler told me.

"The supply cliff is going to come real soon," Ressler told me. "In other words, starts are already slowing down."

The upside for renters, though, is that the cliff hasn't arrived yet. Those in the market can expect more options and better bargains than what was on offer just a year ago, particularly if they're eyeing a top-end unit in a city with a lot of construction cranes on the horizon. So, for now, the formula for wealthier lessees is straightforward: Ride out the good times, sock away the extra cash that isn't going toward plumbing fixes or gym memberships, and check back in on the homebuying landscape when the rental market heats up again.

Nations told me she still hoped to buy a home one day. But the timeline of her parents' generation — get married, buy a house, have kids — no longer matches the reality for her or many of her peers, she said. Luckily, though, she had another option.

"I know how challenging it is to rent in Nashville, especially on your own," Nations told me. "If you don't have a roommate or a partner, it can feel overwhelming and impossible. This was literally an answered prayer."

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.

• Jack Smith moved to gag Trump from claiming the FBI plotted to kill him during the Mar-a-Lago raid.
• The motion could reveal a pro-Trump bias if Judge Aileen Cannon denies it, experts told BI.
• "Any normal judge" would issue an order to protect witnesses, said a former federal prosecutor.

Special counsel Jack Smith and lawyers for Donald Trump are fighting over a proposed gag order that would prevent the former president from claiming the FBI plotted to assassinate him during their August 2022 raid on Mar-A-Lago.

But, in addition to preventing Trump from making false and inflammatory claims about witnesses in his classified documents case, legal experts told Business Insider that the motion filed by Smith on May 31 could also reveal whether Judge Aileen Cannon is biased in Trump's favor, as critics from across the legal spectrum have alleged.

Accusations of pro-Trump bias

Judge Cannon, appointed by Trump in 2020, has been accused of having a pro-Trump bias after making several unusual decisions in his favor. She has overseen cases involving accusations that Trump illegally kept classified documents from his time in the White House in violation of the Espionage Act.

In 2022, as part of a separate lawsuit Trump brought, attacking the FBI's investigation, the judge sided with the former president's legal team when she ruled the government's witness list should be unsealed.

One of her rulings in Smith's criminal case against Trump was also reversed on appeal by the conservative 11th Circuit appeals court after she moved to appoint a special master to oversee the review of classified documents seized from Mar-A-Lago.

On May 7, Cannon handed Trump's camp another legal win when she delayed the case indefinitely by scheduling a flurry of additional hearings through July to rule on "myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA issues," referencing the Classified Information Procedures Act before the trial could begin.

Known for his personal attacks on the judges overseeing cases against him, The Washington Post reported Trump has instead described Cannon as "highly respectable." And allies of the former president joked to Rolling Stone she is their "favorite member of the Trump campaign" and a "godsend."

Cannon's decisions have drawn sharp criticisms from legal experts across the political spectrum, including attorney George Conway, the ex-husband of former Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway, as well as Ty Cobb, a former lawyer for the Trump White House, who told CNN Cannon's rulings in Trump's favor appear to be "her attempt to put her thumb on the scale."

'She should recuse'

For some attorneys and former prosecutors who spoke to Business Insider, Cannon's actions create an appearance of a conflict of interest so significant that they believe she should recuse herself or be removed from the case by a higher court.

"She is a judge in a case where the president who appointed her is one of the litigants. That is all that should be necessary to force a reasonable person to question her impartiality," Tracy Pearson, a former trial and appellate lawyer, told BI."If the case were being defended by her former law firm, she would need to recuse. Here, the case is against the person who hired her. She should recuse."

Others aren't so sure: Rather than bias, it's possible Cannon is overly cautious about exercising her judicial powers due to her relative inexperience, Kevin McMunigal, a former federal prosecutor, told BI.

"I'd say she's just being sort of very careful about how she goes about this, not wanting to make an obvious mistake and get turned around like she did," McMunigal said. "Because she got scolded the first time by the appellate court, and that's the kind of experience that will tend to make the judge really risk averse."

The New York Times reported that Cannon presided over just 14 days of criminal trials as a judge before she was assigned this historic case involving a former president accused of espionage.

The gag order becomes the barometer

But denying the requested gag order, which was requested to protect law enforcement witnesses — something most judges wouldn't typically deny — could become a key barometer to determine how biased Cannon really is, Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, told BI.

"Any normal judge would probably issue an order that would protect witnesses," Rahmani said. "Judge Cannon has issued — or not issued — some very bizarre orders, but given that Judge Cannon has seemingly sided with Trump at every possible turn, I wouldn't be surprised if she did not issue this order."

Rahmani added: "It's kind of setting her up. I mean, obviously, I think this issue is important, but it would really show how unreasonable she is if she won't take precautions to protect the safety of the agents and witnesses in the case, and I can see her getting reversed again."

