• Andrew Halter delivers water 1,200 miles by rail to the Navajo Nation from Mississippi.
• Navajo Nation residents struggle with water scarcity, with 30% lacking reliable drinking water.
• Halter hopes water-by-rail can be a solution for other Western communities and in natural disasters.

Andrew Halter had been in the railroad business for 25 years, mostly in middle management roles. It was his dream job and all he ever wanted to do.

But when the world shut down in 2020, and he got laid off, he needed to figure something else out.

"It came to me one day like a clap of thunder," Hatler, who is based in Pennsylvania, told Business Insider.

Halter and his brother had long talked about the possibility of using rail to help alleviate the water crisis in the Navajo Nation. His brother, Chris Halter, runs the St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School, located on the southeastern edge of the reservation, which spans more than 27,000 square miles across parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.

Nearly a third of Navajo Nation residents do not have access to reliable, clean drinking water, according to the tribe. The estimated population was over 165,000 in 2020, according to census data.

The mission was already delivering water via trucks to 250 families, a small portion of the Navajo who are water-scarce. The families receive about 40 gallons of water a day, far less than the 300 gallons the average American family uses. The mission has relied on a local well to get the water, but if something happened to it, all those families would be without any water virtually overnight.

"To be honest, it was always the thing that would wake me up in the middle of the night," Chris Halter told BI. "If that well shuts down for some reason, what would I do next?"

Now, Halter's company, Jacob's Well, in partnership with the mission, delivers thousands of gallons of water each month from Mississippi to the Navajo Nation via the BNSF Railway. The water-by-rail served as a lifeline in 2022 when the well had to undergo repairs that lasted months.

The operation has grown quickly, and Halter is focused on expanding, both to provide more water to the Navajo Nation but also potentially to other places in the West, where dried up rivers and reservoirs are leaving communities increasingly desperate for solutions.

Some thought the water-by-rail idea was crazy

When Halter first started calling railroads about transporting drinkable water, some thought the idea was crazy.

He finally got in touch with Eunice Sun at BNSF, who currently serves as the business development manager of emerging markets.

"We haven't moved potable water prior to this opportunity, really, because the economics don't necessarily pencil out in order to pay for that water and pay for the transport," Sun told BI. But when Halter came to her, she said he did a great job communicating his vision and business plan.

Halter said right now they can transport water, depending on fuel prices and other fluctuating costs, for around 38 cents a gallon. Currently, those costs are covered almost entirely by private donations to the mission. However, as the operation scales up and he transports more tank cars of water, those costs could come down.

Getting a public utility to sell him hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per month was another story. "A lot of times, they think you're crazy," Halter said. Still, they were able to work out a deal with the water department of Helena, Mississippi, where Jacob's Well collects its water before it travels 1,200 miles by rail to the southwest.

Once it arrives, the Navajo families can pick up water from the mission or have it delivered to their homes, just as the well water is.

Originally, Halter said he couldn't even find information about how the water would travel, and it took a lot of testing before and after transport to ensure the supply stayed safe to drink.

"We've kind of had to wing it and make up our own rules as we go along and figure some things out the hard way, which we did," he said.

It took around eight months from when Halter first contacted BNSF for the first shipment to go out, and the operation has only grown since. Halter said they currently average around two tank cars a month, which each hold 21,000 gallons of water, but the operation is capable of delivering 200,000 gallons a month if needed.

They sent half a million gallons of water total in 2023. He's hoping to reach 2 million this year.

Emergency water supply and the water crisis

It's unclear at this point how scalable or economically feasible water-by-rail will be in other places, but those involved are hopeful.

Chris Halter said he's currently conducting a study that he hopes will show the project has had a sound return on investment so that he can show tribal, local, and state governments that his is a feasible option.

Sun said expanding Jacob's Well wouldn't come without growing pains, but that BNSF is happy to help support the project's growth. "It tugs at your heartstrings," she said, adding that it's not often she gets to work on a project that has such a direct positive impact on a local community.

Halter sees water-by-rail as something that could fill a serious need in all sorts of situations, from communities whose wells run dry to natural disasters. He's already been in touch with the state of New Mexico and FEMA. He's hopeful that rail will be among the solutions that help alleviate the broader water crisis.

After getting a severe case of COVID-19, Halter lost the use of his right hand and was not able to go back to work on the railroad, so he now runs Jacob's Well full time.

"It's become a driving mission to give these people water," he said. "I want to be able to provide people with water at the lowest cost possible, and I want it to make enough money to support itself, but I don't need to get wealthy on it."

For now the operation is run on donations, but they're hoping they can get grant money or other public funds to help support it in the future.

"Water is a human right," Halter said. "And they should be able to have it."

Have a news tip or a story to share? Contact this reporter at kvlamis@businessinsider.com.

