• $3.2 billion Eisler told investors it was closing down due to the high costs of talent in September.
• The firm had more than 250 people based in nine offices across the US, Europe, and the Middle East.
• The manager has had discussions with onetime rival funds about purchasing their risk system, Photon.

Shutting down a hedge fund isn't as simple as turning off the lights and handing the office keys to the building manager.

Trades need to be wound down slowly to make sure backers don't lose money in a fire sale. Employment contracts with payouts and deferred compensation need to be honored. Anything worth selling needs to find a buyer.

At $3.2 billion Eisler Capital, the London-based multistrategy fund founded by Goldman Sachs veteran Ed Eisler, the firm's late September letter to investors about liquidating the firm was just the first step.

The firm had transformed itself from a macro shop into a fund with dozens of different teams trading their own specialities and had ambitious goals. In a conversation with Business Insider at the end of 2023, Eisler's COO, Chris Milner, said the manager had increased head count by more than 40% that year and had "a lot of support from our capital partners and the Street right now and don't feel constrained."

"What we don't want to do is grow for growth's sake. Against that, though, we are an ambitious organization," Milner said.

Unfortunately, 2023 was a high point for the firm. The firm made 3% in 2024, trailing its larger multistrategy peers, as costs mounted. Key moneymakers Adrien Delattre and Lewis Morton left the firm despite being named partners at the end of 2023.

"The challenge of attracting and retaining experienced money managers capable of deploying capital at scale within a cost structure acceptable to investors has grown significantly," the firm told investors in its letter.

Compared to the typical fund liquidation, Eisler has the ongoing attention of the industry due to its high head count and a possible sale of some of the firm's intellectual property.

In talking with backers of the firm, people close to the manager, and industry experts, Business Insider has pulled together the latest on the firm's potential sale of its risk system, Photon, the portfolio manager rival funds are trying to hire, and where some of the fund's investing talent has already landed.

The manager declined to comment.

The battle for Eisler's risk system

While Eisler's returns lagged behind those of its peers in 2025, with a loss of 1.7% through August, the firm's risk and analytics system, developed by Eisler and his right-hand man, Sam Wisnia, was known throughout the industry as well-designed. One person at a rival fund said Eisler's macro background gave the system a unique feel compared to others in the industry, which were made with long-short equity or quant trading in mind.

Multistrategy funds, the sprawling giants that have come to define this era of the industry, are hyper-focused on risk, given the key part of their pitch to large institutional investors: We can make money in any market environment.

While the cutthroat, immediate firings for any PM who loses 3% are not as common due to the talent war, these firms use a host of systems and tools to monitor the exposures and risks of each trading team, ensuring that no one portfolio drags down the entire fund. Eisler's Photon is considered to be one of the best for tracking macro risks.

Several people said the firm has had conversations with funds such as Verition and Taula Capital about buying the system, which is named Photon. Verition and Taula declined to comment.

Two LPs of the fund told Business Insider that they are frustrated that the money made from the potential sale of the system will not be distributed to them, but instead will go to Eisler and Wisnia. These backers feel entitled to a share of the proceeds from any sale, given that their pass-through fees covered the development of Photon.

A person close to the firm said that Eisler's legal documents with investors clearly give the ownership of intellectual property, such as Photon, to the founder.

The PM everyone is circling

In late 2023, in an effort to keep top talent at the firm, Eisler named four new partners. A little over a year later, three of them, including the aforementioned Delattre and Morton, had departed the fund — an ominous sign for how top performers viewed the manager's future.

The one new partner who stayed with the firm through its closing is now one of the most coveted potential hires for rivals, according to business development executives at two different multistrategy funds.

Massimiliano Pignatelli is a Milan-based portfolio manager who joined Eisler in 2020 after a stint on a trading desk for Macquarie in London. His resume includes a decade-long stint at French bank Société Générale, where he was the head of European Forward Trading, a type of derivative trading.

While he's worked in different European cities in his career, including Paris, the Italy native relocated to Milan while at Eisler. The financial center in northern Italy has become a haven for London's wealthy fleeing the United Kingdom's high tax regime.

He did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Where the talent has landed

Pignatelli is far from the only Eisler talent in demand.

With more than 250 people across nine offices in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, the manager had a significant staff despite its relatively low asset base.

Despite a potential 30% cut to their bonuses if they left the fund immediately, Eisler executives and PMs have already started popping up at other funds. Below are some of the individuals who have already made a move, according to media reports, LinkedIn profiles, and industry sources.

• Elanco CEO Jeff Simmons said he urges his six kids to find their passions in their careers.
• Simmons said everything changed once he found his 'why.'
• He also emphasized the importance of a strong work ethic and good social skills.

When Jeff Simmons isn't steering animal-health giant Elanco, he's focused on a different kind of leadership challenge: raising six kids.

"We have family meetings every Sunday," Simmons told Business Insider.

Those check-ins double as career-coaching lessons. With some of their children already in the workforce, Simmons said he and his wife are consistently coaching their kids.

The CEO's core message is straightforward: "Find your 'why.'"

One of his sons has already put that advice into action, leaving a broadcasting job in Lexington, Kentucky, to pursue a path as a pastor.

