• US consumers are tightening their purchases, Amazon and Starbucks executives said Tuesday.
• Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said their customers were trading down and looking for deals.
• Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan said the coffee chain's customers were growing more cautious.

US consumers are becoming more prudent with their spending, executives at Amazon and Starbucks said on Tuesday.

"Customers in the US are being very thoughtful about their spend. They look for deals, they trade down and look for lower ASP (average sale price) products," Amazon's chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, told journalists ahead of the company's earnings call.

Customers are buying "a lot more consumables and everyday essentials," which tend to be cheaper, Olsavsky said.

Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan made a similar observation during his company's earnings call.

"We continue to feel the impact of a more cautious consumer, particularly with our more occasional customer and a deteriorating economic outlook has weighed on customer traffic and impact sales broadly across the industry," Narasimhan said.

The CEO said that Starbucks' performance this quarter "did not meet our expectations." Sales declined 3% in the US year-on-year.

Olsavsky and Narasimhan's remarks underscore the challenges facing US consumers — and the companies that sell to them — as shoppers attempt to stretch their dollars amid persistent inflation.

"From being a point of strength during 2023, it appears that lower- and middle-income households' spending growth has been softening," Bank of America economists wrote in a report published on March 11.

In July, McDonald's CFO Ian Borden told investors that customers were trying to save money by "trading down" to its value menu items and "buying a little less."

"A challenging macro environment including rising interest rates and elevated costs continues to create volatile consumer confidence levels and put pressure on consumer spending," Borden said then.

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

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• New York Police Department officers in riot gear entered Columbia University's Hamilton Hall.
• Dozens of protesters were taken by police into busses in zip ties, The New York Times reported.
• This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

New York Police Department officers in riot gear entered Columbia University's Hamilton Hall, which had been occupied by protesters for roughly 20 hours, according to multiple news reports.

According to The New York Times, the NYPD entered the building using a makeshift bridge that allowed them to climb into the second-story window.

Dozens of protesters were taken by police into busses in zip ties, The Times reported.

Videos from student groups on the scene show protesters being pushed off campus by police.

Student groups had been on campus for days, setting up tents and camping out at the Ivy League University to protest Israel's war on Gaza. Demands for the protest included that the university cut financial ties to Israel.

Columbia University, the NYPD, and Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement to the Times, Columbia said in part: "We regret that protesters have chosen to escalate the situation through their actions," adding, "We made the decision, early in the morning, that this was a law enforcement matter, and that the NYPD were best positioned to determine and execute an appropriate response."

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said training AI could one day cost $100 billion.
• Amodei told CNBC that he isn't worried about the commoditization of large language AI models.
• The number of companies able to afford to develop new models will remain slim, he said.

The large language model market may be heating up, but the CEO of AI powerhouse Anthropic isn't all that worried about competition, predicting the price tag of training such models could eventually balloon to $100 billion.

Anthropic CEO and cofounder Dario Amodei discussed the future of Anthropic, its chatbot "Claude," and the billion-dollar AI industry in a wide-ranging interview with CNBC last week.

"The number of players" that have the financial capability to train professional-level AI models at top scale, Amodei said, "is going to be relatively small to start with."

Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei, cofounded Anthropic in 2021, quickly drawing major backers, including Amazon. The e-commerce company poured $1.25 billion into Anthropic last year and pledged an additional $2.75 billion in March, cementing a powerful partnership that grants Amazon a minority ownership stake in Anthropic and allows Anthropic access to Amazon's cloud servers and chips.

The company's Claude rivals similar models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Meanwhile, Amazon is working on its own AI "Olympus," while Elon Musk open-sourced his "Grok" model last month.

But even as model development booms, Amodei brushed off concerns of rapid commoditization, pointing to the astronomical price of creating and training large language models. Amodei told CNBC that current models already cost a company $100 million to develop — and that price will only increase as the technology advances.