• Meta and xAI are competing to partner with buzzy AI startup Character.AI, per the Financial Times. 
• It's the latest twist in the rivalry between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
• The two billionaires have been feuding for years, and are now both racing to build superhuman AI.

The rivalry between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg may be heating up again.

Musk's xAI is reportedly vying with Meta to partner with Character.AI, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that allows users to create AI-generated characters that act as chatbots, individuals with knowledge of the situation told the Financial Times.

According to the report, both companies have held exploratory talks with Character.AI about working together on initiatives, including pre-training and developing AI models, although no deal has been struck with either.

Character.AI, which allows users to create their own personalized chatbots, was valued at $1 billion last year and is in talks to raise around $200 million from investors including Google.

The race between Meta and xAI to partner with Character.AI marks the latest development in the fierce rivalry between Musk and Zuckerberg.

The two billionaires have been publicly feuding since 2016, when a SpaceX rocket exploded and destroyed a Facebook satellite.

The grudge nearly turned physical in 2023, when Musk challenged jiu-jitsu champion Zuckerberg to a cage match. To date, the fight hasn't happened, but that hasn't stopped Musk from continuing to goad his rival on X.

AI seems like it will be the latest theater for their rivalry. Meta and xAI, which Musk founded last year, are racing to build up their AI infrastructure and fighting each other for talent.

XAI announced it had raised $6 billion in funding on Monday, and is reportedly planning to build a "gigafactory of compute," an enormous supercomputer that will be used to train the latest version of its sarcastic and foul-mouthed Grok chatbot.

Meta, meanwhile, has added AI features to its social media platforms, including Character.AI-style celebrity personas.

Zuckerberg has vowed to spend "aggressively" on AI and said that the company's mission is now to build AGI, a level of AI that will outperform humans.

The two billionaires have clashed over AI before. In 2017, Zuckerberg branded Musk's views on AI as "irresponsible" after Musk questioned whether AI could be a threat to humanity.

"With AI especially, I'm really optimistic, and I think that people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios … I don't understand it. It's really negative, and in some ways, I actually think it's pretty irresponsible," Zuckerberg said.

Musk fired back that the Meta boss had a "limited" understanding of the subject.

Meta, Elon Musk, and Character.AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside normal working hours.

• Elon Musk runs X, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Tesla, and xAI.
• As of May 2024, Musk is the world's third richest person with a net worth of $191 billion. 
• Musk has been divorced three times, dated celebrities, and has 10 children with three women.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is the cofounder of other major companies, including SpaceX. 

He was born in 1971 in South Africa. Musk's parents are Maye and Errol, who divorced in 1979. In the 1990s, he founded his first startup, Zip2, with his brother, Kimbal, and began a decadeslong career in tech.

Musk's second venture, online banking company X.com, merged with a startup of Peter Thiel's to form PayPal. When PayPal sold to eBay in 2002, Musk made $165 million. 

Musk is the third richest person in the world. He's frequently trading places with other billionaires in the ranks, but as of May 2024, Musk's net worth stands at $191 billion, putting him behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and French luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault. His estimated fortune peaked at around $340 billion in November 2021 as Tesla shares soared.

X, formerly known as Twitter

Elon Musk started buying shares in Twitter, now called X, in January 2022 and initiated an acquisition in April that year. 

By the time Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, he had actually spent months trying to back out of the agreement. At the start of July, he sent a letter to Twitter purporting to terminate the acquisition. Twitter promptly sued him.

When the sale went through, Musk immediately ousted a number of Twitter executives, including its CEO, CFO, and chief legal officer. In November, Musk issued an ultimatum: work at an "extremely hardcore" rate or accept a three-month severance package. He would go on to lay off around 80% of Twitter's staff.

Musk's Twitter verification changes were announced on November 1. He tweeted that Twitter's "current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn't have a blue checkmark is bullshit." He added, "Power to the people! Blue for $8/month."

In May 2023, Musk named Linda Yaccarino as Twitter's new CEO. "Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app," Musk said in a tweet.

In July 2023, Twitter was rebranded to X.

SpaceX

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, investing $100 million he made from the sale of PayPal.

The company nearly failed. After three unsuccessful launches between 2006 and 2008, funding was running out. Then, on September 28, 2008, SpaceX became the first private company to achieve a successful orbital launch. That same year, SpaceX received a $1.5 billion NASA contract. 

"Fate liked us that day," Musk told CNBC when reflecting on the events nine years later.

SpaceX launches now happen on a fairly regular basis. The company publishes a SpaceX launch schedule on its website. Launches typically take place at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base or the Kennedy Space Center, which are both in Florida.