Simmons said it took him 13 years to uncover his own sense of purpose, and "everything changed" once he did. Simmons described coming across a desperate father and his two daughters who hadn't eaten in two days. He says it was a defining moment that "wrecked him" and made him realize his purpose.

"It unlocked something in me. My 'why' is hungry," the CEO said, adding that he's passionate about about solving food insecurity and also drawn to the mindset of a hungry leader.

Simmons, who has been with Elanco for over three decades, has centered his life around that passion. The company is focused on changing animal care through innovation and helping farmers improve animal health while reducing their environmental footprint. Roughly a decade ago, Simmons founded Hatch for Hunger, an organization that delivers protein-rich meals to those in need.

The nonprofit is about to hit 100 million meals given this year, an Elanco spokesperson told Business Insider. To fuel his drive to help leaders, he also serves as the chairman of EDGE Mentoring, a mentoring organization.

Simmons said he loves "hungry leaders," and when he sees that trait in someone else, it evokes an emotional response in him.

"When somebody finds their 'why,' they will go places they couldn't imagine going," Simmons said.

Work ethic and manners matter

In addition to teaching his kids to find what motivates them, Simmons said he believes in the power of working hard. He said his family even had a bumper sticker last year that said: "We can do hard things."

The CEO said that while many students may work during college, they aren't prepared for the stamina required to handle a 14-hour workday or the greater demands of navigating a full-time job.

Simmons said he teaches his kids that there's "power in the ability to work," and that the first five years on the job can make a difference in your career. Simmons said his son, who recently graduated from college and works in Dallas, told him that a number of his friends who graduated in May have already quit their jobs.

"His playback to me, and I agree with, is they didn't learn the muscle of work," Simmons said.

That mindset also shapes his view on showing up in person early on in your career. While the CEO encourages flexibility in the workplace, he said entry-level employees should "no question, be in the office," if they have the option to be.

He and his wife also constantly preach the importance of what he refers to as basic social "hygiene," like sending thank-you notes.

"I think the basics can be forgotten," Simmons said.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jane Way, 84, who lives in a suburb of Phoenix. Way works 30 hours a week as a US-based accountant for a South African orphanage. She works partly out of financial necessity but said she would work regardless, despite some health issues. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I started working at 7 in my parents' restaurant. I have a degree in accounting. I was the first woman from Cal Poly to be invited to help recruit students for CPA firms. I was then offered a position at a Big 8 firm, where I worked for two years and became certified.

I was a CPA for 46 years in various roles, including franchising and retail, across different kinds of companies. I was a prominent figure in accounting and finance departments.

My husband was also a CPA. He started an import business after a massive heart attack in 1972. I've been widowed since 1987 and never remarried.

At the time, I was the CFO of an international franchisor of rental equipment and party goods. My husband and I also owned and managed an import company specializing in gourmet and decorative accessories.

After his death, I was not prepared to handle all the responsibilities of a high-ranking CFO accounting position. I began working as a contract employee for various companies and with a rental company for several years.

I've primarily worked in the private sector. My emphasis for the last 12 years has been with nonprofits, and I'm currently working with an Arizona nonprofit that has an orphanage in South Africa.

I'm very active in my church and serve on the missions committee. Someone brought this charity to the church as an opportunity for us to get involved.

I work night and day, literally

9 a.m. my time is the end of the day in South Africa. My workday for Open Arms Home for Children begins at 11 p.m. and ends at 8 a.m.

I do some work during the day that I can complete without direct supervision. I don't work a full day most days, but it averages about 30 hours a week. I do financial statements, analyses, and reports during the regular day. I take a couple of long naps every 24-hour cycle.

I'm a person who thrives on work. I need to be doing something to make things better for people. Otherwise, I don't feel like I'm productive at all.

My mantra for many years has been to share my best. For me, work is its own reward, and it keeps me thinking fresh thoughts. I need the money and am open to additional opportunities, but I would work anyway.

I've retired at least twice, and it just doesn't suit me. I was shortly retired in 1990 after running my accounting practice, and my "long retirement" was from 2004 until 2011. In my 60s, I thought I was through with work.

I'm dependent on both my Social Security and my nonprofit income

I put two grandchildren through college and spent my retirement early, so I don't have huge resources. This is what I chose to do.

When the family gathered to celebrate my 80th birthday, I shared that I have a 20-year plan. I'm almost five years into that plan, and some things are better, while others are worse, but I intend to be here to celebrate reaching 100 and hope to still be working.

Our lives shape us, just as we shape our lives. My priorities are my faith and family, followed by work, and then writing. I'm very close to my family. I have one son and three grandchildren. I decided that I needed to be an influence in their lives.

I have several health issues

Some are serious, but I don't think about that, any more than necessary, as there are other things that need to be done. You don't reach 84 without facing some health challenges.

I've been in a wheelchair for five years, so my ability to be mobile and do things outside my home is pretty limited. My entire career and family are ways for me to stay connected to the world.

I work from home, and everything I need is conveniently located nearby. My son and one of my grandsons live with me. My son had a stroke in 2016 and is disabled. My grandson's marriage fell apart, and we decided it was a matter of economy for the three of us to live together.

It has gone very well. Everybody takes care of their own stuff, and I do most of the cooking. We share expenses.

Since I share my home with my son and grandson, I have ready tech support. Along the way, I've had to take breaks due to health issues, the most recent being COVID-19 in 2023. I was in the hospital for almost two weeks and then in rehab for six weeks.