"I think we're going to see models trained in the next year are going to be about $1 billion," Amodei told the outlet. "And then 2025, 2026, we're going to go to $5 billion or $10 billion. And I think there's a chance it may go beyond that to $100 billion."

The number of companies financially able to train models at that cost will remain slim, he said.

Diversity in development techniques may also help stave off commoditization, Amodei told CNBC, comparing the various different models to differences in human beings.

"We as humans, we all have — our brains are all basically designed the same, but we're very different from one another, and I think models will be the same," he said.

Amodei said some AI models may specialize in topics like law or national security, while others could gain expertise in biochemistry.

"I think that force is going to lead to different model providers specializing in different things, even as the base model they made is the same," he added.

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• The employees behind Tesla's Supercharging stations are being laid off, BI previously reported.
• Musk said following the cuts that Tesla will keep growing its charger network "at a slower pace."
• Tesla will now focus on "100% uptime and expansion of existing locations," Musk said.

Shortly after news broke that Tesla would be laying off another round of employees, including the team behind the company's Supercharging network, CEO Elon Musk took to social media to reassure owners and investors that the charging stations aren't going anywhere.

"Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations," Musk wrote in a post on X.

Despite Musk's assurances, Tesla has already begun pulling out of leases for upcoming stations in New York, EV news outlet Electrek reported.

The company currently operates 57,579 Superchargers at 6,249 locations globally, the outlet reported.

Even the most die-hard Tesla fans were disheartened by the news. Commenters on Musk's post were quick to call his announcement "kinda lame" and urged him to reconsider, arguing that a large charging network is key to promoting widespread adoption of electric vehicles nationwide.

"This is a goddamn disaster. Superchargers need to be Tesla's second top growing sector outside of FSD," Troy Meekhof, who runs the site The Cybertruck Guy, which covers the Cybertruck and other EVs, wrote in response to Musk's post. "You're opening up the network to practically every EV driver on the continent without building with urgency? I'm honestly floored at this decision."

Meekhof told Business Insider that, as an owner of two Tesla vehicles, he's very familiar with Superchargers and called them "damn near magical," saying they work every time without fail and the stations he visits are rarely full. However, he said, entire sections of the country and his home state of Michigan are completely off-limits to him and his vehicles "simply because of the lack of charging options."

"I'm generally apt to trust Musk's maniacal whims because they're indicative of a more complex longer-term plan, but destroying the division responsible for what I believe is their single greatest achievement in North America is simultaneously shocking and bewildering," Meekhof told BI, adding he's "certainly looking forward to seeing what this broader plan is, but at face value, I'm alarmed."

The latest round of Tesla layoffs, announced by Musk via email late Monday, include Rebecca Tinucci, senior director of the company's Supercharger group, and Daniel Ho, head of new products, BI previously reported. While some employees may be reassigned, the Supercharging team, about 500 employees strong, will be dissolved.

The cuts come after Tesla's lukewarm earnings report last week, which included an 8.7% year-over-year revenue drop in Q1, its earnings per share missing consensus forecasts, and the company's free cash flow dropping 674% year-over-year to negative $2.5 billion.

Representatives for Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

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• Starbucks reported disappointing sales Tuesday in both US and international segments.
• One thing that's not helping: the peak demand in the mornings is too high.
• The company said a mid-teens percent of mobile customers abandon their carts due to long wait times.

Starbucks is having a rough year so far.

The Seattle-based coffee giant posted worse-than-expected sales figures for its second fiscal quarter as visits from "occasional customers" declined, the company said Tuesday.

But while visits from loyal customers remain strong, CEO Laxman Narasimhan highlighted a curiously Starbucksian problem that any occasional or loyal customer has likely encountered: demand is too high during the peak morning rush.

Narasimhan said on the company's earnings call that nearly two-thirds of Starbucks' morning business in the US is from rewards members using the mobile app, which has yielded a remarkable insight.