SpaceX runs the Starlink satellite internet system. Its satellites operate in Earth's lower orbit, decreasing the lag between when the data is transferred to the receiver, according to the company. Musk said he plans to eventually create a constellation of up to 42,000 satellites. 

The company launched its first batch of Starlink satellites in 2019 and has more than 4,000 of its satellites in orbit today.

The SpaceX Falcon 9, a partially reusable two-stage rocket, is often used for launches. The Falcon 9 family of rockets is a first-of-its-kind and a key asset for NASA in servicing the International Space Station since the retirement of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. Apart from the Space Shuttles, the majority of spacefaring equipment was previously single-use.

SpaceX is valued at almost $140 billion under Musk's unique leadership style. Because it's a private company, SpaceX stock is not easy to purchase for members of the general public. 

The company is not currently publicly planning an IPO. Musk has said that SpaceX won't file for an initial public offering until what he calls the "Mars Colonial Transporter" is flying regularly.

SpaceX's long-term goal is to make colonizing Mars affordable.

The Boring Company

Musk's The Boring Company was created as a subsidiary of SpaceX and later became its own entity. Inspired by LA traffic gridlock, the tunneling venture has several ongoing projects on the West Coast.

In April 2022, The Boring Company completed Series C funding of $675 million, which was valued at $5.675 billion, according to a Boring Company news release. Boring Company stock is not currently publicly traded.

In 2018, Musk sold 20,000 Boring Company flamethrowers in just five days. The product, called "Not-A-Flamethrower," has been off the market for years. However, it's acquired something of a cult status among the tech mogul's fans, and some people have been paying hundreds of dollars to snap them up on eBay.

Among Musk's other innovative products is a 5'8" humanoid Tesla robot named Optimus, announced in 2021. The robot is designed to help reduce the labor shortage, according to Musk, and keep workers safer. This could very well be groundbreaking, but it still has a long way to go before it is ready for production and available for purchase.

Neuralink

Musk's brain-chip company Neuralink has begun implanting its devices in human skulls — and like many of Musk's ventures, the new technology has been met with both fanfare and skepticism.

Neuralink's current priority is to treat patients with neurological conditions, such as paralysis and blindness. Initially, in the first human trial, Neuralink's goal is to help patients with paralyzed limbs control devices like a computer mouse or keyboard with only their thoughts. 

But Musk has said he wants Neuralink to ultimately help humans achieve "symbiosis" with artificial intelligence so that they don't get "left behind" as AI evolves over time.

xAI 

Musk founded startup xAI in March 2023, which has since launched a chatbot called Grok. In May 2024, xAI announced it had raised $6 billion in a Series B funding round.

The billionaire wants xAI to build a supercomputer and have it running by fall 2025, The Information reported. It will be powered by Nvidia's GPUs. 

Elon Musk's wives and kids

Musk's spouses are Justine Musk, who he met at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, and Talulah Riley, whom he married in 2010. He met Riley at a bar in London, and the couple divorced and remarried before splitting again.

Five of Musk's children were born during his eight-year marriage with his ex-wife, Justine.

It is unclear if Musk is dating anyone presently. Musk reportedly split in 2022 with actor Natasha Bassett, who is believed to be his last public girlfriend.

Before that, Musk briefly dated actor Amber Heard in 2017 amid her divorce from actor Johnny Depp. The two first connected on the red carpet of the 2016 Met Gala, which Depp was expected to attend but didn't.

He and the musician Grimes started dating in 2018. Since then, they've broken up and gotten back together a few times. Now, they appear to just be co-parents of a boy and a girl named X Æ A-Xii and Y.

Musk quietly had twins in November 2021 with one of his top executives, Shivon Zilis.

Crypto.com is everywhere. Its name is plastered on the home of arguably the most famous NBA franchise, the Los Angeles Lakers. It's sponsoring Formula 1 races and UFC matches. It's ads are back on the airwaves, with Eminem declaring during the NBA playoffs that "fortune favors the brave."

Crypto.com is also nowhere. It doesn't have a flashy CEO like FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried (who is currently in prison) or Binance's CZ (who is headed to prison). Unlike with Coinbase, regulators don't seem to be sniffing around. Sure, the company has high-profile marketing efforts, but day to day, Crypto.com doesn't really come up much at all.

Crypto.com is one of those things I've long placed in my "I wonder what the deal is" column, along with Jojo Siwa, bird flu, and the difference between F1 and NASCAR. It seems impossible to watch a sporting event without seeing its name somewhere, and yet I rarely chat with someone who uses it or come across its name in headlines. Part of the issue is that I live in New York, where its services aren't allowed. (That's not a knock on the company — for a lot of crypto exchanges, the Empire State is a tough nut to crack.) But it's also a rather nebulous entity in the American market. It says it's got 100 million users globally, but it still seems to fly a little under the radar.