I hope to stay with this organization for the next decade and contribute to its success. I know they're pleased with the work I do, and it will be up to me to decide when I no longer want to work.

Work is its own reward

Find a field you enjoy, and it won't be work. It's important to volunteer and give back to your community.

If I had regrets, one might be that I didn't cultivate relationships. I met friends at church. My close friends here in Phoenix started out as clients in Yuma in 1987. I have many newer friends my age, and we get together and do things, but it isn't the same as having people who know your history.

The most important thing is to be true to yourself and do what you want to do and what makes you happy. People need to be able to make their own life choices and suffer the consequences if they don't turn out as they hoped.

Part of what makes us adults is going through the hard times and understanding that that's a part of living. Nothing is just handed to us.

When CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned Meta employees in January to "buckle up" for an "intense" year, he meant it.

Determined to dominate the next era of AI, Meta has spent the past year in blitz mode. Zuckerberg has overhauled divisions, reallocated resources to new products, and poured billions into the AI arms race with OpenAI, Google, and others. Zuckerberg's push came with a marked shift in leadership tone as well, including his public celebration of what he described as more "masculine energy."

Along the way, the company has trimmed its metaverse ambitions, raised performance expectations, and cut thousands of jobs, all while chasing Zuckerberg's grand vision of "personal superintelligence."

In some ways, the moves have boosted efficiency and led to faster innovation. In others, some divisions have been roiled by internal tensions, including clashes resulting from AI reorganizations and Zuckerberg flaming the AI talent wars, according to current and former employees. Some also said Meta's layoffs earlier this year were unnecessarily demoralizing when Zuckerberg branded the affected employees as "low performers."

The company's transformation comes at a time when Big Tech is rewriting its playbook, cutting costs, toughening its tone with employees, and making massive bets that AI will determine who leads in the next decade.

Meta is wagering that moving harder and faster will help give the company an edge over its rivals. After months of a cultural reset in early 2025, employee sentiment improved in recent months, a Meta spokesperson said, citing a recent internal employee sentiment questionnaire.

Investors are worried about the company's strategy, particularly its plan to sink tens of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure and talent. The question is whether Meta is overdoing it. Shares have risen 7.5% this year, less than half that of the S&P 500, and have underperformed most of the so-called Magnificent 7 companies.

"The company must articulate its vision, show how its pieces fit together, and, most importantly, demonstrate steady growth," said Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, who covers Meta.

This account of Meta's "year of intensity" is based on interviews conducted by Business Insider with more than a dozen current and former employees, analysts, and academic researchers.

The AI overhaul

Over the summer, Zuckerberg sought to change the perception that Meta was trailing behind its AI rivals. In June, the company made a $14 billion investment in AI training company Scale AI and hired its 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, as chief AI officer. Two months later, it rebranded its team focused on AI efforts to Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).

As Meta's leadership sought to reorganize teams and recruit top talent from competitors, some ex-employees went public with the view that the company lacked a coherent AI strategy.

Joena Zhang, a former Meta Superintelligence Labs employee, said in a November LinkedIn post that "nobody really knew what anyone was doing" during the first half of the year at MSL — then called GenAI. She said there were "endless" meetings that didn't result in "actual decisions." And in a July Substack post, former Meta researcher Tijmen Blankevoort wrote that Meta had "a wavering vision that was tough for team members to enthusiastically rally behind."

Meta began offering massive compensation packages to attract top AI talent from rival labs, including OpenAI and Google's AI division, DeepMind.

This created rifts between the "old guard" and newer hires by offering outsiders significantly more compensation than existing employees got. It fueled a quiet competition to prove whose ideas for AI features were more valuable, according to two MSL employees.

The tensions also revolved around access to computing resources and the prestige of being associated with the elite team at the center of MSL, as one researcher previously told Business Insider.

In August, Meta undertook its fourth major reorganization in six months to streamline its AI efforts, dividing MSL into four teams: a new TBD Lab (short for "to be determined"), a product team overseeing the Meta AI assistant, an infrastructure team, and the company's long-standing Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab.

After the shake-up, it was unclear who owned which projects, and people were reassigned between teams, according to the two MSL employees, one of whom added that the flow of information between TBD and MSL wasn't always even.

Asked about the internal shake-up, a Meta spokesperson pointed Business Insider to an X post from Andy Stone, a Meta communications executive, describing previous reporting about the company's AI restructuring as "navelgazing."

At least eight of Meta's AI staffers, including researchers, engineers, and a senior product leader, left the company within two months of MSL's formation. Meta said most had been with the company for years, and that some attrition is normal for an organization of its size.

Two months after the August shuffle, Meta cut about 600 jobs as part of a wider reorganization of the MSL division. Wang told employees that the cuts were designed to speed up decision-making.

Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, told Business Insider that the changes have helped Meta move faster in model releases and in integrating its AI across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

"Meta is now one of the only companies training frontier-class models and deploying them to billions of users, which is exactly where I want it to be," he said.

Meta also shook up its leadership ranks in Reality Labs, the division responsible for developing its virtual and mixed reality products.