"We saw a mid-teens percent order incompletion rate within the order channel this past quarter," he said. "In other words, customers using Mobile Order-Pay put items into their carts and sometimes chose not to complete the order, citing long wait times and product unavailability."

That works out to more than one in eight mobile order customers opting not to buy a menu item they were otherwise interested in — a hefty chunk of cash left on the table for Starbucks.

Even as Narasimhan assured investors that his team is working diligently on improving performance in the morning rush, he also said the company is ferreting out untapped demand at all hours of the day.

"Last quarter, we mentioned we were conducting a pilot program to serve customers overnight between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m. when our stores are traditionally closed," he said. "During this pilot test, we doubled our business. Building off that success, we are aggressively pursuing options to build a $2 billion business over the next five years."

The bottom-line impact of these strategy shifts will take more time to be seen however, and the company cut its revenue forecasts in half.

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• Influencer marketing is booming, and brands spend billions to promote products with a personal touch.
• But the industry is unregulated and has problems for brands, audiences, and influencers alike.
• Influencer ads can be fraudulent, discriminatory, and unethical, and audiences have no way to push back.

It seemed like a marketer's perfect plan to get products into the hands of their target audience: pay an internet icon or local influencer to promote them to their loyal fans.

And for the better part of the last two decades, it worked like a charm.

But these days, the industry of influencer marketing is completely off the rails. According to analysts and experts who spoke to Business Insider, influencer brand deals and advertisements are rife with unethical business practices thanks in part to limited regulation of a practice that is rapidly growing year over year.

Since 2016, the dollars driving the influencer marketing industry have ballooned from $1.6 billion a year to an estimated $21.1 billion in 2023, according to Influencer Marketing Hub. The outlet estimates the industry will reach an estimated $24 billion by the end of 2024.

Researcher Emily Hund, author of the book, "The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media," in a recent article for Harvard Business Review, made the case for new regulatory guardrails to be applied to the industry, arguing marketers and regulators often turn a blind eye to bad behavior from brands and influencers alike, which can range from discrimination and unfair business practices to outright fraud.

"While the industry has developed into a sophisticated, albeit chaotic, space, it has done so largely outside the confines of regulatory or professional oversight," Hund wrote. "Its lack of boundaries opens the door for multidirectional exploitation. Marketers, brands, influencers, and platform companies all have opportunities to exploit one another to varying degrees of harm."

It's rough for brands

David Camp, the cofounder of the marketing company Metaforce, told Business Insider that while there's nothing new about influencer marketing — it's just a revamped version of the classic celebrity endorsement, shrunk down for small-time personalities with niche audiences — the industry faces more than its fair share of fraud, misrepresentation, and just plain unreliability.

Fake influencers can defraud brands by purchasing followers or manipulating their metrics to give the appearance of more engagement than they actually receive, driving up their asking price for partnerships and ad deals. The practice costs businesses about 15% of their ad spending, totaling more than $1.3 billion in 2019, CBS News reported.

"Those kinds of negative impacts are more likely in this domain because most of these online influencers do their own thing, and they're basically hustlers," Camp said. "They're trying to build an audience so that they can monetize it, and they're not typically represented by very polished spokespeople and agents that rep them to marketers and agencies, whereas in the traditional celebrity-influencer space, there's a whole coterie of people who are associated with evaluating potential spokespeople and influencers and vetting them and then negotiating with them."

In a traditional celebrity endorsement, the people promoting brands' products are well-known, well-represented, and deliver a predictable result for the businesses who hire them — the audience of loyal followers shells out big bucks for the products that've been endorsed. Think Michael Jordan for Nike, George Foreman for the Salton Electric Grill, or Brooke Shields for Calvin Klein. With influencer marketing, that isn't always the case.

For brands, this means their investment in influencers can end up wasted — or, worse, the social media personalities could use an inopportune moment like the California wildfires in 2018 to promote themselves or a brand, potentially damaging reputations all around.