If Cannon does deny the gag order, and if Smith then appeals the decision as experts expect he would, and if the 11th Circuit then reverses her denial — a lot of ifs, to be sure — the question then becomes: After how many reversals is Cannon removed from the case?

Pearson, McMunigal, and Rahmani all agreed that removing her would be a harder sell. They said it could be done, but it's extremely rare for judges to be removed from a case over bias concerns.

"The standard is that when the judge's conduct gives rise to the appearance of impropriety or the lack of impartiality," Rahmani told BI. "I don't know if we're there yet. I don't know if the 11th Circuit will think we're there, but Cannon refusing to issue a gag order that would safeguard law enforcement or other officers, in my opinion, that's an abuse of discretion. But we'll see what Cannon does — and what the 11th Circuit does in response."

Representatives for Smith's office and lawyers for Trump did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

• Job hunters haven't had it easy in recent months despite a relatively strong labor market. 
• One job seeker said she was invited to a happy hour after her on-site interview.
• But instead of mingling with potential colleagues, she met other candidates for the job, she said.

Job seekers are no strangers to jumping through hoops for their prospective employers.

But some employers seem to be taking hiring tests to new levels.

A TikTok user named Marissa Marlowe shared her experience in a recent video, saying she'd applied for hundreds of jobs before being invited to an on-site test with a prospective employer. Business Insider couldn't verify her identity or the company she applied to.

She said that during the day, she gave a 75-minute presentation and had conversations with others at the company, adding that she was then invited to a work happy hour to meet the rest of the team.

But the happy hour was full of other candidates, she said. Marlowe jokingly compared the process to the US reality TV show "The Bachelor" — with multiple candidates all vying for one job from the employer.

Even after jumping through the hiring hoops and attending the happy hour, Marlowe said, she was ultimately rejected for the job.

Job hunters haven't had it easy in recent months. While The Great Resignation kicked off in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic when a wave of people took the opportunity to quit their jobs and start new ones, things have since stagnated.

We've entered what some are dubbing the "Big Stay" — a phenomenon which sees more people staying in their jobs compared to two years ago. Plus, with many major companies slashing jobs, the market has only become more competitive.

Job hunters have also complained of a particularly brutal recruitment market: deciphering fake job ads on LinkedIn, being ghosted by recruiters, and navigating new AI recruitment tools like doing first-round interviews with AI chatbots.

During the pandemic, more employers also started incorporating cognitive and psychometric tests to get to know candidates better. However, these tests can bring more stress to candidates who aren't sure what results the employer is looking for.

Despite low unemployment rates in the US, many job seekers aren't feeling the effects of a relatively healthy labor market. That's especially true for higher-earners, who are facing a less favorable white-collar job market, and those looking for remote jobs.

• Elon Musk has been criticized for his decision to redirect Tesla's Nvidia chips to X. 
• But Tesla's former head of AI infrastructure, Tim Zaman has come forward to defend Musk's decision. 
• Zaman said that most wouldn't understand the "practicalities" of such a "crazy military operation."

Diverting Tesla's AI chips to X made sense given the logistics that come with assembling a supercomputer, the automaker's former head of AI infrastructure said on Tuesday.

"The practicalities of building a supercomputer are insane once you get down to it," Tim Zaman wrote in an X post.

"Lets assume you have a datacenter location and ordered GPUs," he added. "Just taking delivery of thousands of GPUs is a crazy military operation, even before any racking, stacking and cabling or bringup."

Prior to joining Tesla in 2019, Zaman had spent three years working for Nvidia as an AI infrastructure systems software engineer, per his LinkedIn profile. He left Tesla to join Google's DeepMind as a software engineer last year.

"True," Musk replied.

Zaman weighed in on the issue after a CNBC report on the same day said that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had rerouted $500 million worth of Nvidia chips to his social media platform.

Musk confirmed CNBC's report on Tuesday but said the move was made because "Tesla had no place to send the Nvidia chips to turn them on."

"They would have just sat in a warehouse," Musk wrote in an X post.

Musk's decision to redirect the highly coveted AI chips has highlighted his companies' increasingly competing interests.

The mercurial billionaire's sprawling business empire spans multiple industries, whether it be making rockets with SpaceX or drilling tunnels with The Boring Company.

In January, Musk said that he was "uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control." Under Musk, the EV giant has been working hard to realize its ambitions of building self-driving cars and sentient humanoid robots.

Tesla, however, isn't the only Musk-owned company that has set its sights on conquering the AI industry.

On May 26, Musk revealed that his AI startup, xAI, raised $6 billion for their Series B funding round. The latest fundraising round has bolstered xAI's total valuation to $24 billion, making it the second-most valuable AI company behind Sam Altman's OpenAI.