The company is considering budget cuts for the metaverse unit that sits within Reality Labs, which could result in job cuts, a person familiar with the matter previously told Business Insider. A Meta spokesperson said that it is reallocating some of its investment "from Metaverse toward AI glasses and wearables" to match momentum, adding that the company "wasn't planning any broader changes than that."

'Intense' performance reviews

The MSL layoffs were part of a broader effort by Meta to tighten operational efficiency this year, as the company reduced layers of management and implemented a stricter performance review process than in previous years.

Zuckerberg told employees in January he had "decided to raise the bar on performance management" and would move quickly to cut about 5% of "low performers." The company cut about 3,600 jobs in February from its workforce of about 78,450 employees.

By May, it directed managers to place a higher proportion of employees in its bottom review rankings: For teams of 150 or more, 15% to 20% of employees should be rated in the "below expectations" tier, compared with 12% to 15% the previous year.

Multiple employees said the revised system created a pressure-cooker environment and encouraged more cutthroat competition between staff. Managers and employees described a shift toward short-term projects as teams looked to protect themselves from landing at the bottom of the ranking.

The requirement to place more staff in lower performance tiers saw some managers strategically leave positions open or hire employees solely to place them in the bottom tier, two managers said.

The company says employee sentiment improved in the second half of the year. Its latest internal employee sentiment questionnaire, which ran from October 20 to November 3, showed "optimism" rose to 80%, "pride" at 71% and "confidence in leadership" at 68%, according to data Meta shared with Business Insider.

Each of those metrics was up between 10 and 12 percentage points compared to the last survey, which ran April 21 through May 5, the spokesperson said. The latest survey had a 91% participation rate, Meta said.

Departures and loyalists

The combination of policy shifts, reorganizations, job cuts, and stricter performance expectations triggered a wave of departures in 2025, according to five internal farewell posts reviewed by Business Insider. Some employees said Meta's evolving political posture and internal governance changes no longer aligned with their values.

"Meta in 2025 is a very different company from what Oculus & Facebook were in 2017," one engineer, who left Meta in August after nearly eight years at the company, wrote in an internal farewell message, viewed by Business Insider. These types of notes are known internally as "badge posts."

He cited a "matter of principles" for his departure, adding that the "sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit alignment with the new US government" clashed with his personal values.

Similar themes surfaced in other employee departures this year.

"The unnecessary pressure, lack of empathy, and occasional lack of fairness," one former employee wrote in another farewell post from January, seen by Business Insider. "Fighting for scope. Narratives. Oh, the narratives – I'm so looking forward to not hearing that word for a while. Smart and kind people bending their values to survive because they've been on the edge of their seats for too long."

A Meta spokesperson said the resignations represent a small slice of the company. Meta has 78,450 employees, and head count is up 8% year-over-year.

Some departing employees told Business Insider that they no longer had a meaningful outlet to share feedback with leadership on topics such as DEI and embracing "masculine energy" because questions for Q&A sessions were preselected, and that posts critical of leadership decisions were sometimes removed from the platform.

"We will skip questions that we expect might be unproductive if they leak or things like people-related questions that have already been answered," Meta's VP of internal communications, Jonny Oser, informed employees in an internal post earlier this year.

In a January poll titled "Measuring workplace fear," dozens of Meta employees voted anonymously on how afraid they were that speaking openly about working conditions could lead to disciplinary action. The winning responses were "extremely afraid" and "very afraid," according to a screenshot of the poll viewed by Business Insider.

Even as some employees headed for the exits, others say they are optimistic about the new environment.

Two current employees told Business Insider that Meta can be a rewarding place to work, particularly for individuals accustomed to operating in high-pressure environments.

"I would say that people who are confident in their skills and are high performers generally thrive," one senior engineer said.

Another Meta veteran said the company used to "coddle its staff" — but "that's changing."

An engineer said there are reasons to stay put. "The positives are that we are still on the frontier in R&D," they said. "There are a lot of cool AI, wearables, and robotics things going on," giving high-performing employees a chance to learn and build "a lot of good skills."

"Also, we get paid a lot, still, and get free food and snacks," they said. "That helps."

• NFL Hall of Famer Fran Tarkenton is an Apple shareholder.
• He remains bullish on the tech giant even as some investors worry about its pace of AI developments.
• "They've been around for 50 years, and look what they've done in those 50 years!" he told Business Insider.

NFL Hall of Famer Fran Tarkenton started buying up shares of Apple a decade ago — and he doesn't plan on selling them any time soon, he told Business Insider.

"The Apple stock never gets sold," Tarkenton said in a recent interview.

Tarkenton said he "sleeps well at night" knowing that, regardless of what happens with his companies, he always has his backstop of Apple stock, of which he owns hundreds of thousands of shares, according to records viewed by Business Insider.

"I first met Steve Jobs when he was out of Apple and building Pixar, but I really started buying their stock around 10 years ago," Tarkenton added in a follow-up email. "I've handled my own money for a long time, because I wanted to know what the companies I was investing in were doing."

The Minnesota Vikings legend, who made the bulk of his fortune after retiring from the league, said he bought his first Apple shares in 2015 after researching the company.

"I started getting to know some of the people there, and they were brilliant people," he said. "I began investing in Apple, and I don't sell it. I reinvest all the dividends. I read about them and what they're doing every day, so I know that's the company I believe in more than any other."