It's not great for consumers

Despite the money flying around, the FTC only provides basic guidelines about disclosure requirements for influencer marketing to protect consumers of their content.

But only the biggest names seem to get caught when they mislead their audiences — and generally only when they run afoul of rules on disclosing their paid partnerships, which Camp noted is the only rule he's aware of regulating digital media sponsorships and paid advertisements.

In 2022, the SEC settled with Kim Kardashian for $1.25 million after she failed to disclose a $250,000 payment she received to promote EthereumMax crypto tokens on her Instagram.

Similarly, influencer Chiara Ferragni was fined $1 million in January following what Italian officials described as a misleading charity campaign in which she encouraged her followers to purchase a cake, with the proceeds going to a hospital donation, but never fulfilled the promise.

Lindsay Lohan, DJ Khaled, and Naomi Campbell have all also been subject to federal investigations for failing to disclose paid partnerships, Hund noted in her HBR article. The celebrities received warning letters from the FTC, requiring them to provide the agency with information about their relationships with the brands they stealthily promoted, according to the nonprofit Consumer Reports.

"Because she is one of the highest-profile celebrities in the world, Kardashian was an easy 'get' for regulators," Hund wrote. "But far too much sponsored content and far too many influencers exist for government agencies to effectively oversee them all."

Not to mention instances of influencers tricking their audiences into buying branded products with overly positive reviews of companies they're paid by, despite quality issues or even labor abuses.

It's inconsistent for influencers

It's not all easy for the influencers, either. Black and Hispanic content creators face a 35% pay gap compared to white creators, per NBC News, There are also reports of fake talent-management firms requesting $299 "deposits" as part of a scam to fool wannabe influencers.

"Creators bear the brunt of the industry's pervasive uncertainty: They must spend a significant amount of time navigating changing content norms, new platforms and tools, uneven contracts, high expectations for audience engagement, and the blowback that can come with being a public figure with few professional protections," Hund wrote for HBR.

Some influencers faced racial discrimination during an in-person brand-sponsored trip, Business Insider previously reported. And Dylan Mulvaney, an influencer who partnered with brands like Nike and Bud Light, faced a barrage of anti-trans hate and harassment after she posted sponsored content for the companies on her social media pages.

Her partnership with the brands became the reason right-wing figures like Ben Shapiro and Donald Trump Jr. called for a boycott of Bud Light, and she said the resulting threats were so bad she traveled out of the country to escape the backlash.

No end to the mess in sight

Despite the industry's known problems, Camp noted that in some cases, influencer marketing is still perceived to be more desirable because there's a level of authenticity when someone you follow and trust is pitching a product versus just an anonymous ad.

While the FTC's guidelines on disclosures offer some guardrails for the industry, regulators have not focused much attention on the issue.

And there are no signs of slowing the ethical conflicts, especially in the digital marketing and advertising world, where Camp says "there's lots of smoke and mirrors, and it's hard to sometimes understand what you're actually looking at."

"Obviously, some influencers are more high-minded about the brands that they choose to associate with, but for those that are looking to just make money off of their eyeballs, they usually are hustling any which way they can," Camp told BI. "Anyone with an internet connection and an idea can write about their idea and aggregate eyeballs, so there's a lot of shit floating around in that space because there's really no filter, there's no barrier — so there's a very small percentage of cream that rises to that top."

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• "I have a blockbuster Trump story," a lawyer for ex-Playboy Bunny Karen McDougal teased in a text.
• "I will get you more than ANYONE," the National Enquirer's editor answered, adding, "You know why."
• Prosecutors say the ensuing text chain ensnares Trump in a conspiracy to alter the 2016 election.

There were veiled threats, laughable delay tactics, million-dollar demands.

And behind the scenes through it all, prosecutors allege, stood Donald Trump — a presidential candidate eager to quash the sordid tales of a porn star and Playboy Bunny on the brink of the 2016 election, but unwilling to part with a penny of his own to do so.