Often, when I mention Crypto.com to someone who works in the crypto industry, they tell me they know about it, of course. When I ask exactly what they know about it, they come up pretty empty. Maybe it's mainly popular abroad, they speculate, or only for novices. Google data indicates that while a good chunk of the search interest does come from America, more comes from outside the US, notably from Singapore, Nigeria, and Bulgaria.

"Huh, I guess bigger than I thought," one crypto evangelist remarked after looking up its trading volume.

"They own the Lakers' arena? I've always been so confused on how they did that," another crypto entrepreneur said. (To be fair, the company doesn't own the arena; it just bought the naming rights.) He'd set up a Crypto.com account during the 2021-2022 market cycle to do a specific maneuver not allowed on Coinbase at the time, but he hasn't really used it since then.

When I asked Nic Carter, a general partner at Castle Island Ventures, about the company, he replied in an email, "It's kind of a mystery, yes."He added that, like me, he doesn't know anyone who uses it. "But I think that reflects the user base — it's not necessarily crypto-natives but rather retail that wants a casual and accessible experience (is my understanding)," he said.

Crypto.com is positioning itself as the new face of crypto, even as it remains rather faceless itself. It might prove to be a smart move — it's boosting its brand and, in turn, its consumer base while avoiding much of the scrutiny other exchanges have faced. For the time being, Crypto.com is balancing between notability and infamy. It's walking softly but carrying a big ad budget.

---

While Crypto.com only really burst onto the American scene over the past four years or so, it's been around for a while. Originally named Monaco, the exchange was founded in 2016 in Hong Kong by Kris Marszalek, a Polish-born entrepreneur with a colorful past, and a handful of others. Amid the 2017 crypto run, it raised money from the public via an initial coin offering — creating and selling a digital token of its own, similar to a stock-market IPO. In 2018, the company landed the coveted Crypto.com domain name, purchasing it for an undisclosed amount from an academic who had long refused to sell it. (Even more confusingly, Crypto.com is technically operated by Foris DAX Asia, which, according to a scan of Reddit, can befuddle many users when their tax paperwork comes in. It's also the name Crypto.com lobbies under.) Crypto.com's primary business is its cryptocurrency exchange, which works as a middleman for people buying and selling crypto, but it also offers other products, including crypto Visa cards.

The 2021-22 market cycle is when Crypto.com, now headquartered in Singapore, made its big splash. In late 2021, it bought the naming rights to what was then the Staples Center in Los Angeles as part of a 20-year, $700 million deal. It signed sponsorship deals with UFC and F1 while also rolling its "fortune favors the brave" ad campaign, which originally featured Matt Damon. Crypto.com was seeking brand awareness, and it was willing to spend millions upon millions for it.

"This is one brick in a bigger wall of introducing Crypto.com as a brand to the world and communicating what our core values are," Steven Kalifowitz, Crypto.com's chief marketing officer, told Business Insider at the time.

A lot of crypto's mini-emperors turned out to have no clothes.

In the moment, it all sort of made sense. FTX was flying high and had paid $135 million to slap its name on the Miami Heat's stadium. Its founder, SBF, was running around with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the Bahamas and suggesting he'd spend $1 billion on the 2024 election. Binance's CZ was talking about investing $200 million in Forbes, saying it would push media companies toward adopting crypto and lead to the decentralization of the industry. But we know how the story ends: FTX imploded, along with some other high-profile crypto projects, and crypto winter set in. A lot of crypto's mini-emperors turned out to have no clothes.

Crypto.com, however, managed to weather the storm, though not perfectly. The company accidentally sent some $400 million to the wrong account in November 2022, prompting some users to pull their money out of the platform. At the start of 2023, it laid off 20% of its workforce, blaming economic headwinds and FTX's collapse. The Financial Times reported last June that Crypto.com was operating internal proprietary trading teams, which US regulators had dinged Binance for, even though Crypto.com insisted it was fine. The regulatory environment in the US appears to have made the company a little nervous — it shut down its American institutional exchange in the middle of last year.

In the US, Crypto.com has managed to avoid much of the blowback its competitors have faced. (This isn't the case in other countries — in the Netherlands, for example, it was fined for operating without registration.) While the Securities and Exchange Commission has gone after Coinbase and Kraken for operating unregistered securities exchanges, it hasn't made a peep about Crypto.com. Crypto.com has so far ducked notice, even though it's running a lot of the same playbook. In April, the company's chief operating officer acknowledged in an interview with Decrypt that its big-budget marketing efforts could put a target on its back but said the trade-off was worth it.

Crypto.com's determination to push ahead, both loudly and quietly, has set it up to try to capitalize on the market's recent run. Bitcoin is once again on the up and up, and so too is Crypto.com. The company is hiring again, it's advertising aggressively again, and it's talking a big game about its business prospects — its CEO, Marszalek, told Bloomberg in April that it was looking to triple its number of registered users.