Tarkenton told Business that he saw Apple's diversification and its famously high gross margin as too good to pass up.

"They've been around for 50 years, and look what they've done in those 50 years!" Tarkenton said. "They're so diversified; they're in everything, they have more assets than any company in the world, and they keep on growing and building in new ways."

'Tim Cook came in and didn't try to be Steve Jobs'

Tarkenton praised Apple CEO Tim Cook's "authentic leadership," saying that he has handled the difficult task of replacing the iconic cofounder Steve Jobs well.

"He's a very different person from Steve Jobs, but he's been just as good and maybe even better for Apple," he said.

"Tim Cook came in and didn't try to be Steve Jobs. Instead, he was his authentic self, and he's a genius leader," Tarkenton added. "Coming in after an icon like Steve Jobs is a tough job, and he's handled it magnificently."

Under Cook's leadership, Apple has grown at a staggering pace, increasing its market cap from $350 billion in 2011 to over $4 trillion. During that time, Apple unveiled hit products such as the Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as services like Apple Pay and Apple TV+ — though it also launched the relatively slow-selling Vision Pro and reportedly scrapped its long-in-development electric car project.

Meanwhile, Cook is steering Apple through the AI race, which it got a late start to — a critique that Tarkenton said TV pundits like to talk about but that he dismissed.

Tarkenton isn't worried about who will replace Cook, who is nearing retirement age. Cook has said Apple has "very detailed succession plans" and that he would like his replacement to be an internal hire. John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, is widely seen as the frontrunner, though Apple hasn't publicly discussed succession candidates.

"I don't think he'll leave in the next year; maybe in the next couple of years," Tarketon said in his follow-up note. "But if and when he does step away, they'll have another person ready to step up, because they've built that kind of company with that kind of leadership culture."

Tarkenton sees big things ahead for Apple TV

Tarkenton, who co-hosted "Monday Night Football" and an ABC reality TV series after retiring from football in 1978, said he foresees Apple making a big play for NFL rights.

One of the pillars of Cook's tenure at Apple has been building its services business, a high margin enterprise that includes Apple TV, iCloud, and Apple Music, among other digital subscriptions.

The iPhone giant has struck some major deals in the sports space in recent years, including a $2.5 billion agreement with the MLS and the rights to stream "Friday Night Baseball."

In October, Apple announced that it had struck a five-year deal with Formula 1 to exclusively stream races in the US starting next year.

In 2023, Apple began sponsoring the Super Bowl Halftime show, but it has yet to broker any deals to exclusively stream games for the NFL, the ratings king for live sports.

Tarkenton is betting that changes.

"They're going to end up being the biggest televisor of NFL football and maybe college football too, because they'll know how to do it better than anybody else," he predicted.

It doesn't matter what it is, Tarkenton said, as long as it has Apple attached to it.

"When Apple gets on something, it's going to be really good," he said.

Steven Tweedie contributed to this report.

• The Education Department is working to expand Pell grants to short-term credential programs.
• The department cited data showing Americans' declining faith in the value of a four-year college degree.
• High student debt loads and shifting labor market demands have sparked growing interest in short-term programs.

The four-year college degree no longer has the same pull it once did — and the Trump administration agrees.

The Department of Education concluded its negotiations on the Workforce Pell program on December 12, a new initiative included in President Donald Trump's "big beautiful" spending legislation.

The program would extend Pell grants to low-income borrowers in short-term certification programs, with the intention of providing more funding for alternative paths to a four-year college degree or trade school.

Nicholas Kent, the department's undersecretary, acknowledged during remarks at the beginning of negotiations that a standard four-year college degree is losing its value.

"Americans are questioning whether the value of higher education is worth the cost. Polling also shows that students do not believe they are graduating with the specific skills that they need," Kent said. He added that skepticism about college degrees has led to students "showing more interest in pathways that get them into the labor force more quickly and without unnecessary debt."

College still remains the primary path in the US for postsecondary education, and recent data from the New York Federal Reserve showed that it continues to lead to higher earnings. In addition, proponents argue the value of college extends beyond earnings to social opportunities and exposure to new ideas.

However, high student debt loads and a growing number of jobs eliminating degree requirements have sparked a growing interest in short-term credential programs and the trades, which the Trump administration is attempting to boost.

Chris Madaio, a senior advisor at the nonprofit The Institute for College Access and Success, told Business Insider that with more Pell grant support extended to short-term programs, it's likely that more schools will offer them and more students will enroll.

"I think it's all ensuring that students take what's right for them," Madaio said. "These programs should pay off for students, and they should give a good value and use students' limited lifetime Pell grant eligibility for something that's going to work for them and potentially allow them to get a job later down the road."

Strengthening the college and non-college paths

The Department of Education's Workforce Pell proposal will have a period of public comment before it is set to be implemented in July 2026.

If the rule is implemented as proposed, eligibility guidelines would vary by state. According to the department, each state will determine what qualifies as a high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand job based on what aligns with the industry needs in that state. For example, a state where agriculture dominates the economy might choose to prioritize short-term programs in that field.

Madaio said that this state variance is by design: "It's really important that states are taking a close look at what they're approving to ensure that there are jobs in that state and that these are valuable workforce training programs for jobs that are needed in that state."