For nearly four hours on Tuesday, jurors in the Manhattan hush-money trial were led through long scrolls of text messages from the five months leading to Trump's election.

Their guide to these sometimes ribald texts was one of their authors, key prosecution witness Keith Davidson, an LA-based lawyer who repped ex-Bunny Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels.

Both women claim they had affairs with Trump during the early months of his marriage to Melania Trump.

As Trump listened from the defense table, Davidson described the frantic attempts to bury both women's stories by selling them to the National Enquirer.

Trump's then-attorney and "fixer," Michael Cohen, was the hyperactive front man for these two so-called "catch-and-kill" schemes, Davidson said.

But Trump was calling the shots, his testimony suggested.

"He was highly excitable — sort of a pants-on-fire kind of guy," Davidson said of Cohen.

Jurors smiled as the lawyer continued describing Cohen.

"Frequently, I'd be on the phone with him, and he'd take another call, and he'd be talking out of two ears," Davidson remembered on the witness stand.

"Sort of like that movie, 'Up,' where the dog says, 'Squirrel! Squirrel!'" he added to some laughter from the jury.

Cohen was a proxy for Trump, Davidson stressed Tuesday, making an important point for the prosecution.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has alleged that Cohen opened his own wallet to pay the $130,000 hush money payment that silenced Daniels 11 days before the 2016 election — but did so only for Trump's benefit.

Trump is charged with falsifying business documents to disguise as "legal fees" what were actually monthly reimbursement checks he paid to Cohen throughout 2017, his first year in office.

"Every single time I talked to Michael Cohen, he leaned on his close affiliation with Donald Trump," Davidson testified.

"It was part of his identity," the lawyer told jurors of Cohen. "He let me know it at every opportunity he could that he was working for Donald Trump."

Trump was so integral to the deals that his frugality nearly quashed the Daniels catch-and-kill effort, according to a series of texts between Davidson and the National Enquirer's then-editor-in-chief, Dylan Howard.

Trump was perilously "tight" when it came to paying hush money, the two men agreed in their texts.

"I can't believe Cohen let this go. It's going to be a shit show" if Daniels takes her story elsewhere, the Enquirer editor complained in an October 18, 2016 text shown to jurors on overhead screens.

"I bet," Daniels' lawyer texted back in agreement.

"All because trump[sic] is tight," the Enquirer editor texted back.

When Daniels' lawyer responded "Yup," the Enquirer editor responded, "I reckon that trump[sic] impersonator I hired has more cash."

"Lol," Daniels lawyer responded.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass, who was conducting Davidson's direct examination, appeared eager to forge this link between Trump and the scheme to silence Daniels.

He asked his witness what he thought the Enquirer editor meant by calling Trump "tight."

"That Trump is frugal," Davidson answered.

"That they had this deal sort of on a silver platter," Davidson continued. "And the only reason it didn't 'fund' is that he didn't want to spend money."

Cohen's stall tactics on Trump's behalf were so obvious as to be laughable, the lawyer also testified.

At one point, Cohen blamed Yom Kippur for the delay in getting the $130,000 together, Davidson testified.

At another point, Cohen claimed the Trump Organization computer systems were, "quote, all fucked up," Davidson told the jury.

"He stated you can't believe what we're going through," Davidson testified, continuing to describe Cohen's stalling on the $130,000.

"The Secret Service is here, and there are so many firewalls," Davidson said Cohen stalled at another point.

"I never got your emails!" Cohen claimed at another point, the lawyer said.

"I called him and said, Michael, this is a very bad situation," he said he told Cohen.

"And then he said, 'God damn it, what do you expect me to do? My guy is in four, five different states'" campaigning, he said Cohen told him.

"I thought he was trying to kick the can down the road until after the election," Davidson added.

Jurors were told just that in opening statements.

Trump had hoped to forestall paying Daniels until the election, Steinglass had said in openings, after which it wouldn't matter if she told her story at all.