Data from the marketing-intelligence firm Sensor Tower indicates crypto advertisers' digital spending in the US increased by 185% year over year in the first quarter of 2024. Crypto.com spent eight times as much as Coinbase on digital advertising during that period. (It's worth noting that back in the first quarter of 2022, Crypto.com actually outspent FTX on digital ads by a bit.)

But the thing about all Crypto.com's advertising dollars is that they seem to be only effective-ish. Data compiled by CCData shows that Crypto.com has a 2.3% market share by trading volumes on the spot market globally, which is about half of Coinbase, which has 4%, and only slightly above Kraken, which has 1.4%. (Globally, Binance is still dominant.) According to Sensor Tower, Crypto.com saw a 140% increase in downloads in March from the prior month, though it fell slightly behind Coinbase, which had a 160% increase.

All that buying of stadiums and renaming stuff, it's just kind of viewed as lame by most people in crypto.

Crypto.com didn't respond to multiple requests for interviews or comments for this story. Most of the people I did speak to gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug when I asked what they thought of the company.

One crypto executive said part of the issue was that Crypto.com, being an upstart from Asia, is a little outside Silicon Valley's mainstream crypto circles. Similar to the clubby "PayPal Mafia" that dominated software in the 2010s, a sort of Coinbase crew has its hold on the crypto industry of the 2020s. The exec wasn't too keen on Crypto.com's flashy advertising either, describing it as "decadent" and irresponsible.

"All that buying of stadiums and renaming stuff, it's just kind of viewed as lame by most people in crypto," they said. "I think the tackiest thing and frankly irresponsible thing to do is to roll out FOMO ads. 'Buy crypto or get left behind' is a really irresponsible message. JPMorgan doesn't do that."

And despite the company's ability to dodge serious regulatory scrutiny, it hasn't engendered a lot of goodwill among some crypto evangelists.

"I'm supportive of bitcoin, but I think Crypto.com is overall a big negative for the American public. It's very confusing. It's a casino," said Alex Gladstein, who as the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation has argued that bitcoin is important for advancing human rights and freedom. "When you go to the website, they encourage you to try and bet on these coins that go to zero. I don't think it's anything to do with financial empowerment for people or any sort of alternative wealth building."

To be sure, the casino thing could be said about most crypto exchanges — and sports-betting apps, and many regular trading apps. Crypto.com seems to be careful about coloring within the regulatory lines. The head of its legal department in the Americas just put out a "crypto legal handbook," which, OK.

Crypto.com is embedded in our culture, and it isn't. It's sort of taken on the FTX mantle but with a more anonymous bent. For the company, it's a pretty savvy space in which to operate: ubiquitous but relatively anonymous. For everyone else, mileage may vary on how you feel about the whole thing. It's a good reminder that, whatever the company, it's better to use exchanges only for trading your crypto assets, not for storing them.

Maybe Eminem won't come to regret voicing those ads like Matt Damon did. Or maybe in five years we'll be looking back at this moment and saying: "Remember that one crypto company? Is it still where the Lakers play? Or is it now something else?"

---

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Tucked beneath a 48-story San Francisco skyscraper, at the far end of the parking lot on the first subbasement level, is a door with a keypad lock. An unimposing sign reads "Utility Meter Room." Behind the door is a tangled clot of pipes: yellow, blue, and orange, each one as wide as a 100-pound barbell plate. The pipes — along with thousands more just like them, winding their way under more than 600 American cities, campuses, hospitals, and airports — are more than a blast from our industrial past. They're a steampunk vision of the future.

I've come to 345 California Center, a postmodern hexagon that towers over San Francisco's financial district, to get a look at the hottest new idea for how to break the urban doom loop — the post-pandemic, remote-work apocalypse that is hollowing out America's cities. And when I say "hottest," I don't mean it metaphorically. It's like a sauna down here. Because the Utility Meter Room doesn't run on a self-contained, industrial-sized boiler, like most big buildings. Instead, it's drawing a feed of blistering, high-pressure, vaporized water from a century-old loop of steam pipes that runs beneath the city's streets. The steam loops are a relic of the 19th century, as forgotten as the pneumatic tubes that used to shoot mail all over American cities. But unlike the pneumatic tubes, the steam loops are still there — and they can provide enough heat to keep a building like 345 California Center nice and toasty, even on the coldest of days.

The steam loops are part of an antiquated system known as "district energy." It was basically a shared-services model: a utility would make steam at a central location and then pipe it out to every building in the city. Nobody had to provide their own heat — it was way more convenient, and cheaper, to get it from a common source. 