Accountability is key here, Madaio said, and states should ensure that schools are delivering on the value of the programs they offer. Otherwise, students could be left paying off loans they cannot afford — and that's something that the gainful employment rule, which the department is set to negotiate in January, will address.

"These are really positive developments that show that there's a broad agreement across the political spectrum that we owe it to students to make sure that the programs that they're investing in are going to provide a quality education and that they're going to get something out of it," Carolyn Fast, director of higher education policy at the left-leaning think-tank The Century Foundation, told Business Insider.

Some high schools across the country are working to shift the emphasis away from a four-year college as the only option. Business Insider previously visited a public high school in rural Wyoming, for example, that works to equip students for college, career, or the workforce, giving students the freedom to choose the path that best suits their interests.

Overall, the higher education financing landscape is undergoing significant changes. In addition to the negotiations on Workforce Pell and gainful employment, the Department of Education recently concluded negotiations on a repayment overhaul that condenses the number of existing repayment plans, replacing them with less generous options that could lead to higher payments and shorter timelines to debt relief for student-loan borrowers.

As the slew of higher education changes takes effect, Madaio said that students should expect to see more advertising for short-term programs that are funded by grants. He recommended that students closely examine the actual costs of a program and its outcomes to avoid predatory behavior by schools.

"A critical piece is for students to do their homework when deciding on a certificate credential program, and then consider what kind of jobs they can get for that, and are those things that they need the training for?" Madaio said.

Sriraam Raja, the founding engineer at the software company Decode, has been using generative AI to write code for two years. He says he can get projects done about twice as fast when he uses a chatbot to code with intention. Then one day, he fired off directions, and as he sat there while the bot's wheels turned, he realized he could have actively written what he was aimlessly waiting for the bot to do. "I was giving away a bit of my agency, and so I made a decision to be very conscious," he tells me.

Raja has become "very specific about when I delegate, and also how much I delegate," he says. Waiting for the AI to spit out code can disrupt the flow of his work, and trusting too much work to it has led him to sometimes get bogged down in a lengthy review process. He's also anxious about the long-term effects AI can have on how we all think and problem solve. "There's a side effect where everyone's confidence has increased, but so has their laziness, and their willingness to learn things from first principles has dropped," he says. "I've definitely seen a drop in curiosity that I haven't seen before, and so that worries me."

The Collins dictionary made vibe coding its 2025 word of the year. Coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February, the term refers to using language and generative AI to speed up the coding process. Soon after, companies were adding it as a desired skill in job listings.

Vibe coding was the catalyst for the sort of vibe work era we've entered. It's a shift in how people think about their roles and relationships to work amid an AI boom, and software engineering, long considered a stable and lucrative career path, has perhaps been the career most scrutinized and pushed down a path toward automation. Product managers have suggested that AI will supercharge them, allowing them to take on some technical coding tasks and work without engineers.

Execs have been all-in: Mark Zuckerberg said he expected AI to write half of Meta's code within a year; this spring, AI was already doing about a third of code at Google and on some Microsoft projects. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted in March that 90% of code would be generated by AI in three to six months. The bullish estimate hasn't materialized for most, but Amodei said in October the company's AI tool Claude was writing most of the code at Anthropic. Cognition, which built an AI-powered software engineer it named Devin, is now valued at $10 billion. Some without computer science backgrounds or any training in coding are vibe coding their own projects.

Vibe coding isn't yet the miracle that AI evangelists have professed. AI-generated code can have sneaky errors that pose security risks. As it takes on the work of junior developers, companies eager for gain could displace humans. Time banked with shortcuts now could disrupt training ground for learning basic coding skills, creating a tech worker career ladder collapse could ricochet through the industry. There is potential for developers to save time, to use AI to learn new languages and skills (something Raja tells me he's done), and to pare down their technical debt, or code that needs maintenance. But the impact of AI on the industry is more complicated than it is a silver bullet to efficiency.

Last year, "we were dealing with a lot of optimism and a lot of magical thinking" around the capabilities of AI, says Tariq Shaukat, CEO of Sonar, a company that provides developers with tools to verify code. "The vibe engineering tools are producing a lot of quantity. It's getting more functionally correct, but it's actually becoming more difficult to determine the quality and get the level of trust that you need to integrate that into your code base." The ranks of AI holdouts among developers are shrinking. A 2025 survey of professional developers from Stack Overflow found that only 19.3% don't use AI, and a commensurate 19.7% have an unfavorable opinion of AI. Yet less than 3% of respondents said they highly trust AI for accuracy.

Anyone who has asked a chatbot a question knows that even a short inquiry often results in a verbose response. The same is true of code — when AI generates it, it's typically longer, making the possibility of errors hiding in the code more likely. Amy Carrillo Cotten, senior director of customer transformation at software development company Uplevel, told me in September: "For a lot of engineers, the only thing that looks different is where they spend their time, not exactly how much time it took." Uplevel studied 800 software developers last year and compared the productivity levels of those who used GitHub's Copilot to those who did not. The developers who used Copilot weren't more efficient or less burnt out, and their code had bugs in it 41% more frequently. (GitHub's own research found that those who used Copilot wrote about 18 lines of clean code, compared to 16 lines for those who didn't.) For many, that shift from writing to reviewing code is "not the job they signed up for," Shaukat says, which brings a big adjustment for many developers.