Meanwhile, Trump has fought the charges by distancing himself and his campaign from the payments to Cohen, which he's argued actually were legal fees.

Davidson on Tuesday led jurors through a half-year's worth of texts with the Enquirer editor.

"I have a blockbuster Trump story," he teased the editor in the June 7, 2016 text — the first the jurors saw on Tuesday.

That was the story of his client Karen McDougal, the former Playboy Bunny — and 1998 Playmate of the year — who says she had a ten-month affair with Trump that began in 2006.

"I will get you more than ANYONE," the eager National Enquirer editor answered less than a minute later, adding, "You know why…"

The "why" was Trump, according to the prosecution theory.

At one point, the two texting men — Enquirer editor Howard, and McDougal attorney Davidson — bartered over the former Bunny's story of a 10-month affair with Trump.

"Get me a price on McDougal," the editor texted on July 23, 2016.

"How about 1m now," her lawyer responded, asking $1 million for the story. "And 75k per year for the next 2 years as a fitness correspondent."

The editor looked askance at that high a figure.

"I'll take it to them," he responded. "But thinking it's more hundreds than millions."

Ultimately the Enquirer paid $150,000 to catch and kill McDougal's story, prosecutors say.

Trump has consistently denied sexual encounters with Daniels and McDougal.

The now-GOP-frontrunner has also denied that the money he paid Cohen throughout 2017 was for anything other than legitimate legal fees.

Davidson's testimony is scheduled to continue Thursday morning.

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• Hemant Pandey shares the resume format that has helped him land several software engineering roles.
• He keeps work experiences short and includes points that make for good interview stories.
• Pandey emphasizes the growing importance of personal branding in the job market.

Hemant Pandey's software engineering career was off to a good start.

After an internship at Amazon during his graduate program, he anded a full-time software role at Tesla in 2018. The pay was "top notch," and it was a dream company.

Pandey, who grew up in India, even invited his family to visit him in California that summer.

Two weeks later after they visited, he was laid off.

"It was my first job and getting laid off meant having to build rapport all over again in just six months," he told Business Insider. "I needed to prove myself again."

He didn't feel comfortable telling people he was let go and worried companies might see him as a bad performer and reject him before interviews.

But he was proactive about looking for new roles and landed a job at SAP within a month.

After a year, Pandey switched to Salesforce, where he stayed for two years. In 2021, he applied to Meta after learning about the company's "crazy" pay packages on tech forums.

Here is the résumé format that Pandey has used since college. It got him a $500,000 senior software engineer role at Meta and offers from TikTok and LinkedIn at the same time. BI has verified his employment history and compensation, which includes cash and stock.

Making conscious résumé decisions

Looking back at his résumé two and a half years into his job at Meta, there are a couple of things Pandey said work well, which he would keep the same.

Limiting descriptions: When it comes to summarizing work experiences, "I like to keep it very ambiguous," Pandey said. In an interview, "if people ask me what I did at Salesforce, I can help them know more by explaining rather than writing a paragraph." He uses one to three bullet points for each role.

Including GPA: While his master's GPA is not very "impressive," Pandey chooses to include it and sees it as an opportunity to share a story during an interview. "I generally share how I bombed my first semester and was intimidated," he said about getting a low GPA and almost losing an internship he was offered. He talks about how he had to push himself to keep up with more experienced students and eventually scored better in the following semesters. "This makes a good growth and learning-from-failures story."

Ability to do basics: As engineers move to more senior roles, the job is less about coding and more focused on leading teams and delivering projects, he said. "But if I still interview for a startup, they don't really care about how I'm leading or shipping products. They care about if I can write code, if I'm tech savvy enough." To demonstrate his technical skills, Pandey lists projects and links to his past coding work.

There is only one change he would make if he were to revamp the résumé today.

Personal brand projects: "Your personal brand is now more and more important," he said. "I write actively on LinkedIn and have a newsletter with around 4,000 subscribers," which he would list on his résumé's projects section. He would also include that he mentors students. Those additions "will start to matter more than just my tech skills and certificates."