But then cities began to abandon district energy. Buildings, businesses, and homes started making their own hot water in boilers fueled by coal, then oil, then natural gas. Sometimes it was cheaper, and maybe it was more convenient. But it also set the planet on fire. More heating meant more greenhouse gases, and more global warming. 

Which brings me back to our steampunk future. Today, cities are starting to price the looming climate catastrophe into their energy costs. Starting this year, commercial buildings in New York City will be slapped with steep fines if they're emitting too much carbon. Boston and Washington have similar "decarbonization" laws in place, and San Francisco isn't allowing natural gas in any new construction. That means businesses need to find a cleaner, cheaper source of heat. And those ancient steam loops beneath the streets are starting to seem like a ready-made solution.

"The real benefit of a district-energy system, especially in cities, is the distribution system," says Kevin Hagerty, the CEO of Vicinity Energy. "If a city wants to decarbonize, and they have a district-energy system, it's much easier. They don't have to change things on a building-by-building basis."

In July, Vicinity is installing what will be the nation's first zero-carbon urban steam loop. Drawing electricity from the increasingly decarbonized New England grid, powered by solar and offshore wind, the utility will use the energy to boil water and then deliver steam directly to Boston office buildings and restaurants and storefronts through the city's antiquated maze of pipes. It's a remnant of the Industrial Revolution being used to forestall a lethal climate evolution.

District energy could also be a godsend to businesses struggling to survive the current landscape of empty offices and boarded-up shops. By taking steam right out of the street beneath them, commercial landlords can pay less for their utilities and avoid carbon fines — which means they can lower their rents and hold on to tenants who might otherwise bail. District-energy loops also eliminate the need for boilers and other cumbersome building infrastructure, freeing up space for tenant-grabbing amenities like gyms, roof-decks, and golf simulators. (Yep. That's a real thing.)

The other choice? Spend thousands to upgrade a building's energy systems — cash that landlords don't have on hand, and an expense they can't pass along to tenants. "If you're a building owner, district energy allows you to pay a small premium on your service to get that type of steam," says Blake Ellis, a principal at the engineering firm Burns & McDonnell. "Then you don't have that big capital outlay you probably don't want right now." Especially if, as in many downtowns, your building is only 70% occupied.

About a third of the cost of running a commercial building is energy. And according to one major study, a building as energy-efficient as 345 California Center can charge 20% more for rent than a comparable, inefficient building. Every dollar saved in energy costs, the study found, equates to 3.5% higher rent. And it's a lot easier to be energy efficient if all you have to do is plug into a carbon-free steam loop. 

"This building is 40 years old," Tim Danz, the chief engineer for 345 Cal, tells me. "But we're using the latest technology to manage our energy." He points to the gnarl of pipes that shoots the steam up to the 36th floor, where it's used to cook a water supply large enough to heat the entire building. Having a boiler, Danz explains, "would be another system we would have to provide care and feeding for." District energy, by contrast, is just there for the taking, right beneath our feet.

The most convincing evidence that steam loops make economic sense comes from who's getting into the district-energy game. Vicinity, the nation's biggest clean-steam provider, is owned by Antin Infrastructure Partners, a leading private-equity firm. Cordia, an energy provider operating in 10 cities, is partially owned by the private-equity giant KKR. Everyone needs heat — which makes it a highly bankable investment. "These private-equity funds come in and find areas where they can put capital into a business and get a nice steady rate of return," Hagerty says. "Decarbonizing takes capital, and private equity is a great source of capital." 

From AI startups to biotech companies, steampunk-heated buildings could become the cool new place to be. 

In the long run, of course, private equity may decide to do what it always does and load up these new energy businesses with massive amounts of debt before dismantling them for parts. But for now, the big money sees big profits to be made from America's forgotten infrastructure. Outside of places like airports and college campuses, the idea of district energy fell out of favor long ago. We let the systems go fallow — but fortunately, all the accumulated infrastructure we buried on top of the old steam loops made it impossible to dig their little-used pipes out of the ground. So the whole thing was still down there, waiting, when COVID drove millions of city dwellers to head for the countryside. Now, by drawing heat from their old steam loops, America's cities have an opportunity to jump-start all the downtown commerce that was crippled by the pandemic. 

And it could happen all over the place! Dozens and dozens of cities have steam loops they can use, from New York and Chicago to Miami to San Diego and Portland and Milwaukee. What's more, lots of companies these days are looking for greener buildings, both to save money and to burnish their environmental bona fides. From AI startups to biotech companies, steampunk-heated buildings could become the cool new place to be. 

"Forward-minded companies want to be in a building that doesn't have any on-site fossil-fuel combustion," says Costa Samaras, the director of the Scott Institute for Energy and Innovation at Carnegie Mellon. "The best, greenest buildings will be net-zero buildings. They'll be considered a premium asset. The challenge is, are we going to get enough premium assets in time?" Meaning: Can we use steam loops to fix the urban doom loop before the climate doom loop dooms us all?