"The job looks completely different," says Frank Fusco, CEO of a software company called Silicon Society. His company works with clients on their software, but now they often get amateur, vibe coded versions of those ideas as the starting point. "What I would normally do in code that would take me days, I now do in words and it takes me hours." But Fusco tells me he worries about a decline in critical thinking and basic coding skills. We're "hardwired," he says, to find "the shortest path to the solution." But that approach isn't the best for sharpening coding skills. "It really is a muscle that you have to work all the time."

It's tricky to say AI is already killing developer jobs. Years of layoffs and "right-sizing" in the tech industry, paired with the economic precarity that has also defined 2025, could be shifting industry roles alongside AI. As of November, there were about 92,500 active job postings seeking software engineers, down from nearly 102,000 last November and 159,000 at the start of 2023, according to data from CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for the US IT industry. The number of active tech job posts overall has fallen, from 621,000 in early 2023 to 433,500 last month. But the proportion of open jobs looking for AI skills has jumped by 53% this year.

After two decades of being told to pursue computer science as a stable career and a proliferation of coding bootcamps, working as a developer may not be as cushy. College seniors studying computer science are more likely than any other discipline to say they're "very pessimistic" about their careers, according to a 2025 survey from early career website Handshake. They're the group most likely to say the advances of generative AI have made them regret their major choice. But young people are divided — 43% of computer science majors said they think AI will have a positive effect on their careers.

Automation is in some ways marking "a correction" on the developer labor market, says April Schuppel, developer relations manager at software company Apryse. Before AI, "we needed as many people who were really pushing out the code to take the ideas of the visionaries and bring them to life." Now, "the people who have always been able to make the most impact, they're still the ones that are the safest." Developers who looked at their jobs as clearing tickets might be more replaceable than those who were creative and cared about the project from start to finish. We're far from realizing the end game of vibe coding, but for creative, forward-thinking developers, there's optimism for now. "The more well-rounded people are the ones that are going to have success," Schuppel says.

AI could bring more opportunity for software testers, and also help companies pare down their technical debt. The developer job market might look messy right now, but there's still a heavy focus on the human aspect of the career than in the picture painted by some Big Tech execs. "If there are opportunities for more fine-tuned models, more specialized models that only do certain types of code updates, and there is a way to use that more to augment human developers as opposed to replace, that seems like that's where this is going," says Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA.

Codebases are valuable, and the security risks posed by goofs in AI code are serious threats. Traffic to vibe coding sites slumped in September after a summer of hype. Even Karpathy said his latest project is "basically entirely hand-written (with tab autocomplete)" in a post on X. "I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful." If 2025 was the year tech companies went all in on AI, 2026 might be the year when some of the craze around vibe coding subsides and reality sets in.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

• Costco is a wholesale club that sells a wide range of products and services to fee-paying members.
• Founded in 1983 in Seattle, Washington, the company built off a concept pioneered by earlier stores.
• Costco made $269.9 billion in revenue last year and is the third-largest retailer in the world.

Costco is a members-only wholesale club that offers a variety of products and services at extremely competitive prices.

The company was founded in 1983 by Jim Sinegal and Jeff Brotman, who opened the first Costco warehouse in Seattle, Washington.

Now, more than 40 years later, Costco is the third-largest retailer in the world, with over 920 locations, more than 145 million cardholders, and annual revenue exceeding $269.9 billion.

Here's how the wholesale club redefined retail.

Costco's story begins decades before its first location launched in 1983, tracing its roots to FedMart, a discount department store for government employees.

FedMart was founded by entrepreneur Sol Price. Jim Sinegal started his career at FedMart and thought of Price as a mentor.

The pair developed and refined the wholesale club strategy together at FedMart, which was one of the first general merchandise retailers to expand into other categories like groceries, gasoline, and prescription drugs.

Sam Walton liked what Price and Sinegal were doing with FedMart in California so much that he opened the first Walmart in Arkansas 1962.

"I guess I've stolen – I actually prefer the word 'borrowed' – as many ideas from Sol Price as from anybody else in the business," Walton later said.

After an investor forced Price out of FedMart, he leaned more heavily into the membership club model in 1976 with Price Club.

Price wanted his store to be a wholesale supplier for small businesses, and he opened his first location in an old aircraft hangar that was once used by aviator Howard Hughes.

In 1983, Sinegal and Walton each launched members-only warehouse clubs — Costco and Sam’s Club — that bore a striking resemblance to Price Club.

The basic concept across each company was the same: shoppers pay a fee to gain access to bargain pricing. In each case, the business relies on membership fees more than product markups to earn a profit.

Company sales in that first year reached $101 million, plus $1.3 million in membership fees.

In the beginning, non-members could shop as long as they paid a 5% surcharge on their purchases. There are still a few ways to shop Costco without a membership.

Sales at Costco rocketed from zero to $3 billion in less than six years — a first for any company in history, according to the company.

Costco became a publicly traded company in 1985, initially offering shares for $10. Due to several stock splits, one initial Costco share would be equal to six today, worth a total of more than $5,250 as of December 10.

Despite their similarities, Costco, Price Club, and Sam's Club weren't direct competitors, as each had a sizable geographic territory in which to expand.