Pandey is part of a growing group of people, both corporate workers and business owners, embracing personal branding to boost their careers.

Quynh Mai, the founder of a digital creative agency, decided to embrace personal branding nearly 10 years after she began her business. Once Mai began promoting herself and her work via LinkedIn and media, and giving talks, she said potential customers trusted her experience more, she previously told BI.

"Building a personal brand connected to your business is more important than ever because people won't do business with anyone they don't trust," she said.

Those in 9-to-5 jobs have started adopting similar practices.

Sahil Dua, a senior machine learning engineer at Google in Zurich, told BI that personal branding projects have given him an edge in job interviews and have boosted his career.

"Tech speaking experience actually helped quite a lot in advancing my career and came up a lot in interview processes that I was going through at the time," Dua said.

If he were to revamp his résumé today, he said he would add his experience speaking at conferences and a book he wrote in 2020.

"I would change that section to make sure I highlight that I've given these TED talks to increase my credibility and to say: yeah, I know some stuff," Dua said.

Do you work in tech, finance, or consulting, and have a story to share about your personal résumé journey? Email this reporter at shubhangigoel@insider.com.

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• Kenneth Tan bought a three-bedroom house in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for 920,000 ringgit, or about $192,000.
• He spent six months transforming the old building into a sleek modern home with Japandi influences.
• "Sometimes if I go out, I kind of feel like I want to come home," Tan said. 

When the pandemic hit Malaysia in 2020, Kenneth Tan realized he needed his own space.

When his father and stepmom started working from home, their house began to feel crowded. "I felt like I had to hide in my room," Tan, who works in the F&B industry, told Business Insider.

He started scrolling real-estate platforms half-seriously, but as time passed, he became more invested in the idea of having his own house.

Although high property prices in major cities have made it difficult for many young Malaysians to buy their own homes, it's unclear what percentage of millennials still live with their parents in Malaysia. The Malaysia Population Research Hub did not respond to multiple requests for comment from BI.

In the US, based on the latest 2023 Census data, 19.7% of men and 12.3% of women between 25 and 34 years old still live with their parents.

"I thought, maybe I just need my own condo. A smaller space, or even a studio would be fine," Tan, 32, said.

Before making any purchases, Tan decided to rent a condo on Airbnb for a couple of weeks to see what it would feel like.

While Tan enjoyed the freedom that came with living alone, he realized he wasn't a fan of high-rise living.

In 2022, he ended up buying a corner terrace in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, for 920,000 Malaysian ringgit, or about $192,000.

"I wanted a swimming pool in my place, so I needed a house that had some land. But I also didn't want too much space — which was how I ended up with a single-story corner terrace," Tan said.

A quiet neighborhood

Tan's house is about 1,650 square feet and has three bedrooms. It's located in the township of Happy Garden, and about a 15-minute drive from both his parents' place and his workplace.

Tan estimates the house was built sometime in the 1960s or 70s.

What drew him to the property was its original condition — the previous owners had barely renovated the house in the decades that they lived there.

"You can clearly tell that the floors were original, the walls were original, the roof was original, everything was basically untouched in some way, and there was no renovation that was done anywhere in between," Tan said.

He also ended up liking the neighborhood a lot more than he expected to.

"It's very near to this neighboring commercial area called Kuchai Lama," Tan said. "So it's quite a busy place, not the kind of area that I thought I would like, but somehow the property sits in a pocket of houses that doesn't feel like it's congested at all."

The location made it convenient for him to get around while still allowing him to enjoy the peace and quiet.

"I could just walk to all these commercial areas," Tan said. "And going to the KL city center is like 15 minutes by car."

Tan's house is less than eight miles away from the Petronas Twin Towers.

A six-months long transformation

Tan started renovating his home in January 2023 and completed it in June, half a year later. He now lives in it with his girlfriend.