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Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

• These tech billionaires ran meetings to avoid wasting time, groupthink, and compromise.
• Their different techniques mostly focus on brevity and decision-making.
• Jeff Bezos would get employees to respond to memos, and Bill Gates would grill people for details.

Billionaires are known to be ruthless with their time.

But even people running the world's biggest tech companies have to endure meetings, which have a bad reputation for wasting time and money. Mark Cuban even said they were a "last resort."

The rest of us have to do our best to use them to generate ideas, investigate details, and focus on a single issue.

These are some of the tips household names in business have had for stopping unproductive meetings.

Jeff Bezos began his with 30 minutes of silent study

Meetings with Amazon cofounder Jeff Bezos started with employees studying a memo.

One employee might spend two weeks pulling together a six-page memo for a specific meeting.

After 30 minutes of silent reading, attendees were invited to ask questions and start a discussion about the memo. "I like a crisp document and a messy meeting," Bezos said in a conversation with podcaster Lex Fridman in December.

Allowing attendees time to read a memo and prepare their thoughts enables employees to ask more productive questions in the meeting, he said.

Bezos said he didn't like slideshow presentations, which can hide "sloppy thinking" in bullet points.

He also maintained a "two-pizza" rule: If two pizzas can't feed everyone in the room, there are too many people.

Bill Gates dug for answers

Microsoft founder Bill Gates would use meetings to quiz attendees, said Chris Williams, the former VP of HR at Microsoft, who worked closely with Gates for eight years.

Williams said he'd never forget his first meeting with Gates in 1992. Microsoft had just bought the company Williams worked at. Gates wanted to meet its employees to find out why one of its products ran faster than Microsoft's equivalent.

He grilled a developer with "rapid fire" and "detailed" questions, Williams recalled. By the end, the pair were discussing "the movement of single bits and the size of the Intel 80386 instruction cache," he added.

Gates "was always curious, always wanted to understand, always drilling for more detail," Williams wrote for BI in 2023.

"As he got older, his passion for detail never left, just his method for getting there mellowed," Williams added.

Steve Jobs ensured only key staff were in the room

Steve Jobs was meticulous about keeping meetings small, according to Ken Segall, who worked closely with Jobs as creative director of Apple's ad agency.

After Jobs died in 2011, Segall wrote a book about Apple's work culture, "Insanely Simple." In it, he described how Jobs once noticed someone new had joined a weekly meeting.

"He stopped cold," Segall wrote. "His eyes locked on to the one thing in the room that didn't look right. Pointing to Lorrie, he said, 'Who are you?'"

After she explained who she was and that she was working on related marketing projects, Jobs said, "I don't think we need you in this meeting, Lorrie. Thanks," Segall recalled.

Eric Schmidt made sure meetings had a hierarchy

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said meetings need leaders to make decisions.

In "How Google Works," the 2014 book Schmidt wrote with former SVP of products Jonathan Rosenberg, the pair said each meeting needed a designated "decision-maker" to have the final say.

They wrote that when companies have meetings where everyone present is equal, there's a risk of compromising instead of finding a clear resolution.

Schmidt and Rosenberg added that this person should set the purpose and structure of the meeting and summarize decisions and tasks for participants afterward.

• Even celebrities and ultrawealthy homeowners can face challenges selling their homes.
• Take socialite Sonja Morgan — the starting bid for her NYC home is a fraction of its purchase price.
• She's one of many homeowners resorting to auctioning or renting out pricy homes to offload them.

The world of luxury real estate might seem like a place where deals are plentiful, transactions are swift, and satisfaction is guaranteed.

But that isn't always true, especially in New York City, where a slowdown in demand has made selling multimillion-dollar condos and townhouses more challenging, StreetEasy Senior Economist Kenny Lee told Business Insider.

In many of NYC's upscale neighborhoods, homes are lingering on the market longer and sales are falling, signaling that when it comes to a slump in the real-estate market — not even the nation's wealthiest Americans can walk away unscathed.

Consider the case of Sonja Morgan, the ex-wife of John Adams Morgan, a great-grandson of the founder of J.P. Morgan Chase. Despite Morgan's socialite status and her home's location on the posh Upper East Side, she has struggled to sell the five-story, six-bathroom brownstone.

Morgan, a star of Bravo's "Real Housewives of New York," has owned the home at 162 E. 63rd St. for 27 years, living there on and off. Since around 2008, she has made numerous attempts to sell it, but has failed to attract any serious buyers.

Now, after years of listing and delisting the property, she has opted to auction it with a starting bid of $1.75 million, far below its reported purchase price of $9.1 million in 1997, according to Curbed's Bridget Read.