Price Club was largely in the Southwest, centered in San Diego, while Arkansas-based Sam's Club had the Midwest and Southeast, and Costco took the Northwest, headquartered in the Seattle area.

One way Costco found to keep prices low was to sharply limit the number of different products in its inventory.

Even today, Costco only carries around 4,000 unique products in its assortment — referenced by stock-keeping-unit codes or SKUs — while typical supermarkets carry 30,000 or more. By comparison, a Walmart Supercenter typically carries around 120,000 SKUs.

In 1993, Price Club and Costco joined forces and began operating as PriceCostco with 206 locations and $16 billion in annual sales.

Memberships from each brand were honored by the other.

The company dropped the awkward PriceCostco branding in 1997 and reverted to Costco.

A few remaining Price Club locations were rebranded to Costco at this time as well.

In its 20th anniversary year, Costco had 430 warehouses in North America, Asia, and the UK, over 40 million membership cardholders, and generated $42.5 billion in revenue.

That year, the company ranked ninth among the world's largest retailers.

US warehouses that year generated an average of $112 million in annual sales, while 11 locations exceeded $200 million.

Costco also opened its fifth Business Center that year, a concept that caters more to small business owners than to household shoppers.

Sinegal retired as CEO on January 1, 2012, handing the leadership of the company to its head of merchandising, Craig Jelinek.

Sinegal continued to serve as Company Advisor and Director, ultimately retiring from the board in 2018.

Jelinek had also previously worked for FedMart, and was one of Costco's early hires in the 1980s, rising to vice president in 2004 and ultimately CEO.

Jelinek was in charge of opening Costco's sixth location and helped the company expand in Nevada and California. As vice president of merchandising, he oversaw a range of priorities, including e-commerce, foods, and pharmacy.

Costco became the third-largest retailer in the world in 2014, a ranking it still holds today behind Walmart and Amazon.

Walmart made nearly $675.6 billion in worldwide retail sales in 2024, followed by Amazon at $391.4 billion, and Costco at $244.9 billion, per the National Retail Federation.

Costco turned 40 in September 2023 with 838 locations around the world and nearly 129 million membership cardholders.

Costco has made more than $237.7 billion in revenue for that fiscal year.

In 2023, CFO Richard Galanti confirmed that Costco had been selling 1-ounce gold bars and that they've been selling out "within a few hours."

"When we load them on the site, they're typically gone within a few hours and we limit two per member," Galanti said on the fourth-quarter earnings call in September 2023.

In October 2023, CEO Craig Jelinek announced he would step down at the end of the year.

Jelinek handed over leadership of the wholesale club to Ron Vachris, a 40-year company veteran who had served as Costco's president and chief operating officer since 2022.

Ron Vachris took over as Costco CEO on January 1, 2024, becoming the third person ever to hold the top job.

A 40-year employee, Vachris started as a forklift driver at Costco's predecessor, Price Club, and has since worked in pretty much every area of the company.

When longtime CFO Richard Galanti stepped down in February 2024, his successor assured fans the $1.50 hot dog combo would be "safe."

"While I can't promise to be able to match the humor that Richard Galanti has become famous for, I can promise the same level of open dialogue and transparency you've come to expect," incoming CFO Gary Millerchip said during his first call in the role. "Oh, and to clear up some recent media speculation, I also want to confirm the $1.50 hot dog price is safe."

Throughout 2024, Costco leaned into its Netflix-style crackdown on membership sharing.

Costco's membership crackdown started in 2023 with ID checkers at self-checkout and expanded to the entrances of US warehouses over the next year.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimated in October 2024 that the move drove a significant number of non-member shoppers to finally pay the annual fee — a big lift for Costco's revenue and profit.

After tightening membership enforcement, Costco raised its annual fee for the first time in seven years.

On September 1, 2024, Costco increased its fee from $60 to $65 for Gold Star memberships, with Executive memberships going from $120 to $130 — the first fee hikes in seven years.

Costco made headlines in December 2024 when it was one of the few large companies to make a forceful and unapologetic defense of its DEI policies.

"Our commitment to an enterprise rooted in respect and inclusion is appropriate and necessary," the board wrote in its annual proxy statement.

Shareholders later overwhelmingly rejected the proposal from a conservative activist group that would have required the company to prepare a special report on its DEI efforts.

Shoppers appeared to reward Costco for sticking with its principles, with shopping trips increasing as Target saw declines.

Target saw nearly 5 million fewer shopping trips during the four weeks ending on February 9, according to data from Numerator. By contrast, Costco saw nearly 7.7 million more visits during the same period.

Costco also started testing new tech to check product availability in warehouses and speed up customers' shopping trips.

"We found that digital really enhances the speed of checkout, and so we are really working hard on the digital membership card usage," Vachris said during an earnings call in 2025.

"We've also engaged in some scan-and-go, done by Costco," he added.

Over the summer, Costco began opening its doors an hour early for executive members — a move that proved to be a big win for both customers and the company.

"We estimate these incremental hours added about 1% to weekly US sales since implementation. This has been very well received by our members," Vachris said during its fourth quarter earnings call in 2025.

CFO Gary Millerchip also said that the extended hours and other new perks led a higher share of shoppers to upgrade their memberships.

Foot traffic data from Placer.ai also indicates the adjustment is helping the company accomplish several key goals, namely getting shoppers to visit more quickly and more often.