But money isn't the only issue AI players like Musk and Altman have to contend with. Companies hoping to make a splash in the highly competitive field need to acquire Nvidia's coveted AI chips, which, unfortunately, are in short supply.

This has become a problem — even for Nvidia. In February, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang said in an earnings call that the company was trying its best to distribute chips fairly.

"Why allocate something when the data center's not ready? Nothing is more difficult than to have anything sit around," Huang said.

"At the core of it, we want to allocate fairly, avoiding waste and looking for opportunities to connect partners and end users," Huang added.

• Mark, 65, amassed over $2 million in retirement savings by maximizing his 401(k) contributions.
• He benefited from steady employment, low living costs, and delaying parenthood.
• Mark advises saving early, leveraging Roth accounts, and maintaining consistent contributions.

For many people at or near retirement age, the outlook is dire.

One in five older Americans have no retirement savings, Social Security doesn't feel like much of a guarantee, and the pension era is over.

While the widespread shift over the last five decades to 401(k)s for retirement savings has meant some Americans can't afford the burden of being primarily responsible for their retirement finances, others have been able to work the system to their advantage.

Mark, 65, is one of them.

Mark — whose last name is known to Business Insider but withheld for privacy purposes — retired three years ago at age 62. Throughout his nearly 40-year-long career in geology, he was able to sock away over $2 million for his retirement, even after putting multiple kids through college.

"You just leave it alone, and you look up 40 years later, and it's a really nice number," he said.

The first company he worked for in the 1980s had a pension plan, which quickly transitioned to a 401(k) in the first year he was there. He read some articles on how to maximize the new benefit, and, from that point forward, he said he just essentially maxed it out. He heard the advice that you should aggressively save into a 401(k), and so that's what he did. Then, he said, he just left it there and tried not to worry about it.

"Every once in a while when there was a downturn in the market, it was a little alarming, but whether I was a procrastinator or whatever the thing was, I didn't move the money. I just left it in the same stuff," Mark said.

Mark is the embodiment of what happens when retirement saving does what it's supposed to do. He also was able to have everything fall into place: He said he's been very blessed not to have any long stints of unemployment and to earn enough that he was always able to max out his 401(k). He lived in low cost of living areas, and didn't have kids right away — meaning he was able to accrue some savings before embarking on parenthood.

"When it's all said and done, I ended up with two-plus million dollars," he said. "Never putting extra in, never taking anything out, never taking any loans on the money or any of those sorts of things."

What Mark did right — and what he thinks others should do

In his earlier years of work, Mark was surprised by the people who didn't contribute to their 401(k) accounts, even if it was just a small amount to get the match. He thinks some just didn't know much about 401(k)s during the switch from a pension or didn't understand them.

"I did hear plenty of people that didn't even take advantage of that, and it just seemed like a no-brainer," he said.

Of course, not every American has access to a retirement account. As of 2023, just under three-quarters of Americans had access to some form of retirement benefits, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And of those who do, a solid chunk still doesn't participate in benefits.

Some of that could be chalked up to how benefits have changed. While Mark is a big proponent of the 401(k) and it's worked well for him, other workers might have been used to pension plans. Mark is part of the cohort that saw the retirement economy transition from defined benefits, plans like pensions that pay out fixed amounts, to defined contribution plans, which pay out based on how much you put in — and how the stock market fares.

For instance, after a downturn in the 1980's, Mark said that "it was pretty alarming to me that I lost so much money on paper — but it came back."

"From that point on, I figured any other recession after that, it's going to come back — and it did," he said.

Mark's advice for retirement savings would include taking advantage of some benefits that exist now that didn't really exist when he was doing his retirement planning, things like index funds and Roth accounts — post-tax savings plans that can be offered by employers, in the case of 401(ks), or generally open to Americans making under a certain amount.

"If I was starting now, I would be putting more money into Roth accounts," he said. He also acknowledged that he lives in a low cost-of-living area — and said that if workers can, they should try to lower their living costs. He does realize that certain places cost "a heck of a lot more" than other spots.

But overall, Mark said that he's a "pretty big proponent of the 401(k)." He said that while he knows some people have their own issues with it, he thinks that what he calls the almost-forced savings — the ability to get it out of the person's hands before they have a chance to spend it — is one of the "wisest things there is."

For him, his savings have meant tremendous peace of mind. Unless something very unforeseen comes up, they won't run out of money. If there's something that they need to spend money on or help their kids out with, they can — and that's thanks to their savings.

"If I had to tell people what to do, there's save big and save early — or save early, and it doesn't have to be big, but save early and you get all that compounding," Mark said. "It makes a huge difference. I realize it's the toughest time to save for a lot of people, but if you can get the money saved before it gets into your hands, I guess that's a big deal."

Are you a boomer doing well in retirement? Contact this reporter at jkaplan@businessinsider.com.