• 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.

• Director Rob Reiner and his wife were found dead in their home in Los Angeles on Sunday.
• In a Sunday night statement, LA's mayor confirmed the Reiners' deaths and an ongoing investigation.
• Reiner's films include "This is Spinal Tap," "The Princess Bride," and "When Harry Met Sally."

Rob Reiner, the award-winning director of "When Harry Met Sally" and "The Princess Bride," and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their home on Sunday.

A Los Angeles Police Department representative told Business Insider that at 3:38 p.m. on Sunday, the department received a medical aid call to the 200 Block of Chadbourne Avenue in Brentwood, Los Angeles.

At the scene, the LAPD determined the deaths of a 78-year-old man and 68-year-old woman. The LAPD said in an X statement that its Robbery Homicide Division was investigating an apparent homicide.

In a Sunday night statement, LA Mayor Karen Bass confirmed the Reiners' deaths and said that the investigation was ongoing.

LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton said in a Sunday night press conference that the department was not seeking anyone as a suspect or person of interest in the case, and that the LAPD would speak with the couple's family members in the investigation.

Representatives for the family did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.

Former House Speaker and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi said in an X post on Sunday that the news was "devastating."

"It's hard to think of anyone more remarkable and excellent in every field and endeavor they pursued," Pelosi wrote.

She added, "Rob was creative, funny, and beloved. And in all of their endeavors, Michelle was his indispensable partner, intellectual resource, and loving wife."

Reiner had a long and illustrious career in Hollywood. The son of actor, director, and screenwriter Carl Reiner, he studied at the UCLA Film School before starting his directing journey.

He directed several iconic Hollywood movies, including "This is Spinal Tap" in 1984, "The Princess Bride" in 1987, and "When Harry Met Sally" in 1989.

Reiner also appeared in several acting stints, including movies such as the 2013 Martin Scorsese blockbuster "The Wolf of Wall Street" and TV series "New Girl" and "The Bear."

In 1987, he founded Castle Rock Entertainment, a production company, alongside a group of film producers. The company is now a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Reiner and his wife had three children together: Nick, Jake, and Romy Reiner. He has one daughter, Tracy Reiner, from his previous marriage to actor Penny Marshall.

Nick Reiner battled drug abuse in his teens and early adulthood. His experience, including stints in rehab, led him to write the screenplay for "Being Charlie," a 2015 romance-drama that his father directed.

In 2016, Reiner told Business Insider that his son was the "heart and soul of the film."