He describes the interior design of his home as having Japandi influences, thanks to the textures of the materials and the warm, earthy tones used in the house.

Tan said he worked with an interior designer to bring his vision to life.

"The designer just had to give their input and discuss whether it made sense," he said.

While he had some internal walls broken down to open up the space, Tan says he kept the original structure and layout of the home — including the open airwell.

"It's a very big part of the house, although it doesn't carry too much function per se, other than allowing some light in the center of the house as well as some cross ventilation," Tan said."It's a space that's not really used, but I like it because it makes the house unique."

He estimates that he spent about 1.3 million Malaysian ringgit, or about $271,000, on the renovation.

"There were compromises, but there were also things that I didn't need but ended up spending on because I wanted something nicer," Tan said.

For instance, he says he could have gotten cheaper floor tiles that were 20 ringgit a piece, but he chose the ones that cost 140 ringgit each because he liked them better.

"It's completely emotional because I know very well that the one that's cheaper could be equally as nice, but spending that extra money made it slightly better. I'm just happier because I picked the one that I wanted," Tan said.

Tan's favorite part of the house is his bedroom, which faces the swimming pool. Waking up to the view of the water every morning gives him a sense of peace and calm.

He also likes the arched doorways, which he included as a nod to the original design of the home.

"I actually added quite a lot of arches to it because the original house had them. The house that I used to live in also had them as well," Tan said.

Part of the reason Tan chose to renovate an old home was because he wanted to preserve the original structure — even though he was told it would probably cost just as much, if not more, than demolishing and building a new home.

"Obviously the construction methods back in the day versus today, it's very different," Tan said. "So I think buying the old house and redoing it, it definitely has more character."

Having a home of his own has given him a sense of comfort and security.

"This is something that I only realized after I'm living here, and it's that I'm so much more at ease. I have my own place to go back to," Tan said.

He even spends more time at home than he used to, he said.

"Sometimes if I go out, I kind of feel like I want to come home. Even on holidays sometimes, it's like I miss home. I don't mind being home as much," Tan said.

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

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• Kari Lake is hoping to flip the Arizona US Senate seat being vacated by Kyrsten Sinema.
• But a new Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey shows that she's not consolidating the GOP base.
• The poll shows her likely Democratic opponent, Ruben Gallego, winning 15% of GOP voters.

In the fight to win Arizona's Senate seat this fall, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego and GOP candidate Kari Lake are locked in a close race in what has become one of the nation's premier swing states.

A new survey released by Emerson College Polling/The Hill showed that Gallego, a Phoenix-area congressman, led Lake by 2.2 points (45.3% to 43.1%), with 11.6% of respondents indicating that they were undecided.

While the Senate primaries in Arizona won't be held until August, both Gallego and Lake are heavily favored to capture their respective party nominations to succeed retiring independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

For Lake, who as the GOP gubernatorial nominee in 2022 ran a Trump-aligned candidacy that appealed to his most conservative acolytes, she's already made moves to expand her coalition in the fast-growing state.

But the latest survey showed the challenges that she still faces as she works to flip the key Senate seat for the GOP. And her biggest obstacle may be with members of her own party.

In the poll, Gallego was backed by 87.4% of Democrats and received support from 15% of GOP respondents — a sizable level of crossover support for the Democratic congressman.

Lake's numbers were softer, as she was only supported by roughly 80% of Republicans, while 6.5% of Democrats indicated that they would back her candidacy.

When Sinema — then a Democrat — defeated then-GOP Rep. Martha McSally in the 2018 Senate race, she won 97% of Democrats and 12% of Republicans en route to a roughly two-point (50%-48%) victory.

Lake in the past has notably tussled with leaders in Arizona's center-right Republican establishment, but in recent months, she's sought to unify the party around her candidacy. Still, that effort has hit some snags among some in the party who dislike that she endorsed Trump's debunked election fraud claims regarding the 2020 election.

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