"I wanna be free to garden and travel and not have to worry about the house — but I'm not taking nothing," Morgan told Curbed.

Bidding opened with Concierge Auctions on May 16 and will remain open until May 29. As of May 24, the current highest bid is $4.25 million, according to the company.

Even the ultrawealthy lose in the game of real estate market

Luxury real estate shows like "Million Dollar Listing" or "Buying Beverly Hills" often portray the selling of high-end homes as effortless. However, even with an elite ZIP code and the pedigree of a famous or rich seller, sealing the deal can still prove difficult. Michael Jordan, for example, has been unable to sell his mansion outside Chicago for more than 11 years.

There's also the 105,000-square-foot megamansion in Los Angeles, developed by former film producer Nile Niami. Following ten years of construction, the home languished on the market without attracting a buyer. It was later placed into court-ordered receivership and subsequently entered bankruptcy proceedings. Finally, it was auctioned off for $126 million to the billionaire CEO of Fashion Nova, Richard Saghian, in 2022.

The crux of the issue is that, the more expensive a home is, the fewer potential buyers it has — it's a troublesome scenario amid slowing buyer demand and growing economic uncertainty. The lack of demand from traditional buyers has led to an increasing number of ultrawealthy homeowners, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, renting out their homes or auctioning them off rather than waiting around for buyers.

"A lot of luxury buyers may already have a primary home, so maybe they're looking for a new investment," StreetEasy Senior Economist Lee said. "For that reason, even though they are generally less affected by high mortgage rates, they are heavily influenced by the general economic outlook."

That's partly why more luxury buyers are increasingly considering renting out their homes rather than selling them, he added.

Custom features added by sellers and maintenance costs canalso put off buyers

One person's dream renovation could be the next person's nightmare.

Lee pointed out another obstacle for luxury homeowners: their inclination to elaborately customize their homes with features that may or may not be appealing to the average buyer.

"A lot of houses and apartments in New York City were built before the war," Lee said. "It's also for that reason, it's common for a lot of owners to go through renovations, to make it more livable and more to their own taste."

In addition to a koi pond in the garden, the Morgans also installed a large nautical star in the entryway on the ground floor during a $3 million renovation, according to Curbed.

Lee noted another factor contributing to the difficulty of selling luxury properties: the high costs associated with their maintenance and upkeep.

Morgan's townhouse carries estimated monthly property taxes of $6,003, per the StreetEasy listing. This figure doesn't include additional expenses that come with owning a townhouse such as insurance, repairs, upgrades, landscaping, and more.

Morgan told Curbed she's ready to be rid of it all.

"I don't want anyone to think, 'New York is done and that's why she's leaving,'" Morgan said. "I'll always be a New Yorker. I just don't need all this."

• Meta's AI chief Yann LeCun is an award-winning computer scientist. 
• But Elon Musk says he isn't impressed with LeCun's scientific work.
• LeCun seemed entertained by the exchange, which he says he engaged in while on a transatlantic flight.

Meta's AI chief, Yann LeCun, might have won a Turing Award for his contributions to computer science, but Elon Musk doesn't seem too impressed with his work.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO spent a chunk of his Memorial Day holiday volleying jibes at LeCun after the latter mocked Musk's attempt to recruit workers for his AI startup, xAI.

"What 'science' have you done in the past 5 years?" Musk asked LeCun in an X post on Monday.

"Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022. What about you?" LeCun replied with a link to his Google Scholar profile.

"That's nothing, you're going soft. Try harder!" Musk said in response.

LeCun joined Meta in December 2013 and has worked for the social media giant for over a decade. The 63-year-old French-American is also a computer science professor at New York University.

But Musk didn't seem to believe that LeCun was involved in any scientific work at Meta.

"Yann is 'just following orders,'" Musk wrote when LeCun clarified that he's "a scientist, not a business or product person."

"You don't seem to understand how research works," LeCun replied.

Interestingly, LeCun didn't seem too fussed by his exchange with Musk. In fact, he even told an X user named Alvin Wang that he found the conversation "entertaining."

"You'd think they'd have more important things to do with their time than have a pissing contest," Wang wrote.

"On a holiday? During which I was stuck on an 8 hour transatlantic flight with free wifi? Pretty entertaining, I'd say," LeCun replied.

This exchange with LeCun is one of many times that Musk has butted heads with his tech rivals. The mercurial billionaire once challenged Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match — which has yet to take place. Musk also filed a lawsuit against his OpenAI cofounder, Sam Altman, in February.

LeCun, however, wasn't raring for a cage fight like Zuckerberg.

"I'd settle for a sailing race," he said in a subsequent X post on Monday night.

Representatives for Musk and LeCun